See argumentation. Any fallacies book that doesn’t focus on argumentation will be dated and lack coherence, and a large majority of the textbook treatments are poor. But don’t be discouraged! The fallacies approach to argument evaluation may be one of most valuable ways to help students learn how to interpret arguments, and defend their interpretations. I highly recommend Chris Tindale’s Fallacies and Argument Appraisal (Cambridge 2007). You can engage beginners effectively in this text if you lead up by introducing inferences (in the mind and in argumentation) and premise-conclusion structure. Advanced readers can also find here a remedy to the bad ways they’ve been taught fallacies.
- Mark Battersby’s Is that a Fact? A Fieldguide for Evaluating Statistical and Scientific Information (Broadview 2009). Fun, charming, and practical. No exercises though.
- Theodore Schick & Lewis Vaughn, How to Think about Weird Things (McGraw-Hill multiple editions).
FEMINIST & LIBERATORY:
- Maureen Linker’s Intellectual Empathy (University of Michigan 2014) is unlike any other book, a true innovation in epistemology and critical thinking education to help people reason across social and political differences.
- In the mean time a classic from sociology is Alan G. Johnson’s Privilege, Power and Difference: progressive students may find it a bit obvious but for a general audience it is quite informative, persuasive, and encouraging. (His The Gender Knot may be good too, but I haven’t worked through it.)
- Another source that may be useful is Joanna Kadi’s Thinking Class (South End, 2004).
- Comprehensive texts that attend to feminist and liberatory issues:
- A large number of examples address these concerns in Peg Tittle’s Critical Thinking: An Appeal to Reason (Routledge 2011).
- Chris Swoyer’s Critical Reasoning: A User’s Manual innovates in integrating cognitive science, including social biases, and it’s free!
- Wanda Teays’ Second Thoughts: Critical Thinking for a Diverse Society (McGraw-Hill, two editions) stresses issues of social difference too, but it’s a bit superficial for many post-secondary contexts, and covers such a range of material that it is more of a comprehensive than a specialized approach.
PUZZLES, PARADOXES & THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS:
Peg Tittle. What If…Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy (Pearson/Longman, 2004). I haven’t yet got my hands on this book but given the recent discussions of the role of thought experiments as a philosophical methodology, it may be extremely useful for both teaching and research.