Understanding Scientific Reasoning

UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC REASONING develops critical reasoning skills and guides students in the improvement of their scientific and technological literacy. The authors teach students how to understand and critically evaluate the scientific information they encounter in both textbooks and the popular media. With its focus on scientific pedagogy, UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC REASONING helps students learn how to examine scientific reports with a reasonable degree of sophistication. The book also explains how to reason through case studies using the same informal logic skills employed by scientists and to analyze a complex series of propositions and hypotheses using sound scientific reasoning.

This textbook develops techniques for understanding and evaluating theoretical hypotheses of the sort typically found in the physical sciences as well as the statistical and causal hypotheses used in the social and biomedical sciences, and explains how scientific knowledge can be combined with individual or social values to reach personal and public policy decisions. The fifth edition updates the scientific case studies. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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Directed towards first and second year college students, this volume introduces aspects of the philosophy of science and aims to help readers acquire the cognitive skills useful for understanding and evaluating scientific material as found in textbooks and other sources. While the bulk of the ten chapters explore techniques for the evaluation of theoretical, statistical, and causal hypotheses, the final two discuss how to use scientific hypotheses to reach personal or public policy decisions. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Ronald N. Giere (Ph.D., Cornell University) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota and a former Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota. In addition to many papers in the philosophy of science, he is the author of UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC REASONING (4th ed 1997); EXPLAINING SCIENCE: A COGNITIVE APPROACH (1988); and SCIENCE WITHOUT LAWS (1999). He has also edited several volumes of papers in the philosophy of science, including, most recently, 'Cognitive Models of Science' (1992) and 'Origins of Logical Empiricism' (1996). Professor Giere is a Fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science, a long-time member of the editorial board of the journal 'Philosophy of Science,' and a past president of the Philosophy of Science Association. His current research focuses on scientific cognition as a form of distributed cognition and on the perspectival nature of scientific knowledge.

John Bickle (Ph.D., University of California, Irvine) works in philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of science, and cellular mechanisms of cognition and consciousness. He is noted for his "new wave reductionism" presented in his 1998 MIT Press book, PSYCHONEURAL REDUCTION: THE NEW WAVE. His most recent book, PHILOSOPHY AND NEUROSCIENCE: A RUTHLESSLY REDUCTIVE ACCOUNT, published in June 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers, brings recent research from molecular and cellular cognition to the attention of cogn

Robert Mauldin (Ph.D., University of Tennessee), serves as Professor of Chemistry and Director of General Education at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio. Professor Mauldin has a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry with an emphasis on the study of atmospheric chemistry using supercritical fluid extraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. In addition to undergraduate work in chemistry at the University of Tennessee at Martin, his educational background includes a minor in philosophy. He has a record of scholarly activity in the research areas of environmental chemistry, scientific reasoning, and general education. He currently serves as president of the Association for General and Liberal Studies (AGLS), a national organization that is dedicated to promoting the centrality of general and liberal education in the undergraduate experience. As a co-author for this edition, Mauldin is able to draw on nine years of experience with using this textbook in a general education science course focused on scientific reasoning.