Book Description
This brief, inexpensive text helps students think critically, using examples from the weird claims and beliefs that abound in our culture to demonstrate the sound evaluation of any claim. The authors focus on types of logical arguments and proofs, making How to Think about Weird Things a versatile supplement for logic, critical thinking, philosophy of science, or any other science appreciation courses.
Customer Reviews:
Don't waste your money.......2007-08-13
This book isn't so much about developing better thinking skills as it is a collection of the authors' opinions presented as science. It can help you practice your ability to locate logical fallacies in arguments, since almost every argument in the book contains at least one. My favorite is the voodoo-math that they use to explain apparent pre-cognition as the result of statistical probability. The first half of the formula that they present relies on the notion that the average person knows a very large number of people who are all, for some reason, dying off at a rate faster than one person every four days. The second half of the formula is omitted entirely, and they instead skip directly to their conclusion. I think that the authors were relying on the intimidation that some people feel when faced with a series of big numbers to keep anyone from analyzing their absurd argument.
The authors also frequently use straw man arguments and several variations of the argument from intimidation in an attempt to reinforce their opinions as facts. If you are really interested in developing your thinking skills, then checking out de Bono's books and The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools would be a good start. There are many great books on the topic, and there's also lots of good information for free online.
Quick Turnaround.......2007-06-12
Received product just over 24 hours from ordering. Was worried about overnight delivery accuracy, but was pleased to receive order on time, as promised.
Classic.......2007-02-04
This book is extraordinarily well-written. It covers much, and covers it well. Not only is it a good primer on skepticism and critical thinking, it should definately be required reading for all "postmodernists." Filled with endless examples and clever arguments, this book is a gold mine for anyone teaching a class on critical thinking or even general science.
Think About a Different Book on Critical Thinking.......2007-01-23
Several other reviewers have made comments to the effect that this book is a bit lame. I agree but instead of regurgitating their complaints I'll specify a few of my own.
Thomas Kuhn, which the authors talk about on pages 83-86, is listed as a hard-core relativist. Even if one limits oneself to reading Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions this claim about him cannot be supported. While it is true that Kuhn's work spawned consonance from many such people that shouldn't be too surprising since Kuhn's book is a work of philosophy/literature and not science. Literature, of any sort, is particularly ripe for such abuse. On page 86 the authors say, "We can even say that people with different conceptual schemes experience the world in different ways". That, in a nutshell, is Kuhn's main point - and to make him out to be an Absolutist Relativist is simply not useful.
In discussing the Availability Error (pp 140-144) in confirmation bias the authors use the example of Madey & Gilovich's study using the reading of a faked diary of prophetic dreams. "When subjects were asked to remember as many of the dreams as possible, they remembered many more of the dreams that were fulfilled than those that were not". What they failed to account for is the fact that dreams that 'came true' were in fact mentioned in the diary twice and the ones that did not 'come true' were mentioned only once. So that of course the students remembered 'true' dreams more often; since not only is there the "wow" factor involved in prophetic accounts coming 'true' but by repeating a story using different verbiage the effect on ones memory is more than twice as much. This mnemonic effect is why professional journal articles have an Abstract, Body and Conclusion.
The authors do a disservice to Intelligent Design by inserting it into the discussion on Creationism (pp 189-191) and then misunderstanding it to boot. There is no indication in the text that we've switched topics - in fact, it seems that instead of re-writing the chapter to deal with the new threat of ID the authors merely lumped in some opinions on the subject. This has the unfortunate effect of disrupting the flow of the text.
The authors also seem to misunderstand Michael Behe's contention (cf Darwin's Black Box) that certain biochemical processes are irreducibly complex. Most biologists, we are told, reject Behe's argument that "the parts of an irreducibly complex system could not have evolved independently of that system". The authors commit the logical fallacy of Equivocation (see p 300 in their book) because by definition any process that is irreducibly complex cannot be built up through time given functional Independence of it parts. If the authors really want to go head to head with the Intelligent Design ideas they should tear into Icons of Evolution - the book that does the most damage to Darwinians IMHO.
Really, almost any other book on logic/critical thinking is better than this one. Stick with Copi's _Introduction to Logic_ (if it's still in print) and you'll be able to think circles around any weirdness you might encounter.
