Cause And Effect Conditionals Explanations

This series of books presents the fundamentals of reasoning well, in a style accessible to both students and scholars. The text of each essay presents a story, the main line of development of the ideas, while the footnotes and appendices place the research within a larger scholarly context. The essays overlap, forming a unified analysis of reasoning, yet each essay is designed so that it may be read independently of the others. The topic of this volume is the evaluation of reasoning about cause and effect, reasoning using conditionals, and reasoning that involves explanations. The essay "Reasoning about Cause and Effect" sets out a way to analyze whether there is cause and effect in terms of whether an inference from a claim describing the purported cause to a claim describing the purported effect satisfies specific conditions. Different notions of cause and effect correspond to placing different conditions on what counts as a good causal inference. An application of that method in "The Directedness of Emotions" leads to a clearer understanding of the issue whether every emotion need be directed at something. In the essay "Conditionals" various ways of analyzing reasoning with claims of the form "if . . . then . . ." are surveyed. Some of those uses are meant to be judged as inferences that are not necessarily valid, and conditions are given for when we can consider such inferences to be good. In "Explanations" verbal answers to a question why a claim is true are evaluated in terms of conditions placed on inferences from the explaining claims to the claim being explained. Recognizing that the direction of inference of such an explanation is the reverse of that for an argument with the very same claims is crucial in their evaluation. Explanations in terms of functions and goals are also investigated.

This series of books presents the fundamentals of logic in a style accessible to both students and scholars. The text of each essay presents a story, the main line of development of the ideas, while the notes and appendices place the research within a larger scholarly context. The essays overlap, forming a unified analysis of logic as the art of reasoning well, yet each essay is designed so that it may be read independently. The question addressed in this volume is how we can justify our beliefs through reasoning. The first essay, "Arguments," investigates what it is that we call true or false and how we reason toward truths through arguments. A general theory of argument analysis is set out on the basis of what we can assume about those with whom we reason. The next essay, "Fallacies," explains how the classification of an argument as a fallacy can be used within that general approach. In contrast, there is no agreement on what the terms "induction" and "deduction" mean, and they are not useful in evaluating arguments, as shown in "Induction and Deduction." In reasoning to truths, in the end we must take some claims as basic, not requiring any justification for accepting them. How we choose those claims and how they affect our reasoning is examined in "Base Claims." The essay "Analogies" considers how comparisons can be used as the basis of arguments, arguing from similar situations to similar conclusions. An important use of analogies is in reasoning about the mental life of other people and things, which is examined in "Subjective Claims," written with Fred Kroon and William S. Robinson. "Generalizing" examines how to argue from part of a collection or mass to the whole or a larger part. The question there is whether we are ever justified in accepting such an argument as good. "Probabilities" sets out the three main ways probability statements have been interpreted: the logical relation view, the frequency view, and the subjective degree of belief view. Each of those is shown to be inadequate to make precise the scale of plausibility of claims and the scale of the likelihood of a possibility. Many discussions of how to reason well and what counts as good reason are given in terms of who or what is rational. In the final essay, "Rationality," it's shown that what we mean by the idea of someone being rational is of very little use in evaluating reasoning or actions. This volume is meant to give a clearer idea of how to reason well, setting out methods of evaluation that are motivated in terms of our abilities and interests. At the ground of our reasoning, though, are metaphysical assumptions, too basic and too much needed in our reasoning for us to justify them through reasoning. But we can try to uncover those assumptions to see how they are important and what depends on them.

This series of books presents the fundamentals of logic in a style accessible to both students and scholars. The text of each essay presents a story, the main line of development of the ideas, while the notes and appendices place the research within a larger scholarly context. The basic theme here is the analysis of formal logic in terms of what metaphysical assumptions we need when we develop the formal systems we use. The essays together give a perspective of formal logic as part of the art of reasoning well. The essays are • Possibilities and Valid Inferences, • A General Framework for Semantics for Propositional Logics, • Why Are There So Many Logics? • Truth and Reasoning, • On Translations, • Reflections on Temporal and Modal Logic, • The Timelessness of Classical Predicate Logic, • Events in the Metaphysics of Predicate Logic, • Categoricity with Minimal Metaphysics, • Reflections on Gödel's Theorems, • On the Error in Frege's Proof that Names Denote, and • Postscript: Logic as the Art of Reasoning Well.

