The ability to think clearly and the power to reason well set leaders apart from the crowd. All of us have these abilities, but some may not be able to use their capabilities to full advantage at home, at work, at school, or in group situations.
Think to Win is a clear and inviting guide through the amazing world of logical thinking and reasoning. Designed for all readers, this book explores crucial aspects of effective reasoning - that uniquely human characteristic that catapulted our species from the use of smoke signals to the computer, and from humble cave dwellings to space exploration.
Inspired by a student who once pleaded for a layperson's guide to "thinking well," S. Cannavo walks the reader through the various modes of thinking, understanding, and reasoning, making logical thought engaging through real-life examples. He offers essential tips on how anyone can be empowered through continual self-monitoring and self-improvement.
Want to feel better about yourself and your abilities? Do you want to explain yourself better, present a more convincing case, and ultimately be more successful? Think to Win will help you cultivate your rational intelligence.

Today, scientific literacy is an essential aspect of any undergraduate education. Recipes for Science responds to this need by providing an accessible introduction to the nature of science and scientific methods, reasoning, and concepts that is appropriate for any beginning college student. It is designed to be adaptable to a wide variety of different kinds of courses, such as introductions to scientific reasoning or critical thinking, philosophy of science, and science education. In any of these different uses, the book helps students better navigate our scientific, 21st-century world. Key Features Contemporary and historical examples of science from many fields of physical, life, and social sciences. Visual aids to clarify and illustrate ideas. Text boxes to explore related topics. Plenty of exercises to ensure full student engagement and mastery of the information. Annotated 'Further Reading' sections at the end of each chapter. Final glossary with helpful definitions of key terms. A companion website with author-developed and crowdsourced materials, including syllabi for courses using this textbook, bibliography of additional resources and online materials, sharable PowerPoint presentations and lecture notes, and additional exercises and extended projects.

This book argues for a view in which processes of dialogue and interaction are taken to be foundational to reasoning, logic, and meaning. This is both a continuation, and a substantial modification, of an inferentialist approach to logic. As such, the book not only provides a critical introduction to the inferentialist view, but it also provides an argument that this shift in perspective has deep and foundational consequences for how we understand the nature of logic and its relationship with meaning and reasoning. This has been upheld by several technical results, including, for example a novel approach to logical paradox and logical revision, and an account of the internal justification of logical rules. The book shows that inferentialism is greatly strengthened, such that it can answer the most stringent criticisms of the view. This leads to a view of logic that emphasizes the dynamics of reasoning, provides a novel account of the justification and normativity of logical rules, thus leading to a new, attractive approach to the foundations of logic. The book addresses readers interested in philosophy of language, philosophical and mathematical logic, theories of reasoning, and also those who actively engage in current debates involving, for example, logical revision, and the relationship between logic and reasoning, from advanced undergraduates, to professional philosophers, mathematicians, and linguists.

This book presents a philosophical approach to probability and probabilistic thinking, considering the underpinnings of probabilistic reasoning and modeling, which effectively underlie everything in data science. The ultimate goal is to call into question many standard tenets and lay the philosophical and probabilistic groundwork and infrastructure for statistical modeling. It is the first book devoted to the philosophy of data aimed at working scientists and calls for a new consideration in the practice of probability and statistics to eliminate what has been referred to as the "Cult of Statistical Significance." The book explains the philosophy of these ideas and not the mathematics, though there are a handful of mathematical examples. The topics are logically laid out, starting with basic philosophy as related to probability, statistics, and science, and stepping through the key probabilistic ideas and concepts, and ending with statistical models. Its jargon-free approach asserts that standard methods, such as out-of-the-box regression, cannot help in discovering cause. This new way of looking at uncertainty ties together disparate fields - probability, physics, biology, the "soft" sciences, computer science - because each aims at discovering cause (of effects). It broadens the understanding beyond frequentist and Bayesian methods to propose a Third Way of modeling.

Paradox Lost covers ten of philosophy's most fascinating paradoxes, in which seemingly compelling reasoning leads to absurd conclusions. The following paradoxes are included: The Liar Paradox, in which a sentence says of itself that it is false. Is the sentence true or false? The Sorites Paradox, in which we imagine removing grains of sand one at a time from a heap of sand. Is there a particular grain whose removal converts the heap to a non-heap? The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer, in which a series of seemingly rational choices has us accepting a life of excruciating pain, in exchange for millions of dollars. Newcomb's Problem, in which we seemingly maximize our expected profit by taking an unknown sum of money, rather than taking the same sum plus $1000. The Surprise Quiz Paradox, in which a professor finds that it is impossible to give a surprise quiz on any particular day of the week . . . but also that if this is so, then a surprise quiz can be given on any day. The Two Envelope Paradox, in which we are asked to choose between two indistinguishable envelopes, and it is seemingly shown that each envelope is preferable to the other. The Ravens Paradox, in which observing a purple shoe provides evidence that all ravens are black. The Shooting Room Paradox, in which a deadly game kills 90% of all who play, yet each individual's survival turns on the flip of a fair coin. Each paradox is clearly described, common mistakes are explored, and a clear, logical solution offered. Paradox Lost will appeal to professional philosophers, students of philosophy, and all who love intellectual puzzles.

