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critical thinking
The goal of critical thinking is to arrive at the most reasonable beliefs and take the most reasonable actions. We have evolved, however, not to seek the truth, but to survive and reproduce. Critical thinking is an unnatural act. By nature, we're driven to confirm and defend our current beliefs, even to the point of irrationality. We are prone to reject evidence that conflicts with our beliefs and to attack those who offer such evidence.
The items below are listed in alphabetical order. For someone new to the subject, I suggest the following order of reading:
1) several essays I've written on the difficulty of changing minds: Belief Armor, Evaluating Personal Experience, Why Do People Believe in the Palpably Untrue?, Defending Falsehoods, and Why Woo-woo Wins.
2) the following entries: confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, communal reinforcement, motivated reasoning, backfire effect, memory, and perception deception.
topical index: critical thinking
Aad hoc hypothesis
ad hominem
ad populum fallacy
affect bias
affirming the consequent
anchoring effect
apophenia
appeal to authority
appeal to tradition
argument to ignorance
autokinetic effect
availability error
B
Barnum effect
backfire effect
begging the question
C
change blindness
Clever Hans phenomenon
clever Linda phenomenon
clustering illusion
cognitive dissonance
coincidence
cold reading
communal reinforcement
conditioning
confabulation
confirmation bias
continued influence effect
control group study
D
debiasing
deduction
denying the antecedent
divine fallacy
E
evaluating evidence
F
face on Mars
fallacies
file-drawer effect
false dichotomy
false implication
false memory
Forer effect
G
gambler's fallacy
H
hidden persuaders
hindsight bias
hypersensory perception
I
ideomotor effect
ignorance as a hindrance to critical thinking
inattentional blindness
induction
infrasound
L
law of truly large numbers
Littlewood's law of miracles
M
magical thinking
memory
motivated reasoning
N
nasty effect
nonfalsifiability
non sequitur
O
Occam's razor
opinions
P
pareidolia
perception deception
placebo effect
positive-outcome bias
post hoc reasoning
pragmatic fallacy
proportionality bias
R
recency bias
regressive fallacy
replication
replication revisited
representativeness error
retrospective falsification
S
selection bias
selective thinking
self-deception
shoehorning
single-cause bias/fallacy/illusion
straw man fallacy
subjective validation
subliminal
sunk-cost fallacy
suppressed evidence
T
testimonials (anecdotal evidence)
Texas-sharpshooter fallacy
V
validity
W
Wason Card Problem
wishful thinking
See also
blogs
Unnatural Acts that can improve your thinking: postings about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and illusions. Click here for an alphabetical index of postings so far.
Skeptimedia
Miraculous Deception - miracles, faith healing, self-deception
Using ghost stories to teach critical thinking
Evaluating Acupuncture Studies:Laughable vs. Dangerous Delusions
Disasters
The Paralyzing Precautionary Principle
Statistics and Medical Studies
Fraud and Bias in Medical Research
Creating Your Own Pseudoscience - part 1
Creating Your Own Pseudoscience - part 2
essays
Dowsing for Dollars: Fighting High-Tech Promises
with Low-Tech Critical Thinking Skills
Energy Healing: Looking in All the Wrong Places
Gary
Schwartz's Subjective Validation of Mediums
Critical
Thinking and Control Groups
9/11
Conspiracies: the War on Critical Thinking
Teaching
Critical Thinking
Clever Irrationality
Presentation on Teaching Critical Thinking
Teaching Critical
Thinking
(html version) (click here for pdf
version)
- expanded commentary from my CT workshop presentation at The
Amazing Meeting V
- Available on DVD
Free downloads of chapters from my textbook on Critical thinking, Becoming a Critical Thinker, 2nd ed.
Chapter One,
Critical Thinking
Chapter Two:
Language and Critical Thinking
Chapter Three: Sources
Chapter Seven: Sampling and Analogical Reasoning
Chapter Eight: Causal reasoning
Chapter Nine: Science and Pseudoscience
Answers to selected exercises
For Teachers
Using The Skeptic's Dictionary for courses in
- Critical Thinking about the Paranormal
- General Critical Thinking Courses
- Science and Pseudoscience
- Science and the Supernatural
- Critical Thinking about New Age Ideas
book reviews
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (Crown 2010)
How
Doctors Think
by Jerome Groopman, M.D. (Houghton Mifflin 2007)
Snake Oil
Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine
by
R. Barker Bausell (Oxford 2007).
The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and
the New Fundamentalism
by Dick Taverne (Oxford 2006).
The
Power of Persuasion - How We're Bought and Sold
by Robert Levine (John Wiley & Sons 2003),
Don't
Get Taken! - Bunco and Bunkum Exposed - How to Protect Yourself
by Robert A. Steiner (Wide-Awake Books 1989), and
The
Full Facts Book of Cold Reading (third edition)
by Ian Rowland (Ian Rowland Limited 2002).
Searching
for Memory - the brain, the mind, and the past
by Daniel L. Schacter (Basic Books 1996).
The
Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark
by Carl Sagan (Random House 1995).
The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together by Charles T. Tart, Ph.D. (New Harbinger 2009)
The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death by Gary Schwartz (Atria 2003)
Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality by Dean Radin (Paraview Pocket Books 2006)
The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena by Dean Radin (HarperOne 1997)
Ghost Hunters - William James and the Hunt for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum (Penguin Press 2006).
further reading
Browne, M. Neil & Stuart M. Keeley. Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking (Prentice Hall, 2009).
Carroll, Robert Todd. Becoming a Critical Thinker - A Guide for the New Millennium (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2000).
Damer, T. Edward. Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments 4th edition (Wadsworth Pub Co, 2008).
Moore, Brooke Noel and Richard Parker. Critical Thinking (McGraw Hill, 2008).
Smith, Jonathan. 2009. Pseudoscience and Extraordinary Claims of the Paranormal: A Critical Thinker's Toolkit. Wiley-Blackwell.
Vaughn, Lewis. 2009. The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims. Oxford University Press.
click here for info on the eBook
click here for info on the paperback
Ordering information
download chapters 1, 2, 3, 8, and 9 free
1.
Critical Thinking
2.
Language and Critical Thinking
3.
Chapter Three:
Sources
7. Sampling and Analogical Reasoning
8. Causal reasoning
9. Science and Pseudoscience
Answers to selected exercises
(note: graphs for ch. 4 are incomplete)
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