Every Day Reasoning

Analyze your own thought process with OPEN MINDS AND EVERYDAY REASONING! Structured around clear, compelling questions, such as "Do I have an open mind?" "Am I being clear?" and "Is my reasoning good?," this philosophy text prepares you to make difficult decisions in life. Each chapter contains concluding practice activities and exercises to help you master the material.

Appropriate as a textbook for courses in cognitive psychology or social cognition, Everyday Thinking reviews the rapidly growing literature on cognition in naturalistic settings. It differs from other textbooks in that, where possible, it focuses on thinking in real-world settings rather than in controlled laboratory settings and provides detailed treatments of each of the following topics: * how we form impressions of and represent persons in memory; * how we recognize and represent faces; * how we reason in our day-to-day lives and go about solving everyday problems; * how we make judgments and decisions; * how we encode memories of events--both for future action and for our own life histories; and * what are some of the implications of everyday knowledge and cognition for education and instruction. This book presents the theoretical positions and research evidence on each of these topics and examines the generally unexplored connections among them. As a result, this book presents the study of cognition in a more relevant form and in a context that readers can more readily apply to their own lives.

This book examines the nature and operation of social thought and language as used in everyday life, and looks at social thinking through the complex patternings and functions of discourse. It is based on extensive empirical evidence about the language of contemporary racism and nationalism, drawn from the vast corpus of the discourse of Swiss racism gathered by the author from a variety of written and spoken sources. Three principal investigations, of sociocentrism, causality and the perception of time, are used to sinuate and define the nature and working of everyday speech and reasoning. First published in English in 1990, Speech and Reasoning in Everyday Life is a major contribution to the analysis of the discourse of contemporary ideology and politics. Its theoretical contribution makes this work richly deserving of an introduction to an English-speaking audience of sociologists, social psychologists and anthropologists.

Based on extensive reasoning acquisition research, this volume provides theoretical and empirical considerations of the reasoning that occurs during the course of everyday personal and professional activities. Of particular interest is the text's focus on the question of how such reasoning takes place during school activities and how students acquire reasoning skills.