Title: Critical Thinking Logic — LearnCoachAssist

Q: What is critical thinking?
A: The disciplined process of analyzing, evaluating, and reasoning about information to form well-justified beliefs and decisions.

Q: What is logic?
A: The study of valid inference and the principles of correct reasoning.

Q: What is an argument in logic?
A: A set of statements (premises) intended to support a conclusion.

Q: What is a premise?
A: A statement offered as support for a conclusion.

Q: What is a conclusion?
A: The statement an argument seeks to establish.

Q: What is a sound argument?
A: A deductively valid argument with all true premises.

Q: What is a valid argument?
A: An argument whose conclusion must be true if the premises are true.

Q: What is an invalid argument?
A: An argument where the conclusion could be false even if the premises are true.

Q: What is deductive reasoning?
A: Reasoning from general premises to a specific, necessarily true conclusion (if premises are true).

Q: What is inductive reasoning?
A: Reasoning from specific observations to a probable general conclusion.

Q: What is abductive reasoning?
A: Inference to the best available explanation.

Q: What is a syllogism?
A: A deductive argument with two premises and a conclusion (e.g., All A are B; all B are C; therefore all A are C).

Q: Give an example of a valid syllogism.
A: All humans are mortal. Socrates is human. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Q: What is modus ponens?
A: If P then Q; P; therefore Q.

Q: What is modus tollens?
A: If P then Q; not Q; therefore not P.

Q: What is a fallacy?
A: An error in reasoning that undermines an argument.

Q: What is a formal fallacy?
A: A flaw in the logical structure of an argument.

Q: What is an informal fallacy?
A: An error in content or context, not structure.

Q: What is the fallacy of affirming the consequent?
A: If P then Q; Q; therefore P. (Invalid.)

Q: What is the fallacy of denying the antecedent?
A: If P then Q; not P; therefore not Q. (Invalid.)

Q: What is ad hominem?
A: Attacking the person making an argument rather than the argument itself.

Q: What is a straw man fallacy?
A: Misrepresenting someone's argument to make it easier to attack.

Q: What is a red herring fallacy?
A: Introducing an irrelevant topic to divert attention from the original issue.

Q: What is appeal to authority?
A: Citing an authority's opinion as evidence, especially in areas outside their expertise.

Q: What is appeal to popularity (ad populum)?
A: Arguing something is true because many people believe it.

Q: What is appeal to tradition?
A: Arguing something is right because it has long been done that way.

Q: What is appeal to ignorance?
A: Arguing a claim is true because it hasn't been proven false (or vice versa).

Q: What is the false dilemma fallacy?
A: Presenting only two options when more exist.

Q: What is the slippery slope fallacy?
A: Arguing that one event will set off an inevitable chain of disastrous events without justification.

Q: What is circular reasoning?
A: An argument where the conclusion is assumed in one of the premises.

Q: What is begging the question?
A: Assuming the very point at issue in the premise.

Q: What is the post hoc fallacy?
A: Assuming that because B followed A, A caused B.

Q: What is the correlation/causation fallacy?
A: Mistaking a correlation for a causal relationship.

Q: What is the gambler's fallacy?
A: Believing past random events influence future independent ones.

Q: What is the sunk cost fallacy?
A: Continuing an endeavor due to already invested costs rather than future value.

Q: What is the appeal to emotion?
A: Manipulating emotions to win acceptance of an argument rather than using evidence.

Q: What is appeal to fear?
A: A specific appeal to emotion using fear to persuade.

Q: What is bandwagon fallacy?
A: Encouraging belief because many others believe it.

Q: What is tu quoque?
A: A "you too" fallacy: rejecting criticism by accusing the critic of similar wrongdoing.

Q: What is genetic fallacy?
A: Judging an idea by its source rather than its merits.

Q: What is the no true Scotsman fallacy?
A: Excluding counterexamples by arbitrarily redefining a category.

Q: What is hasty generalization?
A: Drawing a broad conclusion from too few examples.

