Science is a useful metaphor for understanding our lives, but it is often shown to be as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. This lively, thoughtful, and refreshingly speculative debut collection turns scientific method around to question science's faith in certainty, exploring the alternate meaning of "hypothetical" as something that is merely "supposed to be true." Under the poet's wide-angled, open-hearted gaze, scientific investigation begins to mirror the dark art of poetry, reinforcing what we believe about ourselves one minute, then abruptly throwing everything into question. Leigh Kotsilidis lives in Montreal, Quebec, where she works as a freelance graphic designer while completing her MFA in studio arts.
From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans' strangest questions. The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical: - What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool? - Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? - What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City? - Are fire tornadoes possible? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements. The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.
"An innovative exam preparation tool, Property: Hypotheticals and Tools for Success addresses crucial problems students face as they approach exams. Exam-style hypotheticals are hard to find and never have detailed grading rubrics that will produce accurate scoring and actionable feedback. This book solves this problem by providing: A primer on legal analysis, with an emphasis on how to apply rules and a simple pattern for producing excellent exam answers. An extensive collection of hypotheticals that range from simple to difficult exam-level complexity. Detailed grading rubrics that allow you to self-grade in a way that produces actionable feedback. Explanations of common error patterns with specific and practicable strategies for correction. Sample great answers and bad answers with annotations showing what makes an answer effective or ineffective. Property: Hypotheticals and Tools for Success is equally helpful as a supplement to the basic property law course, a coursebook for academic success, or a practice book for the bar. The author, Professor Jill Fraley, is an award-winning teacher and scholar, who has held two Fulbright Scholar appointments and received the AALS Scholarly papers prize. She is a master teacher known for enabling super-successful students"--
This unique workbook presents 28 hypothetical legal cases that cover key constitutional questions and controversies and includes worksheets on which students can render and defend their decisions. A fascinating, hands-on way to approach often difficult subject matter, the cases can be used to illustrate more than one issue and can be as complex or as simple as instructors require.
Using a recently developed theoretical framework called Hypothetical Thinking Theory, Jonathan St. B. T. Evans provides an integrated theoretical account of a wide range of psychological studies on hypothesis testing, reasoning, judgement and decision making.
Lisa Yee gives us her most fascinating flawed genius since Millicent Min. Higgs Boson Bing has seven days left before his perfect high school career is completed. Then it's on to Harvard to fulfill the fantasy portrait of success that he and his parents have cultivated for the past four years. Four years of academic achievement. Four years of debate championships. Two years of dating the most popular girl in school. It was, literally, everything his parents could have wanted. Everything they wanted for Higgs's older brother Jeffrey, in fact. But something's not right. And when Higgs's girlfriend presents him with a seemingly innocent hypothetical question about whether or not he'd give her a kidney . . . the exposed fault lines reach straight down to the foundations of his life. . . .
"Modeling Legal Argument "provides a comprehensive treatment of case-based reasoning and a detailed description of a computer program called Hypo, that models the way attorneys argue with cases, real and hypothetical. The program offers significant advantages over "keyword" case retrieval systems in the legal field and demonstrates how to design expert systems that assist the user by presenting reasonable alternative answers on all sides of an issue and by citing case examples to explain their advice.Hypo analyzes problem situations dealing with trade secrets disputes, retrieves relevant legal cases from its database and fashions them into reasonable legal arguments about who should win. The arguments demonstrate the program's ability to reason symbolically with past cases, to draw factual analogies between cases, to cite them in arguments, to distinguish them, and to pose counter-examples and hypotheticals based on past cases."Modeling Legal Argument "discusses the law as a paradigm of case-based argument, introduces Hypo and its adversarial reasoning process, provides an overview of the Hypo program, and gives extended examples of the model's reasoning capabilities. It describes the case knowledge base, a dimensional index, basic mechanisms of case-based reasoning, and offers a theory of case-based argument in Hypo. Ashley evaluates Hypo's performance and takes up adversarial case-based reasoning beyond the law and extensions of the Hypo model.Kevin D. Ashley is a Research Scientist at the Learning Research an Development Center and Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh. "Modeling Legal Argument is "included in the Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning series, edited by L. Thorne McCarty and Edwina L. Rissland.
