Scientific Thinking

by Robert M. Martin

Scientific Thinking is a practical guide to inductive reasoning―the sort of reasoning that is commonly used in scientific activity, whether such activity is performed by a scientist, a reporter, a political pollster, or any one of us in day-to-day life. The book provides comprehensive coverage of such topics as confirmation, sampling, correlations, causality, hypotheses, and experimental methods. Martin’s writing confounds those who would think that such topics must be dry-as-dust, presenting ideas in a lively and engaging tone and incorporating amusing examples throughout. This book underlines the importance of acquiring good habits of scientific thinking, and helps to instill those habits in the reader. Stimulating questions and exercises are included in each chapter.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Nonfiction

346 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 1997

Reviews

[Colleen Earle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Science triumphalism is the enemy and this book had no shortage of it.

Martin writes in an extremely accessible fashion, which is great. Unfortunately all of his examples are awful and misrepresent the history of science.

If you're only looking for a brief outline of the problems in scientific reasoning this is a good place to start, but take everything said in the book with a grain of salt.

[Daria Drozdova]

An introductory book for schoolchildren. The author uses a lot of examples from social sciences. He discusses statistical inference, samples, hypotheses testing. A lot of simple but clear examples.

[Mahdi Nevisandeh · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a suitable book to start about science and how scientific method works. But only if you want to know the basics. It doesen't get deep into matters, if you want to know deeper and more specificly about discussed matter, I don't recommend it.

[Catalina Bilandzija · Rating 3 out of 5]

read for phil 12.
my brain hurts.