4 ACCEPTABLE REASONS
Critical thinking is reasonable and reflective thinking aimed at deciding what to believe and what to do. It is reasonable in part because it requires us to have reasons for our beliefs and decisions—reasons to think that our beliefs are true or that our decisions are the right ones. Critical thinking is reflective in part because it requires us to think about whether our reasons are good enough, and this means that to think critically we need to think about our reasons as reasons.
We saw in Chapter 3 that a person's reasons for believing or doing something can be put in to the form of an argument, with the reasons as premises and the belief or action as the conclusion. And we saw that there are really only two questions to ask when thinking critically about an argument. First, are the premises true? Second, is the argument valid? And we saw that these questions are wholly independent of each other. An argument might be valid even when its premises are false. And an argument's premises might be true even if they do not support its conclusion. So when we think critically about an argument, we always need to ask these two questions. In Chapter 3 we studied the question about validity. In this Chapter we look at the question of truth.
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