My favorite books to learn how to argue well

This book, driven by research that Kahneman did with his late colleague, Amos Tversky, is an introduction to the fact that much of human thinking is not rational. It is not logic that drives most of your decisions and actions, but a mixture of heuristics and biases. The mind is constituted of two systems, one of them fast, automatic, and largely unconscious, the other, slow, effortful, and demanding of concentration. It is the second one we must invoke when we engage in critical reasoning. But it is extremely easy to give in to the temptation to let system one take over. Read all about these two systems and you will, at least, be alerted to the possibility that you are thinking lazily in almost everything you do. 

Stanovich takes his title from the very last sentence in Richard Dawkin’s book The Selfish Gene, “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” In his book, Stanovich shows how human beings are able to rebel against those selfish replicators – our genes. It involves exercising, in Kahneman’s terminology, our ‘system two’ and exercising tenacity and self-discipline in bringing to bear logic and rationality in our decisions. This book is not an easy read, but it is a fascinating account of why human thinking is different and of what such differences might in principle enable us to do. 

In this book, David-Hillel Ruben introduces the ways in which various philosophers have tried to explain the concept of explanation, before ending with his own account of explanation. Explaining is one of the most important actions a human being can engage in. Diagnoses, for example, are explanations of why you have the symptoms you have, or perhaps they are explanations of why that bridge collapsed or why those people bombed that mosque. In trying to explain something we make our first attempts at trying to understand the phenomenon under investigation. But what actually is an explanation? What do we do when we try to explain something. This is not an easy read, but it is an excellent book. 

One area in which argument is increasingly important is the area of ethics, or morality. In our increasingly polarized world, a world in which people often find themselves in ‘bubbles’ where their ideas are confirmed by everything they read, arguing becomes increasingly difficult because people want to remain in their comfort zones. This book looks at a discussion between four people on a train and examines the way their discussion questions their key assumptions.   

As with any other academic discipline, philosophy has its own language. This is not jargon (or it shouldn’t be!). It is a technical terminology. To look at something very closely, as any academic discipline does, is to record distinctions that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Immediately two names are needed where only one was needed before. This book will talk you through the most important of these distinctions. The book also looks at the methodology of philosophy, the most important of which, of course, is logic.