First comes clear thinking, then comes clear writing. *** The Pocket Guide to Critical Thinking teaches very clearly the essential skills to reason better--for classwork, for writing, and in everyday life. Hundreds of pertinent, analyzed, and engaging examples from the Internet, magazines, newspapers, radio, as well as dialogues of cartoon characters illustrate how to analyze arguments and make better decisions. The Pocket Guide is both the perfect supplement for any course that requires critical thinking and a practical aid for self-study. This fifth edition has new chapters on reasoning in the sciences that provide the basics for any student to begin the study of any science: explanations, experiments, the scientific methods, and models and theories.

Richard L. Epstein received his B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Fulbright Fellow to Brazil and a National Academy of Sciences scholar to Poland. He is the author of the textbook Critical Thinking as well as The Fundamentals of Argument Analysis, Propositional Logics (Kluwer), and Predicate Logic (Oxford) among many other books. Currently he is the head of the Advanced Reasoning Forum in Socorro, New Mexico

1 Claims 2 Definitions 3 Arguments 4 What Is a Good Argument? 5 Evaluating Premises 6 Repairing Arguments 7 Counterarguments 8 Concealed Claims 9 Fallacies 10 Compound Claims 11 General Claims 12 Prescriptive Claims 13 Numbers 14 Graphs 15 Analogies 16 Generalizing 17 Cause and Effect 18 Cause in Populations 19 The Scientific Method 20 Experiments 21 Explanations 22 Models and Theories 23 Evaluating Risk 24 Making Decisions Writing Well Index