The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce's work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce's theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce's theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice's philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science.

This book offers insight into the nature of meaningful discourse. It presents an argument of great intellectual scope written by an author with more than four decades of experience. Readers will gain a deeper understanding into three theories of the logos: analytic, dialectical, and oceanic. The author first introduces and contrasts these three theories. He then assesses them with respect to their basic parameters: necessity, truth, negation, infinity, as well as their use in mathematics. Analytic Aristotelian logic has traditionally claimed uniqueness, most recently in its Fregean and post-Fregean variants. Dialectical logic was first proposed by Hegel. The account presented here cuts through the dense, often incomprehensible Hegelian text. Oceanic logic was never identified as such, but the author gives numerous examples of its use from the history of philosophy. The final chapter addresses the plurality of the three theories and of how we should deal with it. The author first worked in analytic logic in the 1970s and 1980s, first researched dialectical logic in the 1990s, and discovered oceanic logic in the 2000s. This book represents the culmination of reflections that have lasted an entire scholarly career.

This volume is a result of the international symposium "The Tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School in European Culture," which took place in Warsaw, Poland, September 2015. It collects almost all the papers presented at the symposium as well as some additional ones. The contributors include scholars from Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Poland. The papers are devoted to the history and reception of the Lvov-Warsaw School, a Polish branch of analytic philosophy. They present the School's achievements as well as its connections to other analytic groups. The contributors also show how the tradition of the School is developed contemporarily. The title will appeal to historians of analytic philosophy as well as historians of philosophy in Central Europe.

Traditionally, Aristotle is held to believe that philosophical contemplation is valuable for its own sake, but ultimately useless. In this volume, Matthew D. Walker offers a fresh, systematic account of Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good. The book situates Aristotle's views against the background of his wider philosophy, and examines the complete range of available textual evidence (including neglected passages from Aristotle's Protrepticus). On this basis, Walker argues that contemplation also benefits humans as perishable living organisms by actively guiding human life activity, including human self-maintenance. Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good thus cohere with his broader thinking about how living organisms live well. A novel exploration of Aristotle's views on theory and practice, this volume will interest scholars and students of both ancient Greek ethics and natural philosophy. It will also appeal to those working in other disciplines including classics, ethics, and political theory.

This book provides an overview of the confluence of ideas in Turing's era and work and examines the impact of his work on mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. It combines contributions by well-known scientists on the history and philosophy of computability theory as well as on generalised Turing computability. By looking at the roots and at the philosophical and technical influence of Turing's work, it is possible to gather new perspectives and new research topics which might be considered as a continuation of Turing's working ideas well into the 21st century. The Stored-Program Universal Computer: Did Zuse Anticipate Turing and von Neumann?" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

Der geborene OEsterreicher Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) gilt als der Begrunder der Allgemeinen Systemtheorie. Die Querschnittswissenschaft Systemtheorie hat damit ihre Grundlage bekommen. Mark Davidson, Schriftsteller, Journalist, ehemaliger Professor fur Kommunikationswissenschaften an der California State University in Dominguez Hills, hat mit diesem Buch Bertalanffy ein Denkmal gesetzt und eine leicht lesbare Einfuhrung in die Systemwissenschaften vorgelegt. Es beschreibt eine Wissenschaftsstroemung, die wie massgeschneidert ist, den Herausforderungen unseres globalen Informationszeitalters zu begegnen, und es mag mithelfen, Bertalanffy den Platz in der oesterreichischen und internationalen Wissenschaftsgeschichte zuzuweisen, der ihm gebuhrt.

This is a collection of new investigations and discoveries on the theory of opposition (square, hexagon, octagon, polyhedra of opposition) by the best specialists from all over the world. The papers range from historical considerations to new mathematical developments of the theory of opposition including applications to theology, theory of argumentation and metalogic.

This collection of essays examines logic and its philosophy. The author investigates the nature of logic not only by describing its properties but also by showing philosophical applications of logical concepts and structures. He evaluates what logic is and analyzes among other aspects the relations of logic and language, the status of identity, bivalence, proof, truth, constructivism, and metamathematics. With examples concerning the application of logic to philosophy, he also covers semantic loops, the epistemic discourse, the normative discourse, paradoxes, properties of truth, truth-making as well as theology, being and logical determinism. The author concludes with a philosophical reflection on nothingness and its modelling.

