tailieunhanh - Ebook Critical thinking (9th edition): Part 2

(BQ) Part 2 book "Critical thinking" has contents: Three kinds of inductive arguments, causal explanation, moral, legal, and aesthetic reasoning, essays for analysis. | Confirming Pages Chapter 8 Deductive Arguments I Categorical Logic For over a hundred years, the symbol of “the Science of Deduction.” . . . The Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it. — From an article by Sherlock Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Fortunately, the greatest detective was doing some serious exaggerating in this quotation. While it may be that few of us mortals will attain “the highest possible perfection” in “the Science of Deduction,” most of us can learn quite a bit in a fairly short time if we put our minds to it. In fact, you already have an understanding of the basics from Chapter 2.* In this chapter and the next, you’ll learn two kinds of techniques for making and evaluating deductive inferences—in other words, arguments. If you flip through the pages of these two chapters, you’ll see diagrams with circles and Xs, and in Chapter 9, page after page of weird symbols that remind some people of mathematics. These pages may *An understanding that’s somewhat better than Sir Arthur’s, as a matter of fact. Many instances of what he has Sherlock Holmes referring to as “deduction” turn out to be inductive arguments, not deductive ones. We mean no disrespect, of course; one of your authors is a dyed-in-the-wool Holmes fanatic. 254 6/18/08 1:54:23 PM Confirming Pages DEDUCTIVE ARGUMENTS I 255 look intimidating. But there’s nothing all that complicated about them if you approach them in the right way. Nearly anybody can catch on if they take one of Sherlock Holmes’s points seriously: Most people need to apply themselves conscientiously in order to understand this material. The reason is that, both here and in Chapter 9, almost everything builds on what goes before; if you don’t understand what happens at