Ethics and Practical Reasoning

How is practical reasoning related to ethical reasoning? The most common view is that they are identical: practical reasoning just is ethical reasoning. I criticize this view and then propose an alternative account of the relation between ethical thought and practical thought: ethical reasoning is reasoning about sound practical reasoning. I argue that this account of the relation between ethics and practical reasoning explains various phenomena that more familiar views leave unexplained. It also entails that the philosophy of action bears heavily on ethical inquiry

Structure of, access to, and uncertainty in reasoning and their dependence on content

It is known that content has an effect on reasoning. In this paper the influence of the content on the structure of reasoning, the access to it, and the ability to handle uncertainty was studied. The participants were presented with reasoning tasks about the weather and about the oscilloscope in which uncertain premises were introduced. Correct reasoning procedures were identified including correct reasoning with wrong answers. In correct reasoning procedures about the weather, three different structures of reasoning were identified. The participants were mostly able to reason with uncertain components. In reasoning about the oscilloscope, less correct reasoning procedures were found. No empirical and theoretical structures were used. The hidden structure differed here from the one in the weather case because the participants were not able to handle all uncertain components in otherwise correct reasoning. The implications of this unique finding for the acquisition of reasoning skills are discusse

Analogical Reasoning

This chapter from our book Legal Writing in Context aims to demystify analogical reasoning for law students

Assessing statistical reasoning in descriptive statistics: a qualitative meta-analysis

To date, there are abundant studies on statistical reasoning in descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. Nevertheless, the types of statistical reasoning assessments used in those studies are different from each other. Hence, this qualitative meta-analysis is aimed to explore the methods utilized in assessing statistical reasoning among students from all levels in descriptive statistics. A total of 36 studies on reasoning about measures of central tendency, variability and distribution were found and reviewed in this paper. It was noticed that six major types of methods were employed to assess students’ statistical reasoning in descriptive statistics, namely interview, survey or questionnaire, tasks, tests, minute paper, and teaching. This study contributes considerably to the statistical reasoning area as it provides new information on statistical reasoning in descriptive statistics. For future studies, some recommendations are proposed to improve statistical reasoning assessments