The ancient Roman orator Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.) wrote, 'Control your mind or it will control you.' In today's society we are faced with more information, and more complex information, than ever. Faced with making decisions, we can feel overwhelmed and helpless. One way to become less helpless — to gain control over our lives — is to gain control over our own thinking. We can feel helpless when faced with this barrage of information, opinions, data, and conflicting arguments if we lack the skills to quickly grasp and critically evaluate them. This book is designed to impart these kinds of skills.Any course in a university should do more than teach information — in nearly every field, 'facts' become obsolete quickly. The goals of Thinking Matters are to help you: The text is punctuated with exercises or 'personal experiments' to challenge and stimulate your curiosity. These exercises may take the form of an inventory to be taken, a puzzle to be solved, or some thoughts to ponder.The first module Thinking Matters: Critical Thinking as Creative Problem Solving introduces the student to all the above topics — logic, probability, argument forms and fallacies, ethical reasoning, algorithms, and computational thinking — through logic puzzles and games and mathematical magic tricks.
Contents:
- Preface
- The Thinking Reed
- 'Eureka!' Problem Solving Heuristics
- Bridges to Problem Solving
- Puzzles, Paradoxes, & Previews
- Computational Magic
- Cultivating Creativity
- Preview
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Index
Readership: Undergraduates in Logical and Critical Thinking courses, general public with interests in Logical Puzzles. Mathematical Magic, Logic Games, Creative Problem Solving, Computational Thinking.
Key Features:
- The book is beautifully laid out in the Tufte format with margins for quotations, illustrations, and creative doodling
- The book is punctuated with puzzles and exercises that advance the argument of the text by giving the student first-hand experience with what is discussed
- The methods that are introduced by these puzzles will be developed more fully and formally, but no less playfully, in the volumes to follow
