Introduction to Critical Thinking
By Levi Smith
Philosophers spend a lot of time making and analyzing arguments, so they have developed many methods to help with this task. In this section I will cover some introductory topics in the study of logic and critical thinking. The following chapters are revised versions of instructional handouts that I gave to my students in the Inquiry, Argument, and Debate class that I taught at Western Michigan University. The following sections will thus be concise as they are meant to be treated as instructional handouts rather than detailed chapters.
Before I begin this section, I feel obligated to say that I was initially introduced to the Inquiry, Argument, and Debate class back when I was a teaching assistant at Western Michigan University. I TA’d for Olivia Moskot and Jonathan Milgrim’s classes and I thus imagine that much of the material that I covered in my section of the class (and thus the material that I have included here) was taken or inspired by their initial teachings. Furthermore, I reviewed parts of the book Logic & Philosophy: A Modern Introduction. 13th edition (by Hausman, Boardman, and Kahane) while I initially worked on some of the handouts for my class. Thus, although I am not directly quoting the book, parts of these handouts (such as how to identify premise and conclusion indicators) will have likely been inspired by the contents of that book. Furthermore, the definitions and comprehension questions I give in the first section were first inspired or derived (although not directly taken) from those given by Jonathan Milgrim in his class and the Logic & Philosophy book. Furthermore, some of the strategies that I recommend using to find hidden premises and conclusions were inspired by or taken from LSAT prep materials that I reviewed. I unfortunately do not have references for most of these materials; however, I believe that they are common strategies that fit well here. Finally, I must acknowledge that my style of teaching students how to identify deductive arguments was inspired by the teachings of Dr. Thad Botham whose class I took as an undergraduate student. Of course, none of the people that I have mentioned here necessarily endorse any views that I discuss in this book, but I am grateful, nonetheless.
