Thinking theologically about modern medicine

Language and medicine: thinking and talking about Alzheimer's disease.

The scene is familiar to most physicians: the doctor, the daughter, and the patient, a woman in her 80s. The history and physical are completed. The patient is old, and her body is beginning to fail. She is forgetful. At some point, the daughter asks the question: “Doctor, is this Alzheimer’s disease?” There are many possible answers. I never say “yes”; sometimes I say “no”; mostly, though, I a...

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'

Thinking Like a Modern Economist