Q: What is anecdotal evidence?
A: Personal stories used as proof rather than statistical evidence.

Q: What is cherry-picking?
A: Selecting evidence that supports a conclusion while ignoring contradicting evidence.

Q: What is the texas sharpshooter fallacy?
A: Drawing a conclusion from data after the fact by selecting clusters.

Q: What is moving the goalposts?
A: Changing the criteria of an argument once they are met.

Q: What is special pleading?
A: Applying a standard inconsistently, exempting oneself.

Q: What is loaded question?
A: A question containing an unjustified assumption (e.g., "Have you stopped lying?").

Q: What is equivocation?
A: Using a word with multiple meanings ambiguously in an argument.

Q: What is amphiboly?
A: A fallacy from ambiguous sentence structure.

Q: What is composition fallacy?
A: Assuming what's true of parts is true of the whole.

Q: What is division fallacy?
A: Assuming what's true of the whole is true of each part.

Q: What is reification?
A: Treating an abstract concept as a concrete thing.

Q: What is false cause fallacy?
A: Misidentifying a cause.

Q: What is the middle-ground fallacy?
A: Assuming the truth lies between two positions when one may simply be correct.

Q: What is poisoning the well?
A: Discrediting an opponent before they speak so their argument is dismissed.

Q: What is the burden of proof?
A: The obligation to provide evidence for a claim, typically on the asserter.

Q: What is Occam's razor?
A: The principle that, all else equal, simpler explanations are preferable.

Q: What is the principle of charity?
A: Interpreting others' arguments in their strongest reasonable form.

Q: What is the steelman?
A: The strongest version of an opposing argument, opposed to a strawman.

Q: What is confirmation bias?
A: The tendency to favor information confirming existing beliefs.

Q: What is availability bias?
A: Judging probability by how easily examples come to mind.

Q: What is anchoring bias?
A: Relying too heavily on the first piece of information presented.

Q: What is hindsight bias?
A: The "I knew it all along" effect after events occur.

Q: What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?
A: The tendency for the unskilled to overestimate their ability.

Q: What is overconfidence bias?
A: Excessive trust in one's own judgment, beyond evidence.

Q: What is in-group bias?
A: Favoring members of one's own group.

Q: What is fundamental attribution error?
A: Overemphasizing personal traits and underestimating situational factors when judging others.

Q: What is self-serving bias?
A: Attributing successes to oneself and failures to external factors.

Q: What is the framing effect?
A: How information's presentation influences decisions.

Q: What is loss aversion?
A: The tendency to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains.

Q: What is status quo bias?
A: A preference for the current state of affairs.

Q: What is groupthink?
A: A pattern where group cohesion suppresses critical evaluation.

Q: What is the halo effect?
A: Letting one positive trait of a person color overall judgment.

Q: What is the horn effect?
A: The negative version of the halo effect.

Q: What is the planning fallacy?
A: Underestimating time and resources needed to complete tasks.

Q: What is recency bias?
A: Weighing recent events more heavily than distant ones.

Q: What is survivorship bias?
A: Focusing on entities that "survived" and ignoring those that didn't.

Q: What is the bandwagon effect?
A: Adopting beliefs because others have, regardless of evidence.

Q: What is the IKEA effect?
A: Overvaluing things one has helped to create.

Q: What is the endowment effect?
A: Valuing things more highly once one owns them.

Q: What is the just-world hypothesis?
A: The belief that the world is fair, leading to victim-blaming.

Q: What is moral licensing?
A: Allowing oneself to behave unethically after doing something virtuous.

Q: What is the bystander effect?
A: Reduced likelihood of helping when others are present.

Q: What is naive realism?
A: Believing one sees the world objectively and others are biased.

Q: What is motivated reasoning?
A: Reasoning to reach a preferred conclusion rather than the most accurate one.

Q: What is intellectual humility?
A: Recognizing the limits of one's knowledge and openness to being wrong.

Q: What is epistemology?
A: The branch of philosophy concerning knowledge — its nature, origins, and limits.

