文档介绍： CHAPTER ONE
Deciding What to Believe
When you read a newspaper or book, listen to someone speak, or even just think
by yourself, you face decisions about what to believe. Should you accept a news-
paper editorial’s argument that smoking around nonsmokers violates their rights?
Should you be persuaded by your professor’s reasoning that plea bargaining in the
criminal courts should be eliminated? Should you agree with a -
mentator that certain drugs should be legalized? Should you alter your attitude
toward abortion when a friend points out that it is inconsistent with some of your
other beliefs? Should you be led by your own considerations to the conclusion
that assisted suicide should not be made legal? You already evaluate arguments
about issues like these every day. In this sense, critical reasoning—the subject of
this book—is not entirely new to you. But this book will offer a collection of pro-
cedures that will enable you to carry out this activity more carefully and system-
atically. This should help you develop your own position on such issues more
effectively.
Critical reasoning, then, is concerned with deciding what to believe, but this
is not to say that critical reasoning alone can tell you what to believe. Critical rea-
soning is not a magical technique guaranteed to tell you whether to accept a par-
ticular belief in isolation. It does not operate in a vacuum. To decide whether
drugs should be legalized, for example, you would need supporting information.
You would probably want to know the extent of drug use under present laws, the
nature of illegal drug trafficking and the harm it produces, the probable effects of
different plans for legalization (Would drug use increase? By whom? How
much?), and so on. But in evaluating what appears to be “information” on these
subjects and in judging whether this information justifies taking a particular posi-
tion on the issue, critical reasoning should play a c