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Chapter 1 Summary       

•Living an examined life means painting your life portrait with reflective understanding and informed choices. •Thinking critically involves carefully exploring the thinking process to clarify our understanding and make more intelligent decisions. •Thinking creatively involves using our thinking process to develop ideas that are unique, useful, and worthy of further elaboration. •Achieving your goals involves identifying the “right” goals and then developing an effective plan of action. •We can make more intelligent decisions by using an organized five-step approach to guide our analysis. •Living your life creatively means bringing your unique perspective and creative talents to all of the dimensions of your life. •Creative thinking and critical thinking work as partners to produce productive and effective

Chapter 2 Summary Becoming a critical thinker involves       

•Thinking actively •Exploring situations with questions •Thinking independently •Viewing situations from different perspectives •Supporting perspectives with reasons and evidence •Discussing ideas in an organized way •Analyzing issues thoughtfully

Becoming a sophisticated critical thinker is a lifelong process that requires ongoing analysis, reflection, and practice. Critical thinkers are better equipped to deal with the difficult challenges that life poses: to solve problems, establish and achieve goals, and analyze complex situations.

Chapter 3

Summary We can become more effective problem solvers by approaching complex problems in an organized way:      

•Have I accepted the problem and committed myself to solving it? •Step 1: What is the problem? •Step 2: What are the alternatives? •Step 3: What are the advantages and/or disadvantages of each alternative? •Step 4: What is the solution? •Step 5: How well is the solution working?

This approach to solving problems is effective not only for problems that we experience personally but also for problems that we face as citizens of a community, a society, and the world.

Chapter 4 Summary      

•We construct our world by actively selecting, organizing, and interpreting our sensations. •We view the world through our own unique “lenses,” which shape and influence our perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge. •The “prescription” of our lenses has been formed by our experiences and our reflection on those experiences. •We construct beliefs based on our perceptions, and we construct knowledge based on our beliefs. •Thinking critically involves understanding how perceiving lenses—ours and those of others— influence perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge. •Different types of beliefs include reports, inferences, and judgments.

Chapter 5 Summary   

•Beliefs are interpretations, evaluations, conclusions, and predictions about the world that we endorse as true. •Knowledge is beliefs about the world that we believe are true and for which we can supply compelling reasons and evidence. •Critical thinkers evaluate their beliefs by examining the evidence provided by authorities, references, factual evidence, and personal experience.

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•Viewing situations and issues from a variety of perspectives is a very effective strategy for constructing an informed understanding. •Because the Internet has become such a pervasive source of information, it is particularly important to critically evaluate the credibility and bias of the sources in determining the accuracy of the information being provided.

Chapter 6 Summary    

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•Language is a system of symbols for thinking and communicating. •Words and sentences can communicate a variety of different meanings: semantic, perceptual, syntactic, and pragmatic. •Using language effectively involves using the full range of word sense and sentence meaning to communicate our thoughts in a rich, evocative way. •Language and thought work together as partners: language that is clear and precise leads to thinking that is clear and precise, and vice versa. Becoming an articulate language user and thinker involves avoiding vagueness and ambiguity. •Effective language use involves using the language style that is appropriate to the context, including Standard American English, slang, and jargon. •Language is a powerful tool for influencing the thinking and behavior of others. Emotive language and euphemisms are two examples of effective language uses. •New media has come to play such an important role in our lives that it makes using language clearly and effectively even more paramount.

Chapter 7 Summary    

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•Concepts are general ideas used to identify and organize experience and in so doing, bring order and intelligibility to our lives. •The structure of concepts involves three qualities: signs, referents, and properties. •Throughout our lives we are engaged in the process of forming and applying concepts through the interactive processes of generalizing and interpreting. •Becoming an educated thinker involves learning to form and apply concepts in order to understand complex ideas, make sense of what is happening at the moment, and anticipate what may happen in the future. •We define concepts by describing the necessary properties/requirements that determine when the concept can be applied, along with articulating legitimate examples of the concept.

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•In the same way that words are the vocabulary of language, concepts are the vocabulary of thought. As organizers of our experience, concepts work in conjunction with language to help us understand the world, make informed decisions, think critically, and act intelligently.

Assessing Your Strategies and Creating New Goals How Effective Am I in Forming and Applying Concepts? Concepts are the general ideas that we use to organize our experience and, in so doing, to bring order and intelligibility to our lives. As organizers of our experience, concepts work in conjunction with language to identify, describe, distinguish, and relate all the various aspects of our world. To become sophisticated thinkers, we must develop expertise in the conceptualizing process. Described below are key aspects of the conceptualizing process. Evaluate your position regarding each of these conceptualizing abilities, and use this self-evaluation to guide your efforts to develop these crucial abilities.

Chapter 8 Summary        

•We use various thinking patterns to make sense of the world through the cognitive processes of “relating” and “organizing.” •Three important thinking patterns are chronological and process relationships; comparative and analogical relationships; and causal relationships. •Chronological relationships relate events in time sequence. Process relationships relate aspects of the growth or development of an event or object. •Comparative relationships relate things in the same general category in terms of similarities and dissimilarities. •Analogical relationships relate things belonging to different categories in terms of each other for the purpose of illuminating our understanding. •Causal relationships relate events in terms of the way some event(s) is/are responsible for bringing about some other event(s). •There are different types of causal relationships, including causal chains, contributory causes, and interactive causes. •As you refine your abilities to relate and organize the conceptual vocabulary of your mind, you are improving the power and creativity of your thinking processes while developing a more accurate understanding of the world.

