Clear Thinking in a Blurry World

Book excerpt: A ground-up Canadian text, Clear Thinking in a Blurry World offers a new way of examining the discipline of critical thinking. This text focuses on critical thinking as it applies to philosophy and cognition, rather than the typical 'formal logic lite' approach.Clear Thinking in a Blurry World includes many practical sections that are not commonly found in books in this market—material on numeracy and statistical analysis. Through this text, students will examine sources of information—from social exchanges, to science, to mainstream media—in detail, as well as the cognitive and social psychology of biases. This text aims directly at teaching, or beginning to teach, a broad set of knowledge, skills, and habits properly called critical reasoning faculties. Students using this text will enhance their ability to: -recognize and classify reliable and unreliable forms of reasoning -understand reasoning about evidence, including some central concepts of statistics and probability -anticipate the cognitive and social factors that make us susceptible to particular reasoning errors -critically examine science—and popular conceptions of science—in relation to the problem of how to believe reasonable things -examine the media and other main sources of information about the world to see how they might be unreliable, and under what circumstances