Books I've Found Useful for Critical Thinking

David Zellmer, Ph.D.

Shermer, Michael (2001). The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense. New York: Oxford University Press.

I particularly liked the distinctions made between normal science, borderland science and pseudoscience. Includes a good Baloney Detection Kit.

Sagan, Carl (1996). The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House.

This book makes wonderful reading. Sagan shines when he describes the dreadful toll that unreason has exacted on human beings. Don't miss the chapters on witches and UFO abductees. This book also contains Sagan's classic Baloney Detection Kit.

Toropov, Brandon (2001). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Urban Legends. Indianapolis, IN: Alpha Books.

This one is fun to browse through. There are many on-line sources for Urban Legend debunking, but a real book has its own pleasures. If you've ever worried about waking up in a bathtub of ice with your kidney removed, read on...

Stevenson, Jay (2002). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Alpha Books.

Have you been embarrassed by forgetting what logical positivism is? Do you have to keep looking up words like epistemology and teleology? Have you ever been accused of being Aristotelian in your thinking? This is a surprisingly readable romp through the history of Philosophy from Socrates to New Age thinking.

Paulos, John Allen (2001). Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. New York: Hill and Wang.

Those who Can't Do Math leave themselves open to all kinds of scams and fuzzy thinking. This short and readable book gives many examples.

Poundstone, William (1992). Prisoner's Dilemma. New York: Anchor Books.

Why do people persist in acting in ways that make things worse for everyone, including themselves? Was Vince Lombardi right when he said, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing"? This book may seem to be about mathematics and game theory with its guest appearances by John von Neumann and John Nash (of Beautiful Mind movie fame), but it's really about us and the way we make decisions.

Giere, Ronald N. (1997). Understanding Scientific Reasoning. 4th ed. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace.

This book is aimed squarely at those who are trying to make sense out of scientific claims. It is a bit more technical than the other books in this list when it gets into the details of experimental design, but is just the ticket when you need to do some serious evaluation of things like testing medical claims.

Pennock, Robert T. (1999). Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

After having taken a break of several years from reading the books and literature of creationists, and the books refuting their claims, this 1999 book provided me with a good picture of the latest strategies employed by fundamentalists in their battle to remove the teaching of evolution from our science classrooms.

Steering Committee on Science and Creationism, National Academy of Sciences (1999). Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

This 48-page book is readable free on-line at: http://stills.nap.edu/html/creationism/ (HTML) and at http://www.nap.edu/books/0309064066/html/ (Open Book - Searchable). The HTML version has better rendering of the figures. In this book, the NAS has a condensed presentation of the main points of the theory of evolution and has a FAQ section in response to creationism.

Gould, Stephen J. (1999). Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: Ballantine Books.

The late Stephen Jay Gould is best known for his many books explaining the nature of life on this planet, and the role that evolution plays in what we see. In this volume he examines the roots of the so-called conflict between science and religion and finds some answers that may surprise you. For example, in Chapter 3 he discusses "The Fallacy of Warfare Between Science and Religion" where the blame for much of the conflict we see today may be laid at the feet of a very few influential writers from the past.