TFY Summaries

Chapter One Observation Skills

Once you have completed this chapter, you will understand why thinking skills depend upon the ability to observe well. Through exercises this chapter will show you how well you observe, how to train yourself to observe better, and how your thinking and descriptive writing will improve in this process. A final story by Edward Abbey demonstrates how acute observation skills together with precise description create great reading.

Chapter Two Word Skills

This chapter concerns the process of translating observations into words.  Through exercises, it shows you how to use dictionaries to achieve mental clarity, how word clarity affects your thinking, reading, and writing.  A writing assignment will ask you to build an essay around the definition of a word. Three readings appear in this chapter: a mystery story about lexicographers; Malcolm X’s account of his process of self-education through dictionary study; an essay built around the meaning of the word “privacy.”  

Chapter Three Facts

This chapter concerns some of the complexities of the word fact: how facts are determined, how they relate to observations, how facts get confused with inferences, how facts relate to truth and reality, how they relate to language.  The chapter provides you with ample exercises for identifying facts, for learning how to assess their reliability, how to note them in reading, and how to state them accurately in writing.   Reading selections demonstrate how writing based on  facts can nevertheless result in fascinating reading.  

Chapter Four Inferences

This chapter explains how inferences take place in our minds, how they relate to facts, and how far wrong we can go when we mistake inferences for facts.  Exercises in this chapter will help you build your skills in forming, stating, and assessing inferences, in formulating them into generalizations.  Writing exercises will help you apply this knowledge to improve your thinking and writing.  Final readings will show you how inferences create drama and affect human destiny.  

Chapter Five Assumptions

This chapter concerns another familiar word, assumptions, demonstrating some surprising complexities in the term. Multiple exercises will show you how assumptions relate to facts and inferences, how they affect thinking, how they affect arguments, and how they might be unraveled and clarified. A writing application involves an expository essay on assumption recognition and its role in creative problem solving.  A reading selection by Edward de Bono demonstrates the role of assumptions in creative thinking.  A second selection by David Low shows us how assumptions affect family relationships.

Chapter Six Opinions

This chapter explores that familiar word opinion and examines the way it affects our ability to think critically.  Again we have a familiar but confusing word that can be used in many different ways.  Exercises are offered to help you assess your understanding of the different varieties of opinion. Writing applications ask you to test and expand what you know into essays that articulate, support, describe, or analyze opinions.  Readings show you how professional writers can present  support for an opinion; in one case through direct statement, and in a second case through a satirical  sub-statement.

Chapter Seven Evaluations

This is a chapter about one variety of opinion called evaluations.  Evaluations can be openly stated or remain hidden and manipulative.  They can be based on explicit or vague criteria, clear or vague feelings.  Their effects are powerful.  When we mistake them for facts or are influenced by them unawares, we get into trouble.  This chapter teaches how to both recognize and detach from evaluations.   Exercises and discussion in this chapter will show you how evaluations express and influence feelings, how they can be used covertly to persuade or directly to advise.  The writing application in this chapter gives you a choice of analyzing evaluations in advertisements or of writing a critical review. One concluding reading evaluates the monetary evaluation of human life; a second reading evaluates the use of pornography for profit.

Chapter Eight Viewpoint

The chapter is about how to recognize viewpoints and understand how they filter reality for us.  Exercises and discussion in this chapter will show you how stories revolve around viewpoints, how conscious and unconscious viewpoints differ, how news framing conveys covert viewpoints, and how political viewpoints might be characterized.   Writing applications will allow you to sample the rhetoric, ideas and values of multiple viewpoints, both familiar and unfamiliar.  A concluding reading presents a viewpoint on our reluctance  to talk about religion and politics.

Chapter Nine Argument

The skills of analyzing and writing arguments require some knowledge of every chapter concept studied this far.   At this point you will be asked to integrate this learning while reviewing the structure of arguments and standards for judging arguments.  Exercises in this chapter entail guidelines for analyzing arguments, distinguishing arguments from reports, separating reasons from conclusions, recognizing missing and false information.  Writing applications challenge you to put all this knowledge together in a short persuasive argument.  You will also begin your preparations for writing a final research paper.  Final reading selections present different arguments on the issue of job outsourcing.

Chapter Ten Fallacies

This chapter will teach you about the names and meanings of eleven fallacies.  Fallacies may be accidental or intentional; many are amusing, all are manipulative; each sidesteps the work of constructing a fair and well-reasoned argument.  Multiple examples and exercises will teach you how to recognize a number of basic fallacies and understand why they are fallacious. 

Chapter Eleven Inductive Reasoning and Inductive Fallacies

Inductive reasoning is a method used to discover new information or supply missing information.  When we reason inductively, we observe, test, and investigate in a systematic manner known as the empirical or scientific method. 

Exercises and discussion in this chapter show you how induction uses sensory observation, enumeration, analogical reasoning, pattern discovery, causal reasoning, reasoning from hypotheses and through statistics and probability.  A short writing application asks you to research some facts and form hypotheses about them.  The second half of this chapter treats eight inductive fallacies.  Here you will learn how to identify each in turn by studying their definitions, reading examples, and achieving an understanding of why they are fallacious.

Chapter Twelve Deductive Reasoning

This chapter explains the fundamental standards that govern deductive reasoning.  It offers a basic vocabulary of logic and explains how deduction and induction interplay in our thinking.   Discussion with multiple exercises will show you the meaning and significance of such terms as syllogism, premises and conclusion, validity and soundness. A writing application asks you to write a deductive argument based on a wise saying.   Final reading selections by Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King demonstrate skilled deductive reasoning of enduring persuasiveness.