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Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World Through Experience and Reason
The purpose of this course is to trace out in a semi-historical way how modern rational empiricism has arrived at its tool kit for thinking (a tool kit particularly well modeled by modern natural science but also employed in a wide variety of other, everyday, enterprises)
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First published January 28, 2005
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About the author
James Hall
5 books6 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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James Hall is the James Thomas Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Richmond, where he taught for 40 years until his retirement in 2005. He received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, his Masters of Theology from Southeastern Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
At the University of Richmond, Professor Hall was named Omicron Delta Kappa Faculty Member of the Year (2005), Student Government Association Faculty Member of the Year (2005), and he received the University Distinguished Educator Award (2001). He has written many articles and essays and is the author of three books: Knowledge, Belief and Transcendence; Logic Problems; and Practically Profound: Putting Philosophy to Work in Everyday Life. Professor Hall's first course with the Teaching Company was Philosophy of Religion."
Professor Hall specializes in 20th-century analytic philosophy, epistemology, logical empiricism, and the philosophy of religion. At Richmond, he was noted for developing cross-disciplinary courses combining physics, chemistry, economics, psychology, and literature with his own field of philosophy.
See this thread for more information.
James Hall is the James Thomas Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Richmond, where he taught for 40 years until his retirement in 2005. He received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, his Masters of Theology from Southeastern Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
At the University of Richmond, Professor Hall was named Omicron Delta Kappa Faculty Member of the Year (2005), Student Government Association Faculty Member of the Year (2005), and he received the University Distinguished Educator Award (2001). He has written many articles and essays and is the author of three books: Knowledge, Belief and Transcendence; Logic Problems; and Practically Profound: Putting Philosophy to Work in Everyday Life. Professor Hall's first course with the Teaching Company was Philosophy of Religion."
Professor Hall specializes in 20th-century analytic philosophy, epistemology, logical empiricism, and the philosophy of religion. At Richmond, he was noted for developing cross-disciplinary courses combining physics, chemistry, economics, psychology, and literature with his own field of philosophy.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 18, 2018
Logic preserves truth. Logic cannot create truth nor confirm truth through its own capacity. Its existence shows nothing more than a healthy respect we have for the ‘laws of thought’ when we are dealing with dichotomies, a system where a statement must be true or false, a system where something either ‘is’ or ‘is not’. Logic is the method in which we give a narrative and meaning to matters of fact about the real world, and our experiences about the real world. Logic is how the well prepared mind processes the world around us. The truth (‘a comportment to reality’) is not demonstrated by logic it is only preserved. Our feelings determine our experiences and our experiences need our intuitions in order to provide meaning. For logic to comport to reality we must connect the abstract with the concrete through our intuition, reason, rational, empirical and the narrative we construct.
In a well functioning democracy nothing is more important than for its citizenry to understand the building blocks that go into creating knowledge and the justified true beliefs that compose the foundations of science and culture (i.e. ‘the cultivation of the soul’, the original Cicero meaning for the word ‘culture’).
Every time I hear someone say ‘alternative facts’ are real, or all news that they don’t like is ‘fake news’, or ‘Climate change is a Chinese Hoax’, or ‘autism is caused by vaccines’, or 'that no body was there to observe the big bang therefor it never happened [yes, indeed, Mr. Rush Limbaugh said that inanity the day after Stephen Hawkins passed away]. I understand why they are doing that. They want to undermine our democracy. They want us to question our science and manipulate our culture so they can bring back hate of the others who are not like us. They want us to rely on them for our facts which they admit to making up and they will provide the conclusion without providing the logical steps. They want to make our country no better than a third rate authoritarian fascist state as Russia is today.
Science never proves. It can only reject a null hypothesis and replace it with the alternative until a better alternative comes to replace that. The ignorant and stupid are certain in their beliefs. The intelligent are never certain. The strength of science is that it knows it will constantly remake itself when something better comes along. Science's weakness is that at its foundational core it is complex and hard and simple bromides are easier to embrace and repeat.