This series of books is meant to present the fundamentals of reasoning well in a clear manner accessible to both scholars and students. The body of each essay gives the main development of the subject, while the footnotes and appendices place the research within a larger scholarly context. The topic of this volume is the nature and evaluation of reasoning in science and mathematics. Science and mathematics can both be understood as proceeding by a method of abstraction from experience. Mathematics is distinguished from other sciences only in its greater abstraction and its demand for necessity in its inferences. That methodology of abstraction is the main focus here. The study of these subjects is not just of academic interest but can lead to better research in science and mathematics. First comes clear thinking, then comes clear research and clear writing. The essays: • Background • Models and Theories • Experiments • Mathematics as the Art of Abstraction.

This fifth edition of Critical Thinking by the noted logician Richard L. Epstein is practical, engaging, and easy to teach. Students enjoy and understand it because it is clear and has hundreds of examples using a cast of characters who reason as we do every day. More than 1,000 exercises lead students to be able to reason well in their courses and their lives. Essay writing lessons and visual writing lessons, using the cast of characters, teach students that first comes clear thinking and then comes clear writing. A complete and comprehensive Instructor's Manual makes the text easy to teach and grade. New to this edition: chapters on explanations and reasoning in the sciences. • Over 1,000 examples and exercises from daily life. • A dozen original writing lessons fully integrated with the text. • Unique cartoon writing lessons help students apply critical thinking to non-verbal situations.

Time and Space in Formal Logic begins with an analysis of assumptions about how logic and language relate. Then in the first section, times are taken to be established by true propositions, and those are related as before and after with temporal propositional connectives. In the second section, times are treated as things that can be picked out and counted, leading to a predicate logic that allows for quantification over times. In the third section, locations in space are also treated as things that can be picked out and counted, leading to a predicate logic that allows for quantification over both times and locations. Many applications of the formal systems to formalizing ordinary language propositions and inferences clarify better the assumptions we make in reasoning taking account of time and space by making those precise in the formal systems. Appendices on events, branching times, intentions, and descriptive names add to the scope of the work.

This series of volumes is meant to extend the scope of what we can formalize in classical predicate logic, and in doing so see the limitations of what can be done. The first section of this volume presents classical predicate logic with equality. In the second section, that logic is extended to formalize reasoning that involves adverbs and relative adjectives by viewing those as modifiers of simpler predicates. What is normally taken to be an atomic predicate, such as "barking loudly", can then have internal structure. Reasoning that involves conjunctions of terms, as in "Tom and Dick lifted the table", conjunctions of modifiers, conjunctions of predicates, and disjunctions of predicates can also be formalized by viewing them as part of the internal structure of atomic predicates. Many questions about the nature of formalizing arise in doing this. The internal structure of names is the topic of the third and last section. Names for functions are used in classical predicate logic to form complex names. In our ordinary reasoning we also use descriptions to form functions, such as "the wife of", and descriptions to form names, such as "the cat that scratched Zoe". To reason with those we can take account of their internal structure by dropping the assumption that every name must refer to a specific thing. The formal systems that are developed here are meant to help us understand how to reason well. Many worked examples show how to use them. Those examples also uncover limitations of the formal work. Throughout this series of volumes, the work proceeds by abstracting and creating formal models to formalize reasoning. By paying attention to the process of abstracting we gain insight into why we consider some reasoning to be good and some reasoning bad, and insight also into the deeper assumptions we make about the world on which our judgments rely.

This book presents a new perspective on ways we encounter the world with our languages. There are two kinds of languages. Some direct speakers to encounter the world as made up of things. Others direct speakers to encounter the world as the flow of all with no idea of change, for there is no thing to change, only differing descriptions of the flow. The essays by Richard L. Epstein set out this division of languages and explore its significance for linguistics, metaphysics, thought, meaning, logic, and ethics. The other essays, by Dorothy Lee, Benjamin Lee Whorf, M. Dale Kinkade, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Benson Mates, extend, or contradict, or support those ideas, leading to a large view of how we talk and understand, and how that affects how we live.