John Pollock aims to construct a theory of rational decision making for real agents--not ideal agents. Real agents have limited cognitive powers, but traditional theories of rationality have applied only to idealized agents that lack such constraints. Pollock argues that theories of ideal rationality are largely irrelevant to the decision making of real agents. Thinking about Acting aims to provide a theory of "real rationality."

This book analyses and defends the deflationist claim that there is nothing deep about our notion of truth. According to this view, truth is a 'light' and innocent concept, devoid of any essence which could be revealed by scientific inquiry. Cezary Cieslinski considers this claim in light of recent formal results on axiomatic truth theories, which are crucial for understanding and evaluating the philosophical thesis of the innocence of truth. Providing an up-to-date discussion and original perspectives on this central and controversial issue, his book will be important for those with a background in logic who are interested in formal truth theories and in current philosophical debates about the deflationary conception of truth.

In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorizing?

In Rationality, Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species - cavemen out of time fatally cursed with biases, fallacies and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives and set the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains, we think in ways that suit the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we have built up over millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, causal inference, and decision-making under uncertainty. These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book - until now.

Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten, inspire and empower.

This volume presents 50 contributions on the themes of reasonableness and effectiveness and their connections, which are central issues in argumentation theory. It discusses van Eemeren's views on the study of argumentation; the approach to argumentation adopted in pragma-dialectics; pragma-dialectical perspectives on the dialectical and pragmatic dimensions of argumentative discourse; the notion of strategic maneuvering; the pragma-dialectical method of analyzing argumentative discourse; the treatment of fallacies as violations of rules for critical discussion; pragma-dialectical views on context, the role of logic, verbal indicators of argumentative moves and argument schemes; and the process of writing and rewriting argumentative texts. The pragma-dialectical quantitative approach to empirical research on argumentative discourse is illustrated by reporting on selected, illustrative experimental studies, as well as qualitative studies of historical cases.

Action theory is the object of growing attention in a variety of scientific disciplines and this is the first volume to offer a synthetic view of the range of approaches possible in the topic. The volume focuses on the nexus of formal action theory with a startlingly diverse set of subjects, which range from logic, linguistics, artificial intelligence and automata theory to jurisprudence, deontology and economics. It covers semantic, mathematical and logical aspects of action, showing how the problem of action breaks the boundaries of traditional branches of logic located in syntactics and semantics and now lies on lies on the borderline between logical pragmatics and praxeology. The chapters here focus on specialized tasks in formal action theory, beginning with a thorough description and formalization of the language of action and moving through material on the differing models of action theory to focus on probabilistic models, the relations of formal action theory to deontic logic and its key applications in algorithmic and programming theory. The coverage thus fills a notable lacuna in the literary corpus and offers solid formal underpinning in cognitive science by approaching the problem of cognition as a composite action of mind.

This volume is dedicated to Prof. Dag Prawitz and his outstanding contributions to philosophical and mathematical logic. Prawitz's eminent contributions to structural proof theory, or general proof theory, as he calls it, and inference-based meaning theories have been extremely influential in the development of modern proof theory and anti-realistic semantics. In particular, Prawitz is the main author on natural deduction in addition to Gerhard Gentzen, who defined natural deduction in his PhD thesis published in 1934. The book opens with an introductory paper that surveys Prawitz's numerous contributions to proof theory and proof-theoretic semantics and puts his work into a somewhat broader perspective, both historically and systematically. Chapters include either in-depth studies of certain aspects of Dag Prawitz's work or address open research problems that are concerned with core issues in structural proof theory and range from philosophical essays to papers of a mathematical nature. Investigations into the necessity of thought and the theory of grounds and computational justifications as well as an examination of Prawitz's conception of the validity of inferences in the light of three "dogmas of proof-theoretic semantics" are included. More formal papers deal with the constructive behaviour of fragments of classical logic and fragments of the modal logic S4 among other topics. In addition, there are chapters about inversion principles, normalization of p roofs, and the notion of proof-theoretic harmony and other areas of a more mathematical persuasion. Dag Prawitz also writes a chapter in which he explains his current views on the epistemic dimension of proofs and addresses the question why some inferences succeed in conferring evidence on their conclusions when applied to premises for which one already possesses evidence.

This volume presents a selection of papers reflecting key theoretical issues in argumentation theory. Its six sections are devoted to specific themes, including the analysis and evaluation of argumentation, argument schemes and the contextual embedding of argumentation. The section on general perspectives on argumentation discusses the trends of empiricalization, contextualization and formalization, offers descriptions of the analytical and evaluative tools of informal logic, and highlights selected principles that argumentation theorists do and do not agree upon. In turn, the section on linguistic approaches to argumentation focuses on the problem of distinguishing between explanation and argument, while also elaborating on the role of verbal indicators of argument schemes. All essays included in this volume point out notable recent developments in the study of argumentation.

