The Power of Critical Thinking

The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims is the #1-selling critical thinking textbook, primarily intended for the Critical Thinking, Informal Logic, and Critical Thought and Reasoning courses. These courses, and where this book is successful, is taught out of the Philosophy department--not to be confused with the student-success-oriented Critical Thinking course. The text explores theessentials 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. It is praised for Vaughn's clear, concise, and lively writing, its real-world applications, and its focus on teaching students how to write critically and effectively, which is covered in Appendix B (Essays for Evaluation) and Appendix E (Critical Thinking and Writing). People also appreciate that the book is more economically priced than most competing texts. The textintegrates many pedagogical features, including hundreds of diverse exercises, examples, and illustrations; text boxes that apply critical thinking to student experience; step-by-step guidelines forevaluating claims, arguments, and explanations; a glossary of important terms; and many reminders, summaries, and review notes.

The organization of the book is very clear, and chapters are appropriately divided between important topics...The ordering of the chapters is appropriate and thoughtful. The range of topics is breathtaking... The addition of a full chapter on digital media literacy (Chapter 5) is my favorite change from the sixth to the seventh editions."- Crystal Rose
Well-organized, clear, addresses all the major topics, good exercises. I especially like the attention paid to inference to best explanation."-Jonathan Ruben Cohen
I really appreciate the sections on recognizing one's own bias. The Media, Science, and Morality are new to textbooks, other than the Paul Elder book. I find this incredibly useful and relevant for our times. The chapter on belief and doubt is also new to me, but I wasn't to use it. The sections on logic are very accessible for students"-Quincy Leigh Foley
This book is about as clear as a logic textbook can be (and much better than others I have used)."-James McRae

Lewis Vaughn is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Bioethics, Fifth Edition (2022), The Power of Critical Thinking, Seventh Edition, (2021), Philosophy Here and Now, Fourth Edition (2021), and Living Philosophy, Third Edition (2020), all published by Oxford University Press.

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