Assessing Your Strategies and Creating New Goals

How Well Do I Understand Fundamental Thinking Relationships? We construct an intelligible world by means of concepts, as we saw in the last chapter. But to fully develop a meaningful picture of our complex world, we also have to understand how we relate concepts one to the other by means of fundamental thinking relationships. Described below are some key thinking relationships: chronological and process; comparative and analogical; and causal. Evaluate your position regarding each of these thinking patterns and use this self-evaluation guide to help you become more competent in using and understanding them.

Chapter 9 Summary  

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•Ethics and morality are concerned with the judgment of the goodness or badness of human action and character. •Each of us has a “moral compass”—our set of moral beliefs that we use to guide our choices in moral situations. By studying ethics and engaging in critical reflection, we can improve our moral compass to make it as ethically enlightened as possible. •The Thinker's Guide to Moral Decision Making includes the following points: o •Make morality a priority. o •Recognize that ethics is based on reason. o •Include the ethic of justice. o •Include the ethic of care. o •Accept responsibility. o •Seek to promote happiness. o •Develop an informed moral intuition. o •Discover the natural law of human nature. o •Choose to be a moral person.

Assessing Your Strategies and Creating New Goals How Moral Am I? Described next are key personal attributes that are correlated with having an enlightened sense of morality. Evaluate your position regarding each of these attributes, and use this self-evaluation to guide your choices as you shape the moral person that you want to become.

Chapter 10 Summary       

•Argument is a form of thinking in which certain reasons are offered to support a conclusion. •Cue words for arguments help us identify reasons and conclusions. •Arguments are inferences that we use to help us decide, explain, predict, and persuade. •We evaluate arguments by asking “How true are the supporting reasons?” and “Do the reasons support the conclusion?” •A valid argument is one in which the reasons support the conclusion so that the conclusion follows from the reasons offered. •Deductive argument is an argument form in which one reasons from premises that are known or assumed to be true to a conclusion that follows necessarily from these premises. •Some common deductive argument forms include modus ponens, modus tollens, disjunctive syllogism, and application of a general rule.

Assessing Your Strategies and Creating New Goals How Well Do I Construct and Evaluate Arguments? Arguments are a form of thinking in which certain reasons are offered to support a conclusion, and they are at the heart of the reasoning process. Described below are key thinking abilities that are correlated with analyzing complex issues by recognizing, constructing, and evaluating arguments. Evaluate your position regarding each of these abilities and attributes, and use this self-evaluation to guide your efforts to become a more effective reasoner.

Chapter 11 Summary   

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•Inductive argument is an argument form in which one reasons from premises assumed to be true to a conclusion supported (but not logically) by the premises. •Fallacies are unsound arguments that appear to be logical are often persuasive because they usually appeal to our emotions and prejudices. •Empirical generalization is a form of inductive reasoning in which a general statement is made about an entire group (the target population) based on observing some members of the group (the sample population). •Causal reasoning is a form of inductive reasoning in which an event (or events) is claimed to be the result of another event (or events). •The scientific method works on the assumption that the world is constructed in a complex web of causal relationships that can be discovered through systematic investigation.

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•A hypothesis is a possible explanation that is introduced to account for a set of facts and that can be used as a basis for further investigation. •“The Critical Thinker's Guide to Reasoning” is an organized approach for exploring complex issues.

Assessing Your Strategies and Creating New Goals How Well Do I Reason Critically? Expert critical thinkers are able to use all of the forms of reasoning effectively, including deductive reasoning, which we explored in the last chapter, and inductive reasoning, which we examined in this chapter. Inductive arguments involve reasoning from premises assumed to be true to a conclusion supported (but not logically) by the premises. Many of the arguments to which we are exposed in our daily lives are of this order, including scientific studies, polls on various topics, and generalizations about large populations of people. Evaluate your ability on the following dimensions of inductive reasoning.

Chapter 12

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•The challenge to an enlightened critical thinker is to develop a philosophy of life that expresses who you are as well as the person you want to become. •The quality of our life philosophy is a direct result of our ability to think critically, think creatively, and choose freely. •Choosing freely means that we possess the insight to understand all of our options and the wisdom to make informed choices. Passive, illogical, and superficial thinking inhibits our ability to make intelligent choices and erodes our motivation to persevere when obstacles are encountered. •Exercising genuine freedom involves recognizing and then liberating ourselves from both external constraints and internal constraints, and accepting responsibility for the choices we make. •Discovering the “right” career for us involves finding the best match between our abilities and interests and the careers that are available. •In order to envision and achieve “the good life” for ourselves, we must continually exercise our critical thinking abilities to determine our own path in a world full of choices, obstacles, and possibilities.

Assessing Your Strategies and Creating New Goals

How Free Am I? Described next are key personal attributes that are correlated with choosing freely. Evaluate your position regarding each of these attributes, and use this self-evaluation to guide your choices as you shape the free person you want to become.

(Chaffee 566-567) Chaffee, John. Thinking Critically, 11th Edition. Cengage Learning, 20140101. VitalBook file. The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use....