Reason Better: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Critical Thinking

https://app.tophat.com/e/455176/assigned/ You can access the link without registration choosing Enter as Guest option.

This course or book was created by David Manley. In essence it is a critical thinking online textbook, but with integrated exercises. Other educators, who use the same platform, can change the text according to their purposes. But even if you don’t work to register you can just read it as a regular book.

The book covers a number of topics: how the human mind works, different mindsets and point of view on reasoning, how to achieve clarity with good arguments, how to understand different forms of argument, what to do with evidence and how to apply a probabilistic approach to hypotheses, how to use generalization and what kind of errors may appear during this process, how to understand causation and relate it to evidence, how new information should change our beliefs, how to formulate theories and hypotheses correctly, how to make decisions.

The book also has a list of learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter. It helps to understand what can you learn and decide how to proceed with a chapter.

In a description of his course¹ the author said he wanted to teach only the most useful skill from different fields to create efficient critical thinkers. He also aim to teach useful dispositions, although he called them a mindset. He mostly focuses on inductive logic, which is related to probabilities, than on deductive arguments. He probably did a good job on creating a unified picture of how evidence work in different contexts.

The author proposes the texts mostly as book for teachers who teach critical thinking courses. But I believe it also can be used for self-education. I can recommend this book if you have tried several other books on critical thinking and you are looking for something different. You can also try this book if you want to learn critical thinking from scratch. The book doesn’t require much prior knowledge, and most of the required knowledge can be found online.

1. ^ : http://dailynous.com/2019/05/01/new-kind-critical-thinking-text-guest-post-david-manley/