The simple mind who wants to manipulate will make the world binary and non-subtle in order to force a construct from the limited choices. ‘If you don’t build a wall, you will have rapists and serial killers come through’ after all ‘a Mexican U.S. Judge [who was actually born in East Chicago, Indiana and is actually an American citizen] can’t be trusted to judge’. Perhaps, that’s a false dichotomy. Perhaps, there are other ways to think about the problem. Our understanding can only be constructed from the entities that make up our world view (ontology) and when we allow somebody to purposely limit our perspectives we can blame ourselves as well as the manipulator.
Learning the components of logic, thinking and understanding is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a democracy to strive. I encourage everyone to learn as much as they can about the universe we live in and make part of their meaning of life an inquiry into the inquiry of thought, understanding and logic. Do it as if your democracy depends on it.
In a well functioning democracy nothing is more important than for its citizenry to understand the building blocks that go into creating knowledge and the justified true beliefs that compose the foundations of science and culture (i.e. ‘the cultivation of the soul’, the original Cicero meaning for the word ‘culture’).
Every time I hear someone say ‘alternative facts’ are real, or all news that they don’t like is ‘fake news’, or ‘Climate change is a Chinese Hoax’, or ‘autism is caused by vaccines’, or 'that no body was there to observe the big bang therefor it never happened [yes, indeed, Mr. Rush Limbaugh said that inanity the day after Stephen Hawkins passed away]. I understand why they are doing that. They want to undermine our democracy. They want us to question our science and manipulate our culture so they can bring back hate of the others who are not like us. They want us to rely on them for our facts which they admit to making up and they will provide the conclusion without providing the logical steps. They want to make our country no better than a third rate authoritarian fascist state as Russia is today.
Science never proves. It can only reject a null hypothesis and replace it with the alternative until a better alternative comes to replace that. The ignorant and stupid are certain in their beliefs. The intelligent are never certain. The strength of science is that it knows it will constantly remake itself when something better comes along. Science's weakness is that at its foundational core it is complex and hard and simple bromides are easier to embrace and repeat.
The simple mind who wants to manipulate will make the world binary and non-subtle in order to force a construct from the limited choices. ‘If you don’t build a wall, you will have rapists and serial killers come through’ after all ‘a Mexican U.S. Judge [who was actually born in East Chicago, Indiana and is actually an American citizen] can’t be trusted to judge’. Perhaps, that’s a false dichotomy. Perhaps, there are other ways to think about the problem. Our understanding can only be constructed from the entities that make up our world view (ontology) and when we allow somebody to purposely limit our perspectives we can blame ourselves as well as the manipulator.
Learning the components of logic, thinking and understanding is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a democracy to strive. I encourage everyone to learn as much as they can about the universe we live in and make part of their meaning of life an inquiry into the inquiry of thought, understanding and logic. Do it as if your democracy depends on it.
August 17, 2011
The first part of the course was very interesting and worthwhile. However, from around the midpoint of the course and until the end, I felt it was of very little practical value. I feel a bit disappointed in the course in this regard. It felt empty with little practical value/content and the title of the course seemed misleading. But then, the things that I did learn were interesting and what I’ve been curious about, like the root and development of modern science; induction vs deduction; general knowledge on different philosophers’ contributions; and so on. Near the end, I felt like I didn't have a reason to learn the stuff presented (eg. advanced forms of tools involving truth tables and whatnot).
December 24, 2008
your basic and historic look at logic and philosophy
July 4, 2021
Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World Through Experience and Reason
by James Hall
The professor has a combined background in science and philosophy. At the start, the profess identifies four crucial tools in thinking: intuition, memory, reason, and association. This collection was mentioned several times. However, the course really focuses on the relationship between experience and reason in understanding the world.
The course started by discussing the epistemologies of Plato and Aristotle. Plato thinks all knowledge is from “intuition” that is given to people without their effort. People just need to escape from the “shackle in the cave” and reestablish their connection with the Ideal. Aristotle, on the other hand, thinks knowledge is from observation and experience. People form ideas by organizing their experiences to establish a world-view. Both of them value the reasoning process and a critical step in gaining knowledge.