Q: What is justified true belief?
A: A classical definition of knowledge: belief, true, and justified.

Q: What is the Gettier problem?
A: Cases where someone has justified true belief but lacks knowledge, challenging classical definitions.

Q: What is empiricism?
A: The view that knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience.

Q: What is rationalism?
A: The view that knowledge comes primarily from reason.

Q: What is skepticism?
A: Doubting claims to knowledge without sufficient evidence.

Q: What is the scientific method?
A: A systematic approach: observation, hypothesis, experimentation, analysis, conclusion.

Q: What is falsifiability (Popper)?
A: A theory is scientific only if it makes predictions that could be shown false.

Q: What is a theory in science?
A: A well-substantiated explanation supported by extensive evidence.

Q: What is a hypothesis?
A: A testable proposed explanation.

Q: What is peer review?
A: The evaluation of scholarly work by experts before publication.

Q: What is reproducibility?
A: The ability of others to obtain the same results from the same data and methods.

Q: What is replication?
A: Obtaining similar results via a new study.

Q: What is the replication crisis?
A: The ongoing finding that many published scientific findings cannot be replicated.

Q: What is operational definition?
A: A precise definition specifying how a concept is measured.

Q: What is validity?
A: The extent to which a measure assesses what it claims to.

Q: What is reliability?
A: Consistency of a measurement across instances.

Q: What is the difference between accuracy and precision?
A: Accuracy is closeness to true value; precision is repeatability of measurements.

Q: What is a fact?
A: A statement that can be verified as true.

Q: What is an opinion?
A: A personal judgment or belief not necessarily verifiable.

Q: What is a value judgment?
A: An assessment based on personal or cultural values.

Q: What is the is-ought distinction (Hume)?
A: You cannot logically derive what ought to be from what is.

Q: What is the naturalistic fallacy?
A: Deriving moral claims from natural facts.

Q: What is the moralistic fallacy?
A: The reverse: deriving facts from moral preferences.

Q: What is utilitarian reasoning?
A: Judging actions by their consequences for overall well-being.

Q: What is deontological reasoning?
A: Judging actions by adherence to rules or duties, regardless of consequences.

Q: What is virtue ethics?
A: Focusing on character traits that constitute a good life.

Q: What is the trolley problem?
A: A thought experiment about whether to redirect a runaway trolley to kill one person rather than five.

Q: What is the prisoner's dilemma?
A: A game theory scenario where individual rational choices lead to a worse collective outcome.

Q: What is rationality?
A: Acting in accordance with reason and evidence.

Q: What is bounded rationality (Simon)?
A: The idea that human rationality is limited by information, cognitive capacity, and time.

Q: What is system 1 thinking?
A: Fast, intuitive, automatic thinking (Kahneman).

Q: What is system 2 thinking?
A: Slow, deliberate, effortful reasoning (Kahneman).

Q: What is metacognition?
A: Thinking about one's own thinking.

Q: What is the Socratic method?
A: Critical inquiry through systematic questioning.

Q: What is the dialectical method?
A: A discourse that progresses through contrasting viewpoints.

Q: What is logical entailment?
A: When the truth of one statement requires the truth of another.

Q: What is necessary condition?
A: A condition that must be present for an outcome.

Q: What is sufficient condition?
A: A condition whose presence guarantees an outcome.

Q: What is correlation?
A: A statistical association between two variables.

Q: What is causation?
A: A relationship where one event causes another.

Q: What is a counterexample?
A: An example that disproves a generalization.

Q: What is a thought experiment?
A: A hypothetical scenario used to explore ideas.

Q: What is a heuristic?
A: A mental shortcut for decision-making.

Q: What is bias-variance tradeoff (epistemic)?
A: Balancing simplification (bias) against capturing variability (variance) in beliefs.

Q: What is the principle of parsimony?
A: Same as Occam's razor: prefer simpler explanations.

Q: What is the conjunction fallacy?
A: Judging the conjunction of two events as more probable than one alone.

