Critical Thinking for College Students

by Jon Stratton

The purpose of critical thinking, according to this text, is rethinking: that is, reviewing, evaluating, and revising thought. The approach of Critical Thinking for College Students is pragmatic and pluralistic: truth is viewed in terms of public confirmation and consensus, rather than with regard to naive realism, relativism, or popular opinion. The value of empathy and the legitimacy of diverse points of view are stressed. Nevertheless, it is necessary to use specific linguistic, logical, and evidential standards in order to evaluate thought.

The primary elements of critical thinking are:
―proper definition
―paraphrasing
―reconstruction
―empathy
―analysis of arguments
―evaluation of reasoning
―brainstorming
―imagination
―problem solving

The opening chapters of the text provide a thorough discussion of linguistic standards of meaning. A detailed examination of logical inference and informal fallacies follows. The final chapters of the book cover standards of evidence and problem solving.

Instructor's Manual: ISBN 0-8476-9603-0

Paperback

First published October 27, 1999

About the author

Jon Stratton is Adjunct Professor in the School of Creative Industries at the University of South Australia. He has worked at universities in the UK and Australia and held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Iowa in 1998. His areas of interest include Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Australian Studies, Jewish Cultural Studies and Media Studies. He is the sole author of eleven books and has co-edited two. In 2002 he published Australian Rock: Essays on Popular Music. His most recent books included Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (edited with Nabeel Zuberi, 2014), and When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines 1945-2010 (2014).