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