Reason Better!: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Critical Thinking

by David Manley

Reason Better is the result of rethinking the standard playbook for critical thinking courses. It’s about acquiring a mindset of inquiry, recognizing our cognitive biases, and adjusting our beliefs to match the strength of the evidence.

What would it look like if we taught only the most useful skills from the toolkits of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics? This book emphasizes acquiring a mindset that avoids systematic error (rather than persuading others), focuses on the logic of probability and decisions more than on the logic of deductive arguments, and offers a unified picture of how evidence works in statistical, causal, and best-explanation inferences—rather than treating them as unrelated.

The unified account of evidence is a broadly Bayesian one, but there aren’t any daunting theorems. (Without knowing it, students are taught to use a gentle form of the Bayes factor to measure the strength of evidence and to update.) It’s also shown how this framework illuminates aspects of the scientific method, such as the proper design of experiments.

There’s no need to accept the false choice between a narrow Intro to Logic course and a remedial Critical Thinking course. Students come away with a sense of how to weigh the strength of evidence for claims, and adjust their beliefs accordingly.

Genres: Philosophy

282 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Maia Matson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh boy, was this dry. Don't get me wrong, I actually love reading philosophy. However, this took philosophical ideas and got rid of all and any interesting prose. Part of my love for reading philosophy comes from the ways in which philosopher's structure their arguments. This text took away any complex or interesting structure for the sake of being accessible. I understand that accessible texts are needed. However, just because something is accessible doesn't mean it needs to read this dry.

[David Gross · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was an economically-written, clear, non-threatening introductory text that carefully explains the challenges and tools involved in evaluating evidence and arguments, and in making rational decisions.

[Hemanjot Singh]

Good

[carolina · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 starts because elephants were mentioned