Poor Critical Thinking Skills.......2006-01-07
This book can be savaged by the very critical thinking skills it proposes to teach. The authors insist that a proposition be accurately defined. But rarely attempt to accurately define the concepts they use as examples. They devote a great deal of space to explaining the weakness of individual perception and memory, then insist that reality can only be that which one percieves. One of my greatest criticisms is regular reference to the work of Hyman. Any good skeptic is skeptical of the work of a professional debunker. Hyman is well known for debunking any scientific effort for one might wish to discredit. Thus their regular dependence on Hyman damages their already questionable veracity.
I forced myself to the last chapter, a chapter the authors claim to be example applications of their proposals. I felt they did a poor job of debunking homeopathic medicine, but when they abrubtly dismissed "water witching" because the working hypothesis they defined was faulty, without any discussion of scientific studies or in fact any discussion of the past success or lack thereof, of "witching", I just closed the book and set it on the shelf. It will be in the next batch I trade at the used bookstore.
In conclusion, the authors are sloppy, prejudiced, deceitful, and not particularly good writers. Their position damages science by furthering the cause of those who would call science a "religion" and even worse, but promoting the ideology of the closed, bolted, and sealed mind.
Science has come a long way since Newton first published. The authors seem unaware of this fact.
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Reasoning About Knowledge
Ronald Fagin ,
Joseph Y. Halpern ,
Yoram Moses , and
Moshe Y. Vardi
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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Reasoning about Uncertainty
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Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence)
ASIN: 0262562006 |
Book Description
Reasoning about knowledge -- particularly the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each other's knowledge -- was once the exclusive province of philosophers and puzzle solvers. More recently, this type of reasoning has been shown to play a key role in a surprising number of contexts, from understanding conversations to the analysis of distributed computer algorithms.
Reasoning About Knowledge is the first book to provide a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory. It brings eight years of work by the authors into a cohesive framework for understanding and analyzing reasoning about knowledge that is intuitive, mathematically well founded, useful in practice, and widely applicable. The book is almost completely self-contained and should be accessible to readers in a variety of disciplines, including computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, and game theory. Each chapter includes exercises and bibliographic notes.
Customer Reviews:
Great book.......2000-07-06
I have used only part of the book. Most of the book is explained using the 'muddy children' example, which also serves to illustrate the complexities in automating a trivial puzzle for humans. The book also contains accessible coverage of Kripke structures and Aumann diagrams. This is quite a accessible introduction to a fairly complex subject.
Book Description
Uncertainty is a fundamental and unavoidable feature of daily life; in order to deal with uncertaintly intelligently, we need to be able to represent it and reason about it. In this book, Joseph Halpern examines formal ways of representing uncertainty and considers various logics for reasoning about it. While the ideas presented are formalized in terms of definitions and theorems, the emphasis is on the philosophy of representing and reasoning about uncertainty; the material is accessible and relevant to researchers and students in many fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, economics (particularly game theory), mathematics, philosophy, and statistics.
Halpern begins by surveying possible formal systems for representing uncertainty, including probability measures, possibility measures, and plausibility measures. He considers the updating of beliefs based on changing information and the relation to Bayes' theorem; this leads to a discussion of qualitative, quantitative, and plausibilistic Bayesian networks. He considers not only the uncertainty of a single agent but also uncertainty in a multi-agent framework. Halpern then considers the formal logical systems for reasoning about uncertainty. He discusses knowledge and belief; default reasoning and the semantics of default; reasoning about counterfactuals, and combining probability and counterfactuals; belief revision; first-order modal logic; and statistics and beliefs. He includes a series of exercises at the end of each chapter.
Customer Reviews:
Deep look at the logic of uncertainty.......2006-03-28
If you're completely at home with first-order logic and with probability, you're may be ready to extend some of those ideas. This book examines a range of topics that push logic and probability into wider, more interesting areas.
After a brief introduction, Halpern introduces upper and lower probabilities representing partial knowledge, and other measures representing belief, plausibility, possibility, and necessity. These are built up in a rigorous way, but with plenty of physical significance at each step - these aren't just axiomatic systems put together for their inherent elegance. The next few chapters build up a logical sequence of constructs around these measures, including independence, conditioning, and expectation. I expected to see confidence intervals generalized into these terms, but Halpern may have considered those to be exercises for the reader.
