The art of reasoning

he Art offleasoning is a text on thinking skills. designed for courses in informal logic and critical thinking. It covers a fairly traditional range of topics: classification and definition, argument analysis, tal- lacies, the syllogism, inductive generalization, argument by anal- ogy, statistical reasoning, explanation. In selecting and presenting the material. however, I have put morc emphasis than is customary on assimilating the principles of logic in the form of skills. The canons oi‘ reasoning are applied to a wide range of examples from everytlay experience, political debate. and material discussed in courses across the curriculum. And about a third of the book con- sists ot exercises. Each section of a chapter is followed by a practice quiz, with answers in the back otthe book so that students can test their understanding of the material. Each chapter ends with a vari- ety of exercises that have been designed to test reasoning skills in many diltercnt combinations and on a wide range of tasks.