reason better an interdisciplinary guide to critical thinking pdf

Reason Better: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Critical Thinking

David Manley

It’s time the standard critical thinking curriculum was rethought. Reason Better: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Critical Thinking does exactly this by combining the most recent findings about reasoning from philosophy, cognitive science, social psychology and behavioral economics in a way that’s practical yet rigorous. The text emphasizes developing a mindset that avoids systematic errors, while also presenting a unified picture of evidence that covers statistical, causal, and best-explanation inferences. Students will come away with a sense of how to assess the strength of evidence for claims, adjust their beliefs accordingly, and recognize the errors they're most prone to making. Reason Better is rich with instructor resources to support delivering a course that will have lasting effects on students’ lives.

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Table of Contents for Reason Better: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Critical Thinking

• Preliminaries
• Chapter 1: Reasoning
• Chapter 2: Mindset
• Chapter 3: Clarity
• Chapter 4: Entailment
• Chapter 5: Evidence
• Chapter 6: Generalizations
• Chapter 7: Causes
• Chapter 8: Updating
• Chapter 9: Decisions
• Chapter 10: Co-thinking
• Instructor's Resources
• Advanced Chapter Materials

Key features

• A new and innovative approach to critical thinking that has greater applicability to students’ lives
• Integrated auto-assessed questions gauge comprehension throughout chapters along with separate supplementary chapter quizzes
• Robust instructor manual includes in-class exercises with insightful tips for conveying chapter material and five problem sets combining material across chapters help connect concepts for students

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A new kind of critical thinking textbook

Hi! I'm David Manley and I teach philosophy at the University of Michigan, and got frustrated with the texts available for Critical Thinking courses. So I wrote my own! The text,  Reason Better: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Critical Thinking , is about acquiring a mindset of inquiry, recognizing our cognitive biases, and adjusting our beliefs to match the strength of the evidence.  You can check it out here . (Link won't work on a mobile phone. Use the “Enter as Guest” button on the right: no need for an account to check it out.)

I tried to include only the most useful skills from the toolkits of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics. The result is a text that:

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 deduction.

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 I offer 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.

I’m happy to report that there’s no need to accept the false choice between a narrow Intro to Logic course and a remedial Critical Thinking course. The course at Michigan that uses this text– at the moment taught by the amazing Anna Edmonds–is rigorous but immensely practical. Students come away with a sense of how to weigh the strength of evidence for claims, and adjust their beliefs accordingly.

I’ve been hesitant to turn to a traditional publisher, because I like the TopHat platform so much:

There are embedded questions in each section that are auto-graded and ensure the students are doing the readings.

It offers a really nice UI for students with search and note-taking capabilities, and they can read the text and answer questions on any device.

It’s pretty cheap: TopHat charges students $45 for the textbook (lifetime access) plus homework/grading platform for the semester.

Most importantly, it's very flexible: any prof who assigns the text can modify it it. Want the students to skip a section? Just cut it out. Don’t like the wording of a question? Just change it. It’s hard to overestimate how useful this is in a text.

The text is ready for use right now, but I’ll be continuing to improve it, so I’d be very happy to get any feedback. There is an anonymous feedback form in the text itself that anyone can use. For the next month or so I’ll be working on an additional chapter called “Sources”, about social epistemology in a world of information overload: navigating science reporting, expertise, consensus, conformity, polarization, and conditions for skilled intuition.

Here's the Table of Contents:

1 | Reasoning

What it takes

Specific vs. general skills

The right mindset

Our complex minds

Two systems

Direct control

Transparency

Clarifications

Systems in conflict

Guiding the mind

Distracted minds

Stubborn minds

Motivated minds

A closing caveat

2 | Mindset

Defense or discovery?

Accurate beliefs

Search for possibilities

Search for evidence

The bias blindspot

Considering the opposite

Openness to revision

3 | Clarity

Clear inferences

The two elements

Suppositional strength

Implicit premises

Deductive vs. inductive

The tradeoff

The ground floor

Clear interpretation

Standard form

Interpretive charity

Reconstruction

Clear language

Vagueness neglect

4 | Entailment

Deductive validity

Step by step

Flipping the argument

Logical form

Argument recipes

Some valid sentential forms

Some valid predicate forms

The limits of logical form

Overlooking validity

Biased evaluation

Some invalid forms

5 | Evidence

What is evidence?

The evidence test

The strength test

Evidence & probability

Selection effects

Survival & attrition

Selective recall

Selective noticing

Media biases

News and fear

Echo chambers

Research media

6 | Generalizations

Samples as evidence

Sample size

The law of large numbers

Better samples

Sampling methods

Survey pitfalls

The big picture

Measures of centrality

The shape of the data

Misleading presentations

Thinking proportionally

Loose generalizations

Representativeness heuristic

Causal thinking

An instinct for causal stories

One thing after another

Complex causes

Causes and correlations

The nature of correlation

Illusory correlations

Generalizing correlations

Misleading correlations

Reverse causation

Common cause

Side effects

Regression to the mean

Mere chance

Evidence & experiments

8 | Updating

How to update

The updating rule

The die is cast

More visuals

The detective

Probability Pitfalls

One-sided strength testing

Base rate neglect

Selective updating

Heads I win; tails we're even

9 | Theories

Compound claims

Conjunctions

Disjunctions

Criteria of theory choice

A case study

The best explanation

Sometimes the best explanation is probably false

IBE and statistical generalization

The scientific method

The order of observation

Ad hoc hijinks

10 | Decisions

The logic of decisions

Possible outcomes

Expected monetary value

Mo money, less marginal utility

The value of everything else

Expected utility

Decision Pitfalls

Outcome framing

New vs. old risks

The endowment effect

The possibility and certainty effects

Honoring sunk costs

Time-inconsistent utilities

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Reason Better: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Critical Thinking

https://app.tophat.com/e/455176/assigned/ You can access the link without registration choosing Enter as Guest option.

This course or book was created by David Manley. In essence it is a critical thinking online textbook, but with integrated exercises. Other educators, who use the same platform, can change the text according to their purposes. But even if you don’t work to register you can just read it as a regular book.

The book covers a number of topics: how the human mind works, different mindsets and point of view on reasoning, how to achieve clarity with good arguments, how to understand different forms of argument, what to do with evidence and how to apply a probabilistic approach to hypotheses, how to use generalization and what kind of errors may appear during this process, how to understand causation and relate it to evidence, how new information should change our beliefs, how to formulate theories and hypotheses correctly, how to make decisions.

The book also has a list of learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter. It helps to understand what can you learn and decide how to proceed with a chapter.

In a description of his course 1 the author said he wanted to teach only the most useful skill from different fields to create efficient critical thinkers. He also aim to teach useful dispositions, although he called them a mindset. He mostly focuses on inductive logic, which is related to probabilities, than on deductive arguments. He probably did a good job on creating a unified picture of how evidence work in different contexts.

The author proposes the texts mostly as book for teachers who teach critical thinking courses. But I believe it also can be used for self-education. I can recommend this book if you have tried several other books on critical thinking and you are looking for something different. You can also try this book if you want to learn critical thinking from scratch. The book doesn’t require much prior knowledge, and most of the required knowledge can be found online.

1. ^ : http://dailynous.com/2019/05/01/new-kind-critical-thinking-text-guest-post-david-manley/

Published on 2019-07-31

Tags: critical thinking , course review , books review

Short permalink: https://umneem.org/b51/