Publisher's Synopsis
"Thinking things through" provides a broad, historical introduction to the logical tradition in philosophy and to its contemporary significance. The presentation is centred around three issues in Western thought: What are proofs, and why do they provide knowledge? How can experience be used to gain knowledge or to alter beliefs in a rational way? What is the nature of mind and of mental events and mental states? Glymour describes these key philosophical problems and traces attempts to solve them, from ancient Greece to the present.;"Thinking Things Through" reveals the philosophical sources of modern work in logic, the theory of computation, Bayesian statistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, and it connects these subjects with contemporary problems in epistemology and metaphysics. The text is full of examples and problems, and an instructor's manual is available.