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Claim
When a belief (judgment, opinion) is asserted in a declarative sentence, the result is a claim or statement.
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Objective claim vs. subjective claim
An objective claim is true or false regardless of whether people think it is true or false. Claims that lack this property are said to be subjective.
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“Factual claim”
An objective claim. Saying that a claim is “factual” is not the same as saying it is true. A factual claim is simply a claim whose truth does not depend on our thinking it is true.
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Moral subjectivism
Moral subjectivism is the idea that all judgments and claims that ascribe a moral property to something are subjective. “There is nothing either good or bad but that thinking makes it so.”Moral subjectivism is the idea that all judgments and claims that ascribe a moral property to something are subjective. “There is nothing either good or bad but that thinking makes it so.”
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Argument
An argument consists of two parts—one part of which (the premise or premises) is intended to provide a reason for accepting the other part (the conclusion).
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Cognitive bias
a feature of human psychology that skews belief formation.
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Belief bias
Evaluating reasoning by how believable its conclusion is.
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Availability heuristic
Assigning a probability to an event based on how easily or frequently it is thought of.
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False consensus effect
Assuming our opinions and those held by people around us are shared by society at large.
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Bandwagon effect
The tendency to align our beliefs with those of other people.
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Negativity bias
Attaching more weight to negative information than to positive information.
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Loss aversion
Being more strongly motivated to avoid a loss than to accrue a gain.
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In-group bias
A set of cognitive biases that make us view people who belong to our group differently from people who don’t.
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Fundamental attribution error
Understanding the behavior of others differently from how we understand our own behavior or that of other people in our group.
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Obedience to authority
A tendency to comply with instructions from an authority.
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Overconfidence effect
A cognitive bias that leads us to overestimate what percentage of our answers on a subject are correct.
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Better-than-average illusion
A self-deception cognitive bias that leads us to overestimate our own abilities relative to those of others.
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Truth
The question, What is Truth, has no universally accepted answer, and we don’t try to answer it here. In this book we use the concept in a commonsense way: A claim is true if it is free from error.
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Knowledge
For our purposes, if you believe something is so, have an argument that is beyond a reasonable doubt that it is so, and have no reason to think you are mistaken, you can claim you know it is so.
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