Big Picture

jlive_CHP_395_thinking_syllabus_fall_2023.pdf

• “Cogito, ergo sum,” the French philosopher René Descartes famously declared, “I think, therefore I am.”
• Thinking and Reasoning is a sub-field of cognitive science that deals with topics such as relational and analogical reasoning, induction, categorization, counterfactual reasoning, causal reasoning, explanation, problem solving, decision-making, and creativity.
• This course focuses on scientific inquiry (the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and propose explanations based on the evidence derived from their work), a kinds of thinking and reasoning that figure prominently in science.

Tools

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Textbook

Holyoak & Morrison (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning [main]

Evans (2017) Thinking and Reasoning: A Very Short Introduction

Ball & Thompson (2018) International Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning

Readings should be done by the date they appear on the list.

General principle

• A technique: if we want to know the heristic rules a cognitive sys are using that are different from the normative model, we get to see where the system fail and learn from it.
• Philosophors: ask what works in practice also works in theory.

Term paper

Term paper

Introduction

Lec 1 (Aug 21) Scientific Thinking and Reasoning