Q: What is base rate neglect?
A: Ignoring statistical base rates in favor of specific information.

Q: What is regression to the mean?
A: The tendency for extreme observations to be closer to average on subsequent measurements.

Q: What is the law of large numbers?
A: As sample size grows, sample mean approaches the population mean.

Q: What is the law of small numbers (cognitive)?
A: The mistaken belief that small samples reflect population properties.

Q: What is the illusion of control?
A: The tendency to overestimate one's influence on events.

Q: What is the optimism bias?
A: Underestimating the likelihood of negative events affecting oneself.

Q: What is intellectual virtue?
A: A trait conducive to good thinking, such as open-mindedness.

Q: What is open-mindedness?
A: Willingness to consider new ideas and reconsider beliefs.

Q: What is dogmatism?
A: Holding beliefs rigidly without examining alternatives.

Q: What is fanaticism?
A: Excessive, uncritical zeal for a cause.

Q: What is propaganda?
A: Information used systematically to promote a viewpoint, often deceptively.

Q: What is censorship?
A: The suppression of information deemed objectionable.

Q: What is misinformation?
A: False information shared without intent to deceive.

Q: What is disinformation?
A: False information shared with intent to deceive.

Q: What is malinformation?
A: True information shared to cause harm (e.g., doxxing).

Q: What is gaslighting?
A: Manipulating someone into doubting their own perception.

Q: What is the spotlight effect?
A: The tendency to overestimate how much others notice us.

Q: What is cognitive dissonance?
A: Mental discomfort from holding contradictory beliefs.

Q: What is rationalization?
A: Justifying actions or beliefs with plausible but false reasons.

Q: What is denial?
A: Refusing to accept reality despite evidence.

Q: What is intellectual integrity?
A: Holding oneself to the same standards of evidence as others.

Q: What is intellectual courage?
A: Willingness to defend unpopular but reasoned views.

Q: What is intellectual empathy?
A: Putting oneself in others' shoes to understand their reasoning.

Q: What is intellectual perseverance?
A: Pursuing inquiry despite difficulty.

Q: What is the burden of disproof?
A: The (usually inappropriate) demand that doubters prove a claim wrong.

Q: What is Russell's teapot analogy?
A: The unfalsifiable nature of some claims (like a teapot orbiting the sun) doesn't make them credible.

Q: What is Hitchens's razor?
A: What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Q: What is Sagan's standard?
A: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Q: What is pseudoscience?
A: Claims presented as scientific but lacking proper methodology or evidence.

Q: What is conspiracy thinking?
A: Explaining events as the result of secret, malevolent plots.

Q: What is cargo cult science (Feynman)?
A: Following the form of science without its substance or rigor.

Q: What is data dredging (p-hacking)?
A: Repeatedly testing data until a statistically significant result emerges.

Q: What is overfitting (cognitive)?
A: Building explanations too tightly fit to limited evidence.

Q: What is the perfect solution fallacy?
A: Rejecting a solution because it's not perfect.

Q: What is whataboutism?
A: Deflecting criticism by pointing to someone else's wrongdoing.

Q: What is appeal to nature?
A: Arguing that something is good because it is natural.

Q: What is appeal to consequences?
A: Arguing a belief is true/false based on whether its consequences are desirable.

Q: What is the fallacy of moderation?
A: Assuming the middle of two positions is always correct.

Q: What is the gish gallop?
A: Overwhelming opponents with many weak arguments rapidly.

Q: What is intellectual honesty?
A: Truthful acknowledgment of evidence and arguments.

Q: What is fact-checking?
A: Verifying claims against authoritative sources.

Q: What is lateral reading?
A: Evaluating sources by checking what others say about them.

Q: What is source triangulation?
A: Confirming claims across multiple independent sources.

Q: What is reading comprehension?
A: The skill of understanding and interpreting text.

Q: What is bias detection?
A: Recognizing assumptions, prejudices, or perspectives shaping information.

Q: What are logical operators?
A: Symbols (and, or, not, if-then) that combine statements.

