Critical Thinking

Thinking logically is something we all can do. We find ourselves so often taken in by fallacious arguments, though. How can we identify them in others' arguments and our own thought?

Tools for Critical Thinking

• The sequences of Less Wrong, a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality (with inputs from cognitive psychology, Bayesian probability theory, and other applied math and science). See especially the sequences How to Actually Change Your Mind and Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions.
• E-Prime is perhaps best understood as a "derivative" of English that forbids any form of the verb "to be." Most fallacies involve some form of the verb "to be." An introduction I found useful was "E and E-Prime" by R.A.Wilson. You can read many articles at A Site About Nothing: E-Prime

Alfred Korzybski, one of the big influences of Frank Herbert, first suggested omitting "to be" from English.

I do not necessarily advocate the use of E-Prime at all times, but when looking for mistakes in reasoning, zooming in on the "is"s can make analysis easier.

Here's a CGI script that highlights "to be": [1]

• Algebraic Term Logic This tool is orthogonal to the use of E-Prime, since term logic necessarily entails the use of the "to be" copula, at least implicitly. [2] Fred Sommers
• Pittsburgh Wiki Forum (this link is no longer functional): A wiki designed to formalize Internet discussion, making logical dependencies clear.
• Truth Mapping - link dead, used to point to an online tool for creating argument maps.
• Arguments Graphs
• Theory of Constraints The TOC Thinking Processes of Eliyahu Goldratt (See for example the novel Critical Chain) are mainly concerned with finding problems in industrial situations, but the diagramming techniques offer ways to clarify whether conditions are necessary, and sufficient, what other consequences of the conditions may be, and expose the assumptions. Evaporating Butt diagrams are used for resolving conflicts (where a goal requires one of two conditions to be true, but preconditions for those conditions contradict.
• Psychology of Intelligence Analysis - this is a substantial book published for free by the CIA; it has a number of chapters on logical thought and how common cognitive biases can come up with the wrong answers.
• The six rules of evidential reasoning - Falsifiability, Logic, Comprehensiveness, Honesty, Replicability, Sufficiency (FiLCHeRS?).
• Top 25 Creationist Fallacies - A video explaining and illustrating 25 fallacious patterns of argument.
• lojban - A constructed language, basically naked predicate logic with utterable words. Lojban was designed to test the Sapir-Whorf-hypothesis (which states that your dominant language influences how you think, an idea which also led to E-Prime), is grammatically unambiguous, has a base vocabulary of about 5000 simple and combined words (with only 1500 root words which were algorithmically derived from the worlds most spoken languages) and a very active IRC-channel on irc.freenode.net, which is very helpful for practice. While it may be subjective, speakers have reported that formalized reasoning really is easier for them in lojban. (See also MindPerformanceHacks_2fLearnAnArtificialLanguage)
• Skeptic's Dictionary: Critical Thinking Mini-Lessons
• Denialist's Deck of Cards - Arguments often used by lobbyists and think tanks.
• Why Smart People Do Stupid Things by Kurt Kleiner - You can have a high IQ and still fall victim to cognitive biases.
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases.

External link collections

• Thinking aids