Fourth R
Practical Philosophy
Established 2010
The Fourth R: Reasoning
We're all familiar with the traditional "three R's"—Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic. But this basic skill set isn't complete. To make everything work together, we need a fourth R: Reasoning.
While reasoning is a natural human ability, it turns out that there are right ways and wrong ways to go about it. Without knowing the basics of how to tell which is which, we're liable to do it the wrong way as often as not. The consequences range from merely embarrassing to downright catastrophic.
In an age of escalating population, finite resources, and global interaction, not to mention weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer afford to make public policy and major life choices based on guesswork, gut feeling, and blind ideology.
This website attempts to address this situation. Its objectives are:
to advocate formal instruction in basic reasoning skills for all students at the secondary school level, and
to remedy the effects of the lack of such training on our current adult population, by offering an easy, self-paced course in basic critical thinking, geared to the average high-school graduate and college undergraduate.
It is the aim of this course to teach, not what to think, but rather how to think well. For once people learn the how, with practice and experience they should be able to figure out the what on their own.
HST "Deep Field" background photo courtesy of NASA
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