Thinking about Environmental Problems from Caterpillars:

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'

The Effects of Statistical Training on Thinking about Everyday Problems

People possess an abstract inferential rule system that is an intuitive version of the law of large numbers. Because the rule system is not tied to any particular content domain, it is possible to improve it by formal teaching techniques. We present four experiments that support this view. In Experiments 1 and 2, we taught subjects about the formal properties of the law of large numbers in brie...

Thinking Differently about Sustainability: Experiences from the Uk Open University Thinking Differently about Sustainability: Experiences from the Uk Open University

Systems thinking is often invoked as a panacea for dealing with issues of sustainable development. Imperatives towards being more holistic—getting the bigger picture—are often coupled with a need for greater interdisciplinarity— joined-up-thinking—particularly amongst triple bottom line disciplines of economics, social studies and natural sciences. So why are systems thinking courses not more p...