This book explores the two major elements of Hintikka's model of inquiry: underlying game theoretical motivations and the central role of questioning. The chapters build on the Hintikkan tradition extending Hintikka's model and present a wide variety of approaches to the philosophy of inquiry from different directions, ranging from erotetic logic to Lakatosian philosophy, from socio-epistemologic approaches to strategic reasoning and mathematical practice. Hintikka's theory of inquiry is a well-known example of a dynamic epistemic procedure. In an interrogative inquiry, the inquirer is given a theory and a question. He then tries to answer the question based on the theory by posing questions to nature or an oracle. The initial formulation of this procedure by Hintikka is rather broad and informal. This volume introduces a carefully selected responses to the issues discussed by Hintikka. The articles in the volume were contributed by various authors associated with a research project on Hintikka's interrogative theory of inquiry conducted in the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST) of Paris, including those who visited to share their insight.

How can we advance knowledge? Which methods do we need in order to make new discoveries? How can we rationally evaluate, reconstruct and offer discoveries as a means of improving the 'method' of discovery itself? And how can we use findings about scientific discovery to boost funding policies, thus fostering a deeper impact of scientific discovery itself? The respective chapters in this book provide readers with answers to these questions. They focus on a set of issues that are essential to the development of types of reasoning for advancing knowledge, such as models for both revolutionary findings and paradigm shifts; ways of rationally addressing scientific disagreement, e.g. when a revolutionary discovery sparks considerable disagreement inside the scientific community; frameworks for both discovery and inference methods; and heuristics for economics and the social sciences.

This meticulous critical assessment of the ground-breaking work of philosopher Stanislaw Lesniewski focuses exclusively on primary texts and explores the full range of output by one of the master logicians of the Lvov-Warsaw school. The author's nuanced survey eschews secondary commentary, analyzing Lesniewski's core philosophical views and evaluating the formulations that were to have such a profound influence on the evolution of mathematical logic. One of the undisputed leaders of the cohort of brilliant logicians that congregated in Poland in the early twentieth century, Lesniewski was a guide and mentor to a generation of celebrated analytical philosophers (Alfred Tarski was his PhD student). His primary achievement was a system of foundational mathematical logic intended as an alternative to the Principia Mathematica of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Its three strands-'protothetic', 'ontology', and 'mereology', are detailed in discrete sections of this volume, alongside a wealth other chapters grouped to provide the fullest possible coverage of Lesniewski's academic output. With material on his early philosophical views, his contributions to set theory and his work on nominalism and higher-order quantification, this book offers a uniquely expansive critical commentary on one of analytical philosophy's great pioneers.

This volume is the first ever collection devoted to the field of proof-theoretic semantics. Contributions address topics including the systematics of introduction and elimination rules and proofs of normalization, the categorial characterization of deductions, the relation between Heyting's and Gentzen's approaches to meaning, knowability paradoxes, proof-theoretic foundations of set theory, Dummett's justification of logical laws, Kreisel's theory of constructions, paradoxical reasoning, and the defence of model theory. The field of proof-theoretic semantics has existed for almost 50 years, but the term itself was proposed by Schroeder-Heister in the 1980s. Proof-theoretic semantics explains the meaning of linguistic expressions in general and of logical constants in particular in terms of the notion of proof. This volume emerges from presentations at the Second International Conference on Proof-Theoretic Semantics in Tubingen in 2013, where contributing authors were asked to provide a self-contained description and analysis of a significant research question in this area. The contributions are representative of the field and should be of interest to logicians, philosophers, and mathematicians alike.

After Plato's Forms, and Aristotle's substances, the Stoics posited the fundamental reality of lekta - the meanings of sentences, distinct from the sentences themselves. This is the first time in the tradition of Western philosophy that what is signified is properly distinguished from signs and signifiers. The Stoics on Lekta offers a synoptic treatment of the many implications of this distinction, which grants an existential autonomy to lekta: language can only ever express meanings, but what happens to meanings which are there, ready to be said, but which are never actually expressed? It analyses the deep shift in ontological paradigm required by the presence of lekta in reality, and reveals a truly unique, complex, and consistent cosmic view in which lekta are the keystones of the structure of reality. According to this view, we cannot not speak or think in terms of lekta, and for this reason, they are in fact all there is to say. The Stoics' position ignited many fiery debates in antiquity and continues to do so in the modern era: they were the first to be concerned with questions about language and grammar, and the first to put the relation of language to reality at the heart of the enquiry into human understanding and the place of man in the cosmos. Such questions remain central to life and philosophy to this day, and by explicitly comparing and contrasting the themes and topics discussed to twentieth-century treatments of the status of the proposition, propositional structure, speech act theory, and the relation of attribution of the predicate to a subject-term, this volume seeks to demonstrate the enduring value of a direct Stoic contribution to the contemporary debate.