Essays on Logic as the Art of Reasoning Well

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This post is about a series of books which are to be released. I found these books to be very interesting and enjoyable. I hope to get my hands on them as soon as possible. There's not much to say about them because, of course, I haven't read them yet. So, I'll paste here a brief text about their content.

Read on...

Reasoning about Cause and Effect
The mystery of cause and effect can be circumvented if not eliminated in our reasoning by taking claims to describe purported causes and purported effects and understanding a causal claim as true if and only if the relation between those claims satisfies the conditions for a good causal inference. Different notions of cause and effect correspond to placing different conditions on what counts as a good causal inference. This provides a method of reasoning about cause and effect that is clear and useful in both or ordinary lives and science.

The Directedness of Emotions
Is every emotion we feel directed at something? Examples from ordinary life suggest not. We can better understand emotions and why we sometimes do and sometimes do not feel justified in calling them directed by using the methods of analysis for reasoning about cause and effect.

Conditionals
Sentences of the form “if . . . then . . .” play a major role in our reasoning. Some conditionals, as they are called, are claims, and for those we have criteria for when they are true . Some conditionals are intended to be understood as inferences: were this to be true, this would follow. If meant to be judged solely as valid or not, those can sometimes be evaluated by the methods of modal logics. However, we often use conditionals that we deem good that are only strong or moderately strong inferences, and here I present a theory for how to reason with those.

Explanations
Explanations are answers to questions. Verbal answers to a question why a claim is true can be evaluated as inferences that satisfy conditions peculiar to explanations. Some minimal conditions are typically taken as necessary, though not sufficient. Other conditions have been proposed, but they are either difficult to formulate clearly or have not been widely accepted. An important tool in evaluating inferential explanations is to recognize that the direction of inference of such an explanation is the reverse of that for an argument with the very same claims.

Answers to a question about the function or goal of someone or something are teleological. They depend on clarity about the nature of functions and goals, and there is little agreement about criteria for those to be good beyond the necessity of avoiding the fallacy of assuming that because something occurs in nature it must have a purpose or goal.

Models and Theories
Models and theories arise by a process of abstraction. They do not codify truths of the world, but rather set out ways in which to reason about the world through ignoring what we consider to be extraneous. By better understanding the process of abstraction we can proceed more clearly in creating theories and evaluating them.

Experiments
Experiments in science are meant to produce observations that confirm or disconfirm a theory or to lead to new conjectures. Looking at a examples of experiments we can get a better idea of what scientists expect of a good experiment.

On Mathematics
Mathematics proceeds by a process of abstraction, so that mathematical claims like scientific claims are neither true nor false, but only true or false in an application of the theory to which they belong. A proof in mathematics is meant to show that a claim follows from the assumptions of a particular mathematical theory.


Found at: http://www.advancedreasoningforum.org/essays.htm