Is Bowling a Sport? Thinking Theoretically about Religion

Theory as Practice: Thinking Theoretically About Health Promotion

Learning Objectives When you finish reading this chapter, you will be able to: Describe similarities between commonsense and scientific theories. 1. Choose a definition of scientific theory that makes the most sense 2. to you. Articulate a definition of theoretical thinking (or theorizing) and 3. theory. Further examine and test the notion of theories as stories. 4. Outline what theory/theorizi...

Is Religion Essential? Beliefs about Religious Categories

The purpose of the present study was to assess whether presumed variations in people’s values towards intergroup mobility modulate their essentialist beliefs about the groups. Our target population was orthodox Jews, who, on the one hand, value in-group preservation regarding religious affiliation (Jewish or Christian), but on the other, value uni-directional integration regarding religiosity (...

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'