Critical Thinking Final Exam Review

What the exam will cover:

Definitions, necessary and sufficient conditions

Logical deduction
Implication and innuendo
Statistical and Causal Generalizations
Controlled studies
Assessing credibility of statements

What you need to be able to do, with regard to each:

Definitions, necessary and sufficient conditions: Be familiar with the

“necessary and sufficient conditions” format for defining a term. Know the
difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition. Be able to
read a definition and answer questions about what it implies.

Logical deduction: Know the terminology concerning arguments that we

covered, including argument, premise, conditional, antecedent, consequent,
conclusion, valid, invalid, sound. Know the patterns of deductively valid
argument that we covered, including modus ponens, modus tollens, disjunctive
syllogism/argument by elimination, chain argument. Be able to tell when an
argument does not fit into one of these patterns; in particular, be familiar with the
fallacies denying the antecedent and affirming the consequent.

Implication and innuendo: Be able to distinguish what is logically implied by a

statement as opposed to what is merely being suggested by it. If you are given a
statement, you should be able to state what is being suggested or insinuated by
it, and show that the suggestion is not logically implied by explaining how the
original statement could be true even if the suggested statement is false.

Statistical and Causal generalizations: Terminology includes inductive

argument, inductive generalization, characteristic of interest, target population,
sample, representative sample, biased sample, random sample, statistical
generalization, method of agreement, method of difference. Be able to identify
all of these where they occur, and explain their roles.

Controlled studies: Some of the terminology from above applies. In addition:

hypothesis, control group, experimental group, independent variable, blind,
double-blind, statistically significant. Be able to read a description of a study and
identify its strengths and weaknesses.

Assessing the credibility of statements: A claim is credible to the extent that it

is likely to be true. Assess the credibility of a statement, or a story, by checking it
for coherence and considering its implications. If it is not coherent (because it is
contradictory or it contains claims that conflict with each other), or if it conflicts
with common knowledge, then it is not very credible.