Fiction. THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is a darkly humorous collection of stories featuring an assortment of anonymous characters--A, B, and S--all with problems. They work undercover at an amusement park in Illinois or else they work at a secret government facility that would prefer not to be named. They attend a freewheeling sales meeting with death masks on the wall. Some raise pigs, others race goats. One lives in a suburban home where he watches his wife with another man. They are, together, misled, misunderstood, and mistaken often, but their pursuit of answers never ends. "The collaboration of Maliszewski and Weil yields an intellectually frothy collection... The authors display an almost palpable relish in their extended literary jousts. Readers with a similar sensibility will blissfully wallow in these elaborate yarns."--Publishers Weekly "Reading THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is like eavesdropping on the fevered colloquy of two think-tank eminences expelled for conundrumizing too wisely for their own good about everything crucial and uncomfortable about lives lived with upheaving acuity. Paul Maliszewski and Ryan Weil have written an entrancement of a book, and you'll hang on their every word."--Gary Lutz "These stories? narratives? accusations? recriminations? are the smartest and most fascinating literary inventions you'll read this decade. Imagine an angry, frightened Luis Borges in an argument with himself, or Abbott and Costello if they were very, very well-read. The dueling, hilarious, self-eviscerating, meticulously crafted narratives of A and B make me think of My Dinner with Andre for the era of alternative facts, or Plato and his dialectic transported giddily into contemporary America. Every writer should read these--and anyone else who is interested in the beautiful, confusing disarray of the twenty-first century Western mind."--Clancy Martin "THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is just the sort of fictional testament our meaning-deficient age demands--hilarious, profound, and relentlessly self-questioning. It is a tale told by two beguiling idiots; the kind of story you'd get if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were mid-level CIA appointees, Samuel Beckett were a corporate consultant, and modern American life were re-envisioned as one long shaggy tahr story. If there's any justice in our bedraggled world, THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN will attract a grateful horde of real readers."--Chris Lehmann
This volume traces the development of Aristotle’s hypothetical syllogistic through antiquity, and shows for the first time how it later became misidentified with the logic of the rival Stoic school. By charting the origins of this error, the book illuminates elements of Aristotelian logic that have been obscured for almost two thousand years, and raises important issues concerning the distinctive roles of semantic and syntactic analysis in theories of logical consequence. The first chapters of the book deal with the original Aristotelian hypothetical syllogistic, and explain how Aristotle’s later followers began to conflate it with Stoic logic. The final chapters examine in detail the two most crucial surviving treatments of the subject, Boethius’s On hypothetical syllogisms and On Cicero’s Topics, which carried this conflation into the Middle Ages.
'The Playbook of Persuasive Reasoning: Everyday Empowerment and Likeability' provides an easy, practical guide to the strategies of persuasive reasoning, which Gavin Hurley argues is crucial to all effective communication. Helping professionals and students to become better and more likeable communicators, this fundamental “playbook” outlines numerous eye-opening communicative maneuvers for readers of all levels and backgrounds. It offers a unique approach to argumentation and persuasion and moves away from the more conventional methods which are often overtechnical, unnecessarily complex or too science oriented. Hurley demonstrates how to successfully apply these strategies of cooperative argumentation to your life in order to succeed professionally, socially and cerebrally. This he argues, will allow you to empower your messaging and increase your social magnetism. 'The Playbook of Persuasive Reasoning' is a down-to-earth guide on effective rhetorical strategizing. It is written for everyday application, based on everyday examples, and embedded in everyday language. Today, successful communication is a highly sought-after trait by international employers, clients, and customers alike. Gavin Hurley shows how a wide range of people can benefit from learning how to deliver more abstract material in an effective manner: both verbally and written. This guide is particularly appealing for professionals, including business managers, as well as academics and students, including public intellectuals. 'The Playbook of Persuasive Reasoning' is a useful book for anyone wanting to enrich their skills and strengthen their powers of communication in order to have a social and professional advantage.
