Thinking Matters: Critical Thinking As Creative Problem Solving

by Gary R Mar

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789811216244
Publisher:	World Scientific Publishing Company, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/24/2021
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.49(d)

Table of Contents

Preface vii

1 The Thinking Reed 1

The Wonder of Thinking 1

Thought & Creativity 3

Creative Thinking & Logical Inference 6

Summary of Concepts 9

Exercises 10

2 "Eureka!" Problem Solving Heuristics 19

Characterizing Problems 19

Isolate the Real Problem 22

Working Forward and Backward 27

Changing Your Conceptual Mode 29

Divide and Conquer 32

Let the Problem Incubate 38

Summary of Concepts 40

Exercises 40

3 Bridges to Problem Solving 51

The Puzzle of the Konigsberg Bridges 51

Specializing & Generalizing 53

Euler's Theorem 55

Some Advantages of Modeling 56

Elaborating a Solution 61

Summary of Concepts 63

Exercises 64

4 Puzzles, Paradoxes & Previews 69

Matrix Logic 69

Liars, Truth-Tellers & Truth Tables 73

Inference Rules & Fallacies 83

Logical Deductions & Tree Diagrams 90

Syllogisms & Venn Diagrams 97

Rhetoric & Persuasion 102

Science or Pseudoscience? 107

Probability, Statistics & Decision Making 110

A Parting Paradox 116

Summary of Concepts 117

Exercises 120

5 Computational Magic 137

A "Digital Computer" 137

Dialing Up An Algorithm 138

Programming for People 140

31 Flavours of Freedom 141

The Josephus Problem 143

Alan Turing: the Enigma 147

Summary of Concepts 150

Exercises 153

6 Cultivating Creativity 159

Some Problems with Puzzles 159

Extending Memory Beyond Miller's Magic Number 162

Unreasonable Effectiveness of Logic 165

Wiles Waiting to Prove Fermat's Theorem at Last 169

Beyond the Brain's Illusions 171

Creating Lives 172

The Apple of the Mind's Eye 180

Summary of Concepts 182

Exercises 183

Preview 195

Epilogue 201

Notes 203

Acknowledgements 207

Bibliography 209

Index 215