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Author: Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 584
ISBN-13: 0198569769
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: Forrest E. Baird
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2021-04-20
Total Pages: 267
ISBN-13: 0830855165
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →How do we think? What does a faithful use of logic look like? Without even pausing to think about it, we exercise our capacity for rational thought. But how exactly does logic work? What makes some arguments valid and others not? In this Questions in Christian Philosophy volume, philosopher Forrest Baird offers an introduction to logic. He 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. In addition, he reflects on the relationship between the use of reason and the Christian faith. With this academic but accessible primer, readers will be introduced to the basics of logic—and encouraged to reason better. The Questions in Christian Philosophy Series features introductory textbooks that offer students a Christian perspective on the various branches of philosophy, enabling them as they seek to understand all facets of life including existence, knowledge, ethics, art, and more.
Author: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 0190627123
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Subtitle in pre-publication: How to reason and argue--and why.
Author: Thomas Gilovich
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-06-30
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 1439106746
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: Vinod Goel
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-02-08
Total Pages: 441
ISBN-13: 0262045478
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A new, biologically driven model of human behavior in which reason is tethered to the evolutionarily older autonomic, instinctive, and associative systems. In Reason and Less, Vinod Goel explains the workings of the tethered mind. Reason does not float on top of our biology but is tethered to evolutionarily older autonomic, instinctive, and associative systems. After describing the conceptual and neuroanatomical basis of each system, Goel shows how they interact to generate a blended response. Goel’s commonsense account drives human behavior back into the biology, where it belongs, and provides a richer set of tools for understanding how we pursue food, sex, and politics. Goel takes the reader on a journey through psychology (cognitive, behavioral, developmental, and evolutionary), neuroscience, philosophy, ethology, economics, and political science to explain the workings of the tethered mind. One key insight that holds everything together is that feelings—generated in old, widely conserved brain stem structures—are evolution’s solution to initiating and selecting all behaviors, and provide the common currency for the different systems to interact. Reason is as much about feelings as are lust and the taste of chocolate cake. All systems contribute to behavior and the overall control structure is one that maximizes pleasure and minimizes displeasure. Tethered rationality has some sobering and challenging implications for such real-world human behaviors as climate change denial, Trumpism, racism, or sexism. They cannot be changed simply by targeting beliefs but will require more drastic measures, the nature of which depends on the specific behavior in question. Having an accurate model of human behavior is the crucial first step.
Author: John Bradshaw
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 530
ISBN-13: 0553095927
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The best-selling author of Creating Love sets out to redefine what it means to live a moral life in today's world by helping readers reclaim and cultivate their inborn moral intelligence by developing one's instincts for goodness in childhood and nurturing them through one's adult life to promote good character and moral responsibility.
Author: Al Gore
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2008-01-01
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 0747593345
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A powerful indictment of the Bush-led radical Right's disdain for the principles of reasoned decision-making, and a rallying cry for a return to reason-based policies at home and abroad.
Author: Jason Lisle
Publisher: Master Books
Published: 2018-12-10
Total Pages: 153
ISBN-13: 9781683441496
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: Paul Erickson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-11-22
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 022604677X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: Mark Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-11-20
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 022650039X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
