For Reasoning Aficionados From All Walks of Life! This guidebook addresses one of the most critical yet seldom taught skills. Reasoning skills help us make sense of the world, including how to better make decisions, tackle opportunities, evaluate claims, and solve problems. Interwoven within the book’s five sections – Perception & Mindset, Decision Making, Creative Thinking, Analyzing Arguments, and Mastering Logic – reader’s will discover 50 reasoning tips that summarize the common themes behind classic reasoning problems and situations. Appendixes contain summaries of fallacious reasoning, analogies, trade-offs, and a review of critical reading skills. A wealth of examples, charts, and insightful problems makes The Little Blue Reasoning Book an invaluable guide for any individual wanting to further sharpen his or her thinking skills. Enjoy the benefits of your own self-paced reasoning course: *Gain insights into the four classic mindsets and how each influences one’s outlook. *Make better decisions by framing problems with quantitative tools. *Employ creative thinking to bypass “roadblocks” and unlock novel solutions. *Evaluate claims by challenging the strength of key assumptions. *Use logic to break down arguments in a clear, easy-to-understand manner. *Review the 10 classic trade-offs to speed recognition of core issues. *Read with added clarity, whether your goal involves pleasure or profit. “A wonderful work that shows how reasoning is challenging, yet engaging, rewarding and fun. Because reasoning involves people, it is an art as well as a science. And to remind ourselves just why it’s not always easy to mix the two, we owe a cheerful salute to Nobel prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann who observed: ‘Think how hard physics would be if particles could think.’” —Dr. William A. McEachern, author, award-winning teacher, and founding editor of The Teaching Economist

The Little Blue Reasoning Book helps readers build essential critical thinking, creative thinking, and decision-making skills and is suitable for the everyday student, test-prep candidate, or working professional in need of a refresher course. Interwoven within the book's five chapters -Perception & Mindset, Decision Making, Creative Thinking, Analyzing Arguments, and Mastering Logic - are 50 reasoning tips that summarize the common themes behind classic reasoning problems and situations. Appendixes contain summaries of fallacious reasoning, analogies, trade-offs, and a review of critical reading.

Provides guidelines for United States Democrats to connect moral values to important policies, using practical tactics to guide political discourse away from extreme positions.

"Why do some people succeed at change while others fail? It's the way they think! Liminal thinking is a way to create change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs. What beliefs are stopping you right now? You have a choice. You can create the world you want to live in, or live in a world created by others. If you are ready to start making changes, read this book."

The Art of Creative Thinking provides clear, practical guidelines for developing your powers as a creative thinker. Using examples of entrepreneurs, authors, scientists and artists, John Adair illustrates a key aspect of creativity in each chapter. Stimulating and accessible, this book will help you to understand the creative process, overcome barriers to new ideas, learn to think effectively and develop a creative attitude. It will help you to become more confident in yourself as a creative person. The Art of Creative Thinking gives you a fresh concept of creative thinking and it will guide you in developing your full potential as a creative thinker. New ideas are the seeds of new products and services, and this book will open the door to them.

Alcoholism is a family illness, and changed attitudes can aid recovery. This daily readings guide for family and friends of alcoholics provides meditations and reminder, and visualizations that can provide a measure of comfort, serenity, and a sense of achievement.

A neuroscientist shatters the myths about gender differences, arguing that the brains of boys and girls are largely shaped by how they spend their time, and offers parents and teachers concrete ways to avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes.

Winner, Distinguished Literary Achievement, Missouri Humanities Council, 2015 The story behind the writing of the best-selling Blue Highways is as fascinating as the epic trip itself. More than thirty years after his 14,000-mile, 38-state journey, William Least Heat-Moon reflects on the four years he spent capturing the lessons of the road trip on paper—the stops and starts in his composition process, the numerous drafts and painstaking revisions, the depressing string of rejections by publishers, the strains on his personal relationships, and many other aspects of the toil that went into writing his first book. Along the way, he traces the hard lessons learned and offers guidance to aspiring and experienced writers alike. Far from being a technical manual, Writing Blue Highways: The Story of How a Book Happenedis an adventure story of its own, a journey of “exploration into the myriad routes of heart and mind that led to the making of a book from the first sorry and now vanished paragraph to the last words that came not from a graphite pencil but from a letterpress in Tennessee.” Readers will not find a collection of abstract formulations and rules for writing; rather, this book gracefully incorporates examples from Heat-Moon’s own experience. As he explains, “This story might be termed an inadvertent autobiography written not by the traveler who took Ghost Dancing in 1978 over the byroads of America but by a man only listening to him. That blue-roadman hasn’t been seen in more than a third of a century, and over the last many weeks as I sketched in these pages, I’ve regretted his inevitable departure.” Filtered as the struggles of the “blue-roadman” are through the awareness of someone more than thirty years older with a half dozen subsequent books to his credit, the story of how his first book “happened” is all the more resonant for readers who may not themselves be writers but who are interested in the tricky balance of intuitive creation and self-discipline required for any artistic endeavor.

Our extraordinary capacity to reason and solve problems sets us aside from other animals, but our evolved thinking processes also leave us susceptible 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 behaviorists 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.