How Do We Reason? PDF Download

Author: Forrest E. Baird
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830855165
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
How exactly does logic work? What makes some arguments valid and others not? What does a faithful use of logic look like? In this introduction to logic, philosopher Forrest Baird considers the basic building blocks of human reason, including types of arguments, fallacies, syllogisms, symbols, and proofs, all of which are demonstrated with exercises for students throughout.

Author: Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198569769
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
Good reasoning can lead to success; bad reasoning can lead to catastrophe. Yet, it's not obvious how we reason, and why we make mistakes. This book looks at the mental processes that underlie our reasoning. It provides the most accessible account yet of the science of reasoning.

Author: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190627123
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Our personal and political worlds are rife with arguments and disagreements, some of them petty and vitriolic. The inability to compromise and understand the opposition is epidemic today, from countries refusing to negotiate, to politicians pandering to their base. Social media has produced a virulent world where extreme positions dominate. There is much demonization of the other side, very little progress is made, and the end result is further widening of positions. How did this happen, and what might be done to address it? Walter Sinnott-Armstrong says there is such a thing as a "good" argument: Reasonable arguments can create more mutual understanding and respect, and even if neither party is convinced by the other, compromise is still possible. Think Again shows the importance of good arguments and reveals common misunderstandings. Rather than a means to persuade other people or beat them in an intellectual competition, Sinnott-Armstrong sees arguments as an essential tool for constructive interaction with others. After showing how the failure of good arguments has led us to society's current woes, he shows readers what makes a good argument. In clear, lively, and practical prose, and with plentiful examples from politics, popular culture, and everyday life, Sinnott-Armstrong explains what defines an argument, identifies the components of good arguments as well as fallacies to avoid, and demonstrates what good arguments can accomplish. Armed with these tools, readers will be able to spot bad reasoning and bad arguments, and to advance their own views in a forceful yet logical way. These skills could even help repair our tattered civic culture.

Author: Thomas Gilovich
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439106746
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Thomas Gilovich offers a wise and readable guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. When can we trust what we believe—that "teams and players have winning streaks," that "flattery works," or that "the more people who agree, the more likely they are to be right"—and when are such beliefs suspect? Thomas Gilovich offers a guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. Illustrating his points with examples, and supporting them with the latest research findings, he documents the cognitive, social, and motivational processes that distort our thoughts, beliefs, judgments and decisions. In a rapidly changing world, the biases and stereotypes that help us process an overload of complex information inevitably distort what we would like to believe is reality. Awareness of our propensity to make these systematic errors, Gilovich argues, is the first step to more effective analysis and action.

Author: Paul Erickson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604677X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

Author: Jason Lisle
Publisher: Master Books
ISBN: 9781683441496
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
The vital resource for grading all assignments from the Introduction To Logic course, which includes:Instructional insights enhanced with worksheets and additional practice sheetsSpecial chapter reviews at the beginning of each new chapter worksheet created to help students and teachers grasp the scope of each section.OVERVIEW: Welcome to the world of logic. This logic course will both challenge and inspire students to be able to defend their faith against atheists and skeptics alike. Because learning logical terms and principles is often like learning a foreign language, the course has been developed to help students of logic learn the practical understanding of logical arguments. To make the course content easier to grasp, the schedule provides worksheets and practice sheets to help students better recognize logical fallacies, as well as review weeks for the quizzes and the final. The practice sheets in the back of the book offer practical study for both the final exam and for actual arguments you might encounter online or in the media.FEATURES: The calendar provides daily sessions with clear objectives and worksheets, quizzes, and tests, all based on the readings from the course book.

Author: L. Magnani
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 144198562X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This book ties together the concerns of philosophers of science and AI researchers, showing for example the connections between scientific thinking and medical expert systems. It lays out a useful general framework for discussion of a variety of kinds of abduction. It develops important ideas about aspects of abductive reasoning that have been relatively neglected in cognitive science, including the use of visual and temporal representations and the role of abduction in the withdrawal of hypotheses.

Author: Mark Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022650039X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Mark Johnson is one of the great thinkers of our time on how the body shapes the mind. This book brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades that build a powerful argument that any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of mind and thought must ultimately explain how bodily perception and action give rise to cognition, meaning, language, action, and values. A brief account of Johnson’s own intellectual journey, through which we track some of the most important discoveries in the field over the past forty years, sets the stage. Subsequent chapters set out Johnson’s important role in embodied cognition theory, including his cofounding (with George Lakoff) of conceptual metaphor theory and, later, their theory of bodily structures and processes that underlie all meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. A detailed account of how meaning arises from our physical engagement with our environments provides the basis for a nondualistic, nonreductive view of mind that he sees as most congruous with the latest cognitive science. A concluding section explores the implications of our embodiment for our understanding of knowledge, reason, and truth. The resulting book will be essential for all philosophers dealing with mind, thought, and language.

Author: Woo-kyoung Ahn
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN: 1250805961
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
“An INVALUABLE RESOURCE to anyone who wants to think better.” —Gretchen Rubin Award-winning YALE PROFESSOR Woo-kyoung Ahn delivers “A MUST-READ—a smart and compellingly readable guide to cutting-edge research into how people think.” (Paul Bloom) “A FUN exploration.” —Dax Shepard Psychologist Woo-kyoung Ahn devised a course at Yale called “Thinking” to help students examine the biases that cause so many problems in their daily lives. It quickly became one of the university’s most popular courses. Now, for the first time, Ahn presents key insights from her years of teaching and research in a book for everyone. She shows how “thinking problems” stand behind a wide range of challenges, from common, self-inflicted daily aggravations to our most pressing societal issues and inequities. Throughout, Ahn draws on decades of research from other cognitive psychologists, as well as from her own groundbreaking studies. And she presents it all in a compellingly readable style that uses fun examples from pop culture, anecdotes from her own life, and illuminating stories from history and the headlines. Thinking 101 is a book that goes far beyond other books on thinking, showing how we can improve not just our own daily lives through better awareness of our biases but also the lives of everyone around us. It is, quite simply, required reading for everyone who wants to think—and live—better.

Author: Immanuel Kant
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486113027
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This 1788 work, based on belief in the immortality of the soul, established Kant as a vindicator of the truth of Christianity. It offers the most complete statement of his theory of free will.