We are bombarded with information - press releases, television news, Internet websites, and office memos, just to name a few - on a daily basis. However, the important conclusions that may or need to be inferred from such information are typically not provided. We must draw the conclusions by ourselves. How do we draw these conclusions? This book addresses how we reason to reach sensible conclusions. The purpose of this book is to organize in one volume what is known about reasoning, such as its structural prerequisites, its mechanisms, its susceptibility to pragmatic influences, its pitfalls, and the bases for its development. Given that reasoning underlies so many of our intellectual activities - when we learn, criticize, analyze, judge, infer, evaluate, optimize, apply, discover, imagine, devise, and create - we stand to gain a great deal if we can learn to define, operate, apply, and nurture our reasoning.

Against the dominant view of reductive naturalism, John McDowell argues that human life should be seen as transformed by reason so that human minds, while not supernatural, are sui generis. This collection assembles eleven critical essays that highlight the enduring significance and wide ramifications of McDowell’s unorthodox position.

In choosing between moral alternatives -- choosing between various forms of ethical action -- we typically make calculations of the following kind: A is better than B; B is better than C; therefore A is better than C. These inferences use the principle of transitivity and are fundamental to many forms of practical and theoretical theorizing, not just in moral and ethical theory but in economics. Indeed they are so common as to be almost invisible. What Larry Temkin's book shows is that, shockingly, if we want to continue making plausible judgments, we cannot continue to make these assumptions. Temkin shows that we are committed to various moral ideals that are, surprisingly, fundamentally incompatible with the idea that "better than" can be transitive. His book develops many examples where value judgments that we accept and find attractive, are incompatible with transitivity. While this might seem to leave two options -- reject transitivity, or reject some of our normative commitments in order to keep it -- Temkin is neutral on which path to follow, only making the case that a choice is necessary, and that the cost either way will be high. Temkin's book is a very original and deeply unsettling work of skeptical philosophy that mounts an important new challenge to contemporary ethics.

Modern medicine is one of humankind's greatest achievements.Yet today, frequent medical errors and irreproducibility in biomedical research suggest that tremendous challenges beset it. Understanding these challenges and trying to remedy them have driven considerable and thoughtful critical analyses, but the apparent intransigence of these problems suggests a different perspective is needed. Now more than ever, when we see options and opportunities for healthcare expanding while resources are diminishing, it is extremely important that healthcare professionals practice medicine wisely. In Medical Reasoning, neurologist Erwin B. Montgomery, Jr. offers a new and vital perspective. He begins with the idea that the need for certainty in medical decision-making has been the primary driving force in medical reasoning. Doctors must routinely confront countless manifestations of symptoms, diseases, or behaviors in their patients. Therefore, either there are as many different "diseases" as there are patients or some economical set of principles and facts can be combined to explain each patient's disease. The response to this epistemic conundrum has driven medicine throughout history: the challenge is to discover principles and facts and then to develop means to apply them to each unique patient in a manner that provides certainty. This book studies the nature of medical decision making systematically and rigorously in both an analytic and historical context, addressing medicine's unique need for certainty in the face of the enormous variety of diseases and in the manifestations of the same disease in different patients. The book also examines how the social, legal, and economic circumstances in which medical decision-making occurs greatly influence the nature of medical reasoning. Medical Reasoning is essential for those at the intersection of healthcare and philosophy.

In a series of essays nine philosophers and two psychologists address three main themes: the status of norms of rationality; the precise form taken by them; and the role of norms in belief and actions.

“Brilliant...Timely and necessary.” —Financial Times “Especially timely as we struggle to make sense of how it is that individuals and communities persist in holding beliefs that have been thoroughly discredited.” —Darren Frey, Science If reason is what makes us human, why do we behave so irrationally? And if it is so useful, why didn’t it evolve in other animals? This groundbreaking account of the evolution of reason by two renowned cognitive scientists seeks to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue, helps us justify our beliefs, convince others, and evaluate arguments. It makes it easier to cooperate and communicate and to live together in groups. Provocative, entertaining, and undeniably relevant, The Enigma of Reason will make many reasonable people rethink their beliefs. “Reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant...Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?...Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber [argue that] reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems...[but] to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker “Turns reason’s weaknesses into strengths, arguing that its supposed flaws are actually design features that work remarkably well.” —Financial Times “The best thing I have read about human reasoning. It is extremely well written, interesting, and very enjoyable to read.” —Gilbert Harman, Princeton University

Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.

Hume's Science of Human Nature is an investigation of the philosophical commitments underlying Hume's methodology in pursuing what he calls 'the science of human nature'. It argues that Hume understands scientific explanation as aiming at explaining the inductively-established universal regularities discovered in experience via an appeal to the nature of the substance underlying manifest phenomena. For years, scholars have taken Hume to employ a deliberately shallow and demonstrably untenable notion of scientific explanation. By contrast, Hume's Science of Human Nature sets out to update our understanding of Hume's methodology by using a more sophisticated picture of science as a model.