The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims explores the essentials of critical reasoning, argumentation, logic, and argumentative essay writing while also incorporating important topics that most other texts leave out, such as "inference to the best explanation," scientific reasoning, evidence and authority, visual reasoning, and obstacles to critical thinking. The text integrates many pedagogical features, including hundreds of diverse exercises, examples, and illustrations; text boxes that apply critical thinking to student experience; step-by-step guidelines for evaluating claims, arguments, and explanations; a glossary of important terms; and many reminders, summaries, and review notes. NEW TO THIS EDITION: * Nine new "Essays for Analysis," arranged in a pro/con format, on current, compelling topics including homosexuality, feminists and pornography, adultery, airport security screenings, women in Afghanistan, Islamic extremists and free speech, and fear of vaccines * New discussions of legal reasoning, rhetorical ploys, informal fallacies, probability and statistics, and necessary and sufficient conditions * New text boxes on the straw man fallacy, biased opinion polls, dishonest political discourse, and gut reactions and intuitions * Clearer discussions of scientific conservatism in theory choice, the relationship between enumerative induction and statistical syllogisms, and informal fallacies.

The power of critical thinking -- Obstacles to critical thinking -- Making sense of arguments -- Reasons for belief and doubt -- Fallacies and persuaders -- Deductive reasoning: propositional logic -- Deductive reasoning: categorical logic -- Inductive reasoning -- Inference to the best explanation -- Judging scientific theories -- Critical thinking in morality and the law.