From these pieces, Halpern builds frameworks for real-world decision making. This includes the ability update knowledge (and ignorance) in the presence of new facts. It also includes modal logics, based on the variability of "truth" according to the time at which an assertion is made or the person by whom it it made, and "counterfactuals" that reason about events that could have occurred but didn't. And, whenever Halpern presents a new approach, he's also careful to point out where its weaknesses are.
This isn't for beginners, by any means. The successful reader is flexible about the axioms to use in an analytic system, and is able and willing to follow along with dense logical notation. One should not expect this to cover the whole world of soft logics - traditional fuzziness gets only brief mention, for example. The best parts of this presentation extend familiar probabilistic terms (such as expectation) well beyond their original frameworks, creating a more unified view of various belief measures than I've seen elsewhere. If you have a serious interest in soft logic, formal reasoning, and mathematical tools for AI, I recommend this book very highly.
-- wiredweird
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Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis. Reasoning about Data: Second International Symposium, IDA-97, London, UK, August 4-6, 1997, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 3540633464 |
Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis, IDA-97, held in London, UK, in August 1997.The volume presents 50 revised full papers selected from a total of 107 submissions. Also included is a keynote, Intelligent Data Analysis: Issues and Opportunities, by David J. Hand. The papers are organized in sections on exploratory data analysis, preprocessing and tools; classification and feature selection; medical applications; soft computing; knowledge discovery and data mining; estimation and clustering; data quality; qualitative models.
Book Description
This state-of-the-art survey comprises a selection of the material presented at the International Dagstuhl Seminar on Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in April 2005.
The seminar centered around an emerging de facto standard for time and event annotation: TimeML. The 9 papers included in the book constitute the thoroughly cross-reviewed and revised versions of selected summaries and findings presented and discussed at the seminar.
The papers feature current research and discuss open problems concerning annotation, temporal reasoning, and event identification. The main concern is with the determination of the effectivity of the TimeML language for consistent annotation, the determination of the usefulness of such annotations for further processing, and the question as to which modifications should be applied to the standard to improve its convenience in applications such as question-answering and information retrieval.
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Fuzzy Sets, Logics and Reasoning about Knowledge (APPLIED LOGIC SERIES Volume 15) (Applied Logic Series)
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 0792359771 |
Book Description
Fuzzy Sets, Logics and Reasoning about Knowledge reports recent results concerning the genuinely logical aspects of fuzzy sets in relation to algebraic considerations, knowledge representation and commonsense reasoning. It takes a state-of-the-art look at multiple-valued and fuzzy set-based logics, in an artificial intelligence perspective. The papers, all of which are written by leading contributors in their respective fields, are grouped into four sections.
The first section presents a panorama of many-valued logics in connection with fuzzy sets. The second explores algebraic foundations, with an emphasis on MV algebras. The third is devoted to approximate reasoning methods and similarity-based reasoning. The fourth explores connections between fuzzy knowledge representation, especially possibilistic logic and prioritized knowledge bases.
Readership: Scholars and graduate students in logic, algebra, knowledge representation, and formal aspects of artificial intelligence.
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Rough Sets: Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Data (Theory and Decision Library D:)
Z. Pawlak
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 0792314727 |
Customer Reviews:
Very interesting book!.......2006-09-18
The book is a tutorial overview -- written by the originator of Rough Set theory -- of the work which has been done in this field (by himself and many others) during the decade of the 80's. Although the field remained active through the 90's and until today, this book is still essential for anyone wanting exposure to the various aspects and applications of rough set theory. It's fantastically well written for a book of this nature, full of easy examples, and with very few mathematical prerequisites. One could not really say that it is a "new" theory, since almost every aspect of rough set theory (granulation, feature selection, rule construction, etc.) has been explored in other contexts and applications, but rough set theory just ties these things together in a very nice way. I highly recommend the book. I don't understand the current pricing on it, however, and I wish the publisher would make a reasonably priced paperback of this important text.
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TARK Proceedings 1992 (Tark 1992)
Manufacturer: Morgan Kaufmann
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ASIN: 1558602437 |
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Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge: Proceedings of the 1986 Conference, March 19-22, 1986, Monterey, California
Manufacturer: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
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ASIN: 0934613044 |
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