Q: What is conjunction in logic?
A: P AND Q: true only if both P and Q are true.

Q: What is disjunction in logic?
A: P OR Q: true if either P or Q (or both) is true.

Q: What is negation in logic?
A: NOT P: true if P is false.

Q: What is implication in logic?
A: If P then Q: false only when P is true and Q is false.

Q: What is biconditional?
A: P if and only if Q: true when both have the same truth value.

Q: What is a truth table?
A: A table showing all truth-value combinations of inputs to a logical expression.

Q: What is a tautology?
A: A statement true in all interpretations.

Q: What is a contradiction?
A: A statement false in all interpretations.

Q: What is contingency in logic?
A: A statement true in some interpretations and false in others.

Q: What is propositional logic?
A: Logic of statements as units (P, Q) and their combinations.

Q: What is predicate logic?
A: Logic with quantifiers and predicates over variables.

Q: What is the universal quantifier?
A: ∀ ("for all").

Q: What is the existential quantifier?
A: ∃ ("there exists").

Q: What is De Morgan's law (logic)?
A: NOT (P AND Q) = NOT P OR NOT Q; NOT (P OR Q) = NOT P AND NOT Q.

Q: What is contraposition?
A: "If P then Q" is logically equivalent to "If not Q then not P."

Q: What is the converse of "If P then Q"?
A: "If Q then P" (not logically equivalent).

Q: What is the inverse of "If P then Q"?
A: "If not P then not Q" (not logically equivalent).

Q: What is reductio ad absurdum?
A: Proof by assuming the contrary and deriving an absurdity.

Q: What is dialetheism?
A: The view that some contradictions can be true.

Q: What is the law of non-contradiction?
A: A statement cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same sense.

Q: What is the law of excluded middle?
A: Every statement is either true or false.

Q: What is identity in logic?
A: A=A; everything is identical to itself.

Q: What is normative claim?
A: A statement about how things ought to be.

Q: What is descriptive claim?
A: A statement about how things are.

Q: What is a paradox?
A: A statement that seems contradictory but may reveal an underlying truth.

Q: What is the liar paradox?
A: "This sentence is false." If true, then false; if false, then true.

Q: What is Russell's paradox?
A: The set of all sets that don't contain themselves: does it contain itself?

Q: What is Zeno's paradox?
A: A series of paradoxes suggesting motion is impossible (e.g., Achilles and the tortoise).

Q: What is the ship of Theseus?
A: A thought experiment about identity: is a ship still the same after every part is replaced?

Q: What is solipsism?
A: The view that only one's own mind is sure to exist.

Q: What is relativism?
A: The view that truth or morality is dependent on perspective or culture.

Q: What is absolutism?
A: The view that there are universal truths or moral standards.

Q: What is pragmatism?
A: The view that the truth of beliefs lies in their practical consequences.

Q: What is coherentism?
A: The view that beliefs are justified by their coherence with other beliefs.

Q: What is foundationalism?
A: The view that beliefs rest on basic, self-justifying beliefs.

Q: What is the Münchhausen trilemma?
A: The argument that justifications must end in circularity, infinite regress, or arbitrary stopping.

Q: What is intellectual virtue called phronesis?
A: Practical wisdom — knowing how to act well in specific situations.

Q: What is the principle of sufficient reason?
A: Everything must have a reason or cause.

Q: What is teleological reasoning?
A: Explaining things by their ends or purposes.

Q: What is reductionism?
A: Explaining complex phenomena by reducing them to simpler components.

Q: What is holism?
A: The view that systems should be understood as integrated wholes.

Q: What is emergence?
A: When complex properties arise from simple interactions, not reducible to parts.

Q: What is supervenience?
A: One set of properties depends on, but isn't reducible to, another.

Q: What is the difference between inference and implication?
A: Implication is a logical relationship between statements; inference is the act of concluding.

Q: What is intellectual honesty in disagreement?
A: Engaging the actual content of opposing views, not caricatures.