The course then contrasts rationalism and empiricism. Both regard, respectively, reason and experience as the primary source of knowledge while holding an intense skepticism against the other. The discussion leads to modern empiricism, which is today’s methodology in science. Under this doctrine, experience and reason interact and advance in tandem. Reason is based on experience, and it, in turn, provides a framework for experience interpretation. People form hypotheses, which can be inductions from limited experience or cooked-up theories to explain the experiences. Hypotheses are verified (or falsified) by more experiences, often in the form of designed and controlled experiments. Both experiences and reasoning are fallible; we expect future work will make our understanding closer to reality. We also have some guiding principles to filter the hypotheses that we will take seriously. One is Popper’s theory of falsification, which says any scientific theory must identify a set of possible experiences that can falsify it. Namely, they can be put to the test by experience. The other principle is Occam’s razor, which says one should use a minimal set of hypotheses to explain given experiences. Given the same explanation power, one should choose the hypotheses that are the simplest and least controversial.
Another part of the course is on formal logic. The teacher started with the logic system of Aristotle and Euclid. He then moved to the modern logic theories based on truth tables and Boolean algebra. The modern logic system can capture and process more complex logical relationships. One key in logic discourse is distinguishing the set (“all” and “some”), for which the Van Diagram is a valuable tool. The professor also briefly discussed several common logic fallacies, although they are not discussed in the context of logic theories.
Overall, the course provides interesting perspectives. However, it does not teach anything more than standard scientific methods at the college level. The title of the course is too broad. For example, the book does not cover all “thinking” activities, only those related to scientific works.
by James Hall
The professor has a combined background in science and philosophy. At the start, the profess identifies four crucial tools in thinking: intuition, memory, reason, and association. This collection was mentioned several times. However, the course really focuses on the relationship between experience and reason in understanding the world.
The course started by discussing the epistemologies of Plato and Aristotle. Plato thinks all knowledge is from “intuition” that is given to people without their effort. People just need to escape from the “shackle in the cave” and reestablish their connection with the Ideal. Aristotle, on the other hand, thinks knowledge is from observation and experience. People form ideas by organizing their experiences to establish a world-view. Both of them value the reasoning process and a critical step in gaining knowledge.
The course then contrasts rationalism and empiricism. Both regard, respectively, reason and experience as the primary source of knowledge while holding an intense skepticism against the other. The discussion leads to modern empiricism, which is today’s methodology in science. Under this doctrine, experience and reason interact and advance in tandem. Reason is based on experience, and it, in turn, provides a framework for experience interpretation. People form hypotheses, which can be inductions from limited experience or cooked-up theories to explain the experiences. Hypotheses are verified (or falsified) by more experiences, often in the form of designed and controlled experiments. Both experiences and reasoning are fallible; we expect future work will make our understanding closer to reality. We also have some guiding principles to filter the hypotheses that we will take seriously. One is Popper’s theory of falsification, which says any scientific theory must identify a set of possible experiences that can falsify it. Namely, they can be put to the test by experience. The other principle is Occam’s razor, which says one should use a minimal set of hypotheses to explain given experiences. Given the same explanation power, one should choose the hypotheses that are the simplest and least controversial.
Another part of the course is on formal logic. The teacher started with the logic system of Aristotle and Euclid. He then moved to the modern logic theories based on truth tables and Boolean algebra. The modern logic system can capture and process more complex logical relationships. One key in logic discourse is distinguishing the set (“all” and “some”), for which the Van Diagram is a valuable tool. The professor also briefly discussed several common logic fallacies, although they are not discussed in the context of logic theories.
Overall, the course provides interesting perspectives. However, it does not teach anything more than standard scientific methods at the college level. The title of the course is too broad. For example, the book does not cover all “thinking” activities, only those related to scientific works.
February 6, 2023
I'm sorry that I had to rush through this one (audiobook being taken off Audible Plus), because it's a lot of logical concepts that I have a cursory understanding of, but hope to explore further someday.
March 28, 2008
This is an engaging historical overview of the development of modern rational empiricism. Listening to it created a desire in me to learn more about philosophy in general, which is not something that had ever occured to me before.
March 2, 2016
Excellent and compelling Audiobook. Mr Hall is one of the more erudite speakers I have ever heard.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews