英语思辨连线题汇总
•Claim: When a belief (judgment, opinion) is asserted in a declarative sentence, the result is a claim, statement, or assertion.
•Objective claim vs. subjective claim: An objective claim is true or false regardless of whether people think it is true or false. Claims that lack this property are said to be subjective.
•“Fact vs. opinion”: People sometimes refer to true objective claims as “facts,” and use the word “opinion” to designate any claim that is subjective.
•“Factual claim”: An objective claim. Saying that a claim is “factual” is not the same as saying it is true. A factual claim is simply a claim whose truth does not depend on our thinking it is true.
•Moral subjectivism: Moral subjectivism is the idea that moral judgments are subjective. “There is nothing either good or bad but that thinking makes it so.”
•Issue: A question.
•Argument: An argument consists of two parts—one part of which (the premise or premise
s) is intended to provide a reason for accepting the other part (the conclusion).
•“Argument”: People sometimes use this word to refer just to an argument's premise.
•Arguments and issues: The conclusion of an argument states a position on the issue under consideration.
•Cognitive bias: A feature of human psychology that skews belief formation. The ones discussed in this chapter include the following:
    ◇Belief bias: Evaluating reasoning by how believable its conclusion is.
    ◇Confirmation bias: A tendency to attach more weight to considerations that support our views.
    ◇Availability heuristic: Assigning a probability to an event based on how easily or frequently it is thought of.
    ◇False consensus effect: Assuming our opinions and those held by people around us are shared by society at large.
    ◇Bandwagon effect: The tendency to align our beliefs with those of other people.
    ◇Negativity bias: Attaching more weight to negative information than to positive infor
mation.
    ◇Loss aversion: Being more strongly motivated to avoid a loss than to accrue a gain.
    ◇In-group bias: A set of cognitive biases that make us view people who belong to our group differently from people who don't.
    ◇Fundamental attribution error: Having one understanding of the behavior of people in the in-group and another for people not in the in-group.
    ◇Obedience to authority: A tendency to comply with instructions from an authority.
    ◇Overconfidence effect: A cognitive bias that leads us to overestimate what percentage of our answers on a subject are correct.
    ◇Better-than-average illusion: A self-deception cognitive bias that leads us to overestimate our own abilities relative to those of others.

•Truth: A claim is true if it is free from error.
•Knowledge: If you believe something, have an argument beyond a reasonable doubt that it is so, and have no reason to think you are mistaken, you can claim you know it.
∙ Arguments always have two parts, a premise (or premises) and a conclusion.
∙ The same statement can be a premise in one argument and a conclusion in a second argument.
∙The two fundamental types of reasoning are deductive demonstration and inductive support.
∙A deductive argument is used to demonstrate or prove a conclusion, which it does if it is sound.
∙An argument is sound if it is valid and its premise (or premises) is true.
∙An argument is valid if it isn't possible for its premise or premises to be true and its conclusion to be false.
∙An inductive argument is used to support rather than to demonstrate a conclusion.
∙ An argument supports a conclusion if it increases the likelihood that the conclusion is tru
e.
∙Support is a matter of degrees: An argument supports a conclusion to the extent its premise (or premises) makes the conclusion likely.
∙An argument that offers more support for a conclusion is said to be stronger than one that offers less support; the latter is said to be weaker than the former.
∙Some instructors use the word “strong” in an absolute sense to denote inductive arguments whose premise (or premises) makes the conclusion more likely than not.
∙If it doesn't make sense to think of an argument as providing evidence or support for a contention, it is probably because it is a deductive argument.
∙Inductive arguments and deductive arguments can have unstated premises.
∙Whether an argument is deductive or inductive may depend on what the unstated premise is said to be.
∙If an argument is written, diagramming it may help you understand it.
∙Balance of considerations reasoning often involves deductive and inductive elements.
∙Inference to best explanation is a common type of inductive reasoning in which the conclusion explains the cause of something.
This list summarizes the topics covered in this chapter:
• Clarity of language is extremely important to the ability to think critically.
• Clarity of language can often be lost as a result of multiple causes, including, importantly, vagueness, ambiguity, and generality.
• Vagueness is a matter of degree; what matters is not being too vague for the purposes at hand.
• A statement is ambiguous when it is subject to more than one interpretation and it isn't clear which interpretation is the correct one.
• Some main types of ambiguity are semantic ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity, grouping ambiguity, and ambiguous pronoun reference.
• A claim is overly general when it lacks sufficient detail to restrict its application to the immediate subject.
• To reduce vagueness or eliminate ambiguity, or when new or unfamiliar words are brought into play, or familiar words are used in an unusual way, definitions are our best tool.
• The most common types of definitions are definition by synonym, definition by example, and analytical definition.
• Some “definitions” are used not to clarify meaning but to express or influence attitude. This is known as the rhetorical use of definition.
• The rhetorical use of definitions accomplishes its ends by means of the rhetorical force (emotive meaning) of terms.
• Critical thinking done on paper is known as an argumentative essay, a type of writing worth mastering, perhaps by following our suggestions.
unfamiliarThis list summarizes the topics covered in this chapter.
• Claims lack credibility to the extent they conflict with our observations, experience, or background information, or come from sources that lack credibility.
• The less initial plausibility a claim has, the more extraordinary it seems; and the less it fits with our background information, the more suspicious we should be.