Missimer's Good Arguments: An Introduction to Critical Thinking, 4th Edition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This textbook about how to improve your own argumentation is different from all other textbooks I have seen in this field.The subtitle presents it as an introduction to critical thinking.The reader finds here the criticisms of, say, Karl Popper combined with a thorough empiricist orientation.Missimer addresses persons who cherish the hope of sharpening up their contributions to culture, science, teaching or politics, be it as journalists, instructors, or as students working towards a thesis or Ph.D.In other words, everyone who wants to present an argument in whatever field and who wants it to become as sound as the situation allows.No formalities, of whichever kind, are included.The author addresses you while you find yourself in this situation: sitting at your desk having this future paper of yours in mind.She wants to be your guide and compariion in critical thought in the service of productive writing.As I said, an ordinary textbook it is not: it contains no visible theory, but builds further on the experience and wisdom you already possess.Not surprisingly, it is dedicated to those who would rather browse its pages than read on from page 1 to page 212 at a stretch.In all likelihood they will not regret it: while browsing, they learn new linguistic usages of terms they already knew.They will learn usages that they need as critical writers, from selected short texts written by important and famous people.And the interest rises.Debate is also considered.Should we ponder the pros and cons together or immediately start a debate?The chapter dealing with this topic could have been used as the introduction.An important theme in the book is joint deliberation with no winning or losing.Debating for the honour of turning up as the winner is only briefly dealth with.However, even in the sciences and other academic fields (barring philosophy), one operates to a considerable degree with winning and losing, in particular losing.The book emphasizes the presentation of arguments with an emperical content so as to prevent, or at least postpone, "loss."
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".