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What you are holding in your hands is an introduction to Critical Thinking. This discipline regards two related areas: first, the set of skills and competences that help you recognize, evaluate and produce good arguments; second, the set of activities and tools that we can call on and use to train these skills, respectively. This being so, why is the subject called “Critical Thinking”? In ancient Greece, the term “kriticos” meant the ability to judge and discern things, in order to make the best choices for ourselves and others. These days, this ability appears to be struggling to survive. In the world of hyper-communication, monopolized by social media, it happens that our ability to judge the opinions of others, to tell truth and falsity apart, to distinguish good reasons from bad reasons in support of a choice, has been weakened almost to the point of disappearing. We all know why. The inflated amount of information showering us every day makes it very hard to tell what is reliable and relevant from what is not. This phenomenon is just made worse by the proliferation of fake news, that is to say by the deliberate dissemination of false information that leverages widespread prejudices plus our fears, thus managing to attract the attention of the public. In addition, today any exchange of views, both on the social media and in public discussion, tends to turn into a relentless struggle, in which the insult, the denigration of the opponent, or the ridiculing of the opinion of others, often takes the place of critical discussion of the reasons supporting a given claim. All this drastically reduces not only the quality of public debate and collective choices, but also our ability to express a well-considered judgment on issues that are often very relevant to our lives. It is therefore no coincidence that today the graduation programs of many of the most important universities in the world include a Critical Thinking course: it aims at sharpening the students’ ability to adequately justify a claim, to refute the claims of others, to identify mistakes in reasoning, and to evaluate the reasons in support of a certain assertion. This applies both to everyday discourse and scientific inquiry. The goal in question can only be achieved, however, by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. There is a vast spectrum of disciplines from which one can draw in this respect: logic, probability theory, statistics, decision theory, and again the theory of argumentation and the theory of rational discussion, as well as disciplines which study language, first of all pragmatics. An important contribution to a full awareness of the problems and skills that come into play in Critical Thinking is al so provided by cognitive psychology, and in particular the psychology of reasoning and the psychology of decision. The ability to produce and evaluate arguments, in fact, depends not just on the rules that govern rational discussion, but also on our ability to guard against cognitive biases that systematically lead us into error in making a choice or in providing a solution to a problem. More in general, the ability in question depends on our ability to avoid fallacies, that is, patterns of reasoning that do not work, and yet we tend to follow them for some reason. These mistakes are due to how real cognitive agents are made – to our difficulties in using some reasoning patterns; or to the fact that the cognitive fatigue that we would experience in following correct reasoning procedures leads us to adopt “shortcuts” that can lead us to wrong conclusions.