Thinking And Reasoning

Our extraordinary capacity to reason and solve problems sets us aside from other animals, but our evolved thinking processes also leave us susceptibile to bias and error. The study of thinking and reasoning goes back to Aristotle, and was one of the first topics to be studied when psychology separated from philosophy. In this Very Short Introduction Jonathan Evans explores cognitive psychological approaches to understanding the nature of thinking and reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. He shows how our problem solving capabilities are hugely dependent on also having the imagination to ask the right questions, and the ability to see things from a completely new perspective. Beginning by considering the approaches of the behaviourists and the Gestalt psychologists, he moves on to modern explorations of thinking, including hypothetical thinking, conditionals, deduction, rationality, and intuition. Covering the role of past learning, IQ, and cognitive biases, Evans also discusses the idea that there may be two different ways of thinking, arising from our evolutionary history. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This completely rewritten textbook reflects on the revolutionary changes that have occurred in the field of Thinking and Reasoning in recent years.

The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is the first comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and reasoning. Written by the foremost experts from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, individual chapters summarize basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketch its history, and give a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading. The volume also includes work related to developmental, social and clinical psychology, philosophy, economics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, education, law, and medicine. Scholars and students in all these fields and others will find this to be a valuable collection.

How do we define thinking? Is it simply memory, perception and motor activity or perhaps something more complex such as reasoning and decision making? This book argues that thinking is an intricate mix of all these things and a very specific coordination of cognitive resources. Divided into three key sections, there are chapters on the organization of human thought, general reasoning and thinking and behavioural outcomes of thinking. These three overarching themes provide a broad theoretical framework with which to explore wider issues in cognition and cognitive psychology and there are chapters on motivation and language plus a strong focus on problem solving, reasoning and decision making – all of which are central to a solid understanding of this field. The book also explores the cognitive processes behind perception and memory, how we might differentiate expertise from skilled, competent performance and the interaction between language, culture and thought.

Thinking and reasoning are key activities for human beings. In this book a distinguished set of contributors provides a wide readership with up-to-date scientific advances in the developmental psychology of thinking and reasoning, both at the theoretical and empirical levels. The first part of the book illustrates how modern approaches to the study of thinking and reasoning have gone beyond the Piagetian legacy: through the investigation of avenues previously not explored, and by demonstrating that young children have higher capacities than was assumed within the Piagetian tradition. The second part focuses upon theoretical and empirical investigations of the interplay between logic and intuition in reasoning and decision making, and how these forms of thinking evolve with age, through the general framework of what is known as dual-process theories. Contrary to Piaget’s claim, it becomes apparent that elaborate adult reasoning could rely on some form of intuition. The Development of Thinking and Reasoning provides psychologists, educators and everyone interested in child development with an integrated and up-to-date series of chapters, written by prominent specialists in the areas of thinking, reasoning, and decision making.

The Routledge International Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is an authoritative reference work providing a balanced overview of current scholarship spanning the full breadth of the rapidly developing and expanding field of thinking and reasoning. It contains 35 chapters written by leading international researchers, covering foundational issues as well as state-of-the-art developments in thinking and reasoning research. Topics covered range across all sub-areas of thinking and reasoning, including deduction, induction, abduction, judgment, decision making, argumentation, problem solving, expertise, creativity and rationality. The contributors engage with cutting-edge debates such as the status of dual-process theories of thinking, the role of unconscious, intuitive, emotional and metacognitive processes in thinking, and the importance of probabilistic conceptualisations of thinking and reasoning. Authors also examine the importance of neuroscientific findings in informing theoretical developments, and explore the situated nature of thinking and reasoning across a range of real-world contexts such as mathematics, medicine and science. The Handbook provides a clear sense of the way in which contemporary ideas are challenging traditional viewpoints as "new paradigm of the psychology of reasoning" emerges. This paradigm-shifting research is paving the way toward a richer and more inclusive understanding of thinking and reasoning, where important new questions drive a forward-looking research agenda. It is essential reading for both established researchers in the field of thinking and reasoning as well as advanced students wishing to learn more about both the historical foundations and latest developments in this rapidly growing field.

The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning brings together the contributions of many of the leading researchers in thinking and reasoning to create the most comprehensive overview of research on thinking and reasoning that has ever been available.

This undergraduate textbook reviews psychological research in the major areas of reasoning and thinking: deduction, induction, hypothesis testing, probability judgement, and decision making. It also covers the major theoretical debates in each area, and devotes a chapter to one of the liveliest issues in the field: the question of human rationality. Central themes that recur throughout the book include not only rationality, but also the relation between normative theories such as logic, probability theory, and decision theory, and human performance, both in experiments and in the world outside the laboratory. No prior acquaintance with formal systems is assumed, and everyday examples are used throughout to illustrate technical and theoretical points. The book differs from others in the market firstly in the range of material covered: other tend to focus primarily on on either reasoning or thinking. It is also the first student-level text to survey an imporatant new theoretical perspective, the information-gain or rational analysis approach, and to review the rationality debate from the standpoint of psuchological research in a wide range of areas.