In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is reductionism. Reductionism is the idea that complex theories or phenomena can be reduced down to other theories or phenomena. Essentially, the whole shebang can be boiled down to one thing that explains it all. It’s a philosophical …
Introducing Consciousness: A Graphic Guide by David Papineau and Howard Selina is the latest book in this series I’ve read. It explores what this thing is that we call consciousness. There are no answers, because consciousness remains pretty elusive, but the book doesn’t aim to give you answers. One of the ideas raised was philosopher …
Book Review: Introducing Consciousness: A Graphic Guide Read More »
Introducing Psychology: A Graphic Guide by Nigel C. Benson is from the same series as Introducing Evolutionary Psychology, which I recently reviewed. It essentially takes the most interesting and relevant bits from an Intro to Psychology course and simplifies it, adding some fun graphics to boot. Explanations are bite-sized, chapters are short and sweet, and …
Book Review: Introducing Psychology: A Graphic Guide Read More »
I got thinking about this after watching an interview with Steven Pinker, one of my academic crushes, and then another interview with Jordan Peterson. Both referred to biological differences between men and women, although in different ways, and I wanted to do a post exploring my own take on sex and gender differences, and the …
Separating Out Sex/Gender, Biology and Social Construct Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week, we’ll look at the difference between innate and acquired characteristics. While intuitively it would seem reasonable that there are some capacities or abilities that are innate and some that are learned, there’s fundamental disagreement within the academic community over …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is emotions. This may seem like a rather obvious topic; after all, we all have emotions. But there’s actually more than meets the eye, so I thought it would be interesting to look a little closer. Emotions are …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week, we take a bit of a detour to look at philosophical razors. I first heard of philosophical razors quite recently, in a poem by Suzette Benjamin that mentioned Occam’s razor. So, what is it and why is philosophy doing some …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is critical thinking. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that, while there are various different definitions, the basic underlying idea is “careful thinking directed to a goal.” Wikipedia describes critical thinking as “the analysis of facts to form …
Our minds play all kinds of tricks on us. We’ve got all kinds of cognitive biases that influence what we do with our thoughts, and our brains do interesting things with what they pick up through our senses. There’s a philosophical argument as to whether or not there is a truly objective reality, but for …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is stoicism. Stoicism came up in a book I recently reviewed, You Got This, and I wanted to find out more about it. It means taking a detour from psychology into the world of philosophy. Stoicism in Ancient …
