| A | B |
|---|
| Factual claim | An objective claim. Not the same as saying it is true. Simply a claim whose truth does not depend on our thinking it is true. |
| 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). |
| Availability heuristic | Assigning a probability to an event based on how easily or frequently it is thought of. |
| Bandwagon effect | The tendency to align our beliefs with those of other people. |
| Belief bias | Evaluating reasoning by how believable its conclusion is. |
| Better-than-average illusion | A self-deception cognitive bias that leads us to overestimate our own abilities relative to those of others. |
| Claim | When a belief (judgment |
| Cognitive bias | a feature of human psychology that skews belief formation. |
| False consensus effect | Assuming our opinions and those held by people around us are shared by society at large. |
| Fundamental attribution error | Understanding the behavior of others differently from how we understand our own behavior or that of other people in our group. |
| In-group bias | A set of cognitive biases that make us view people who belong to our group differently from people who don’t. |
| Issue | A question. |
| Knowledge | For this class |
| Loss aversion | Being more strongly motivated to avoid a loss than to accrue a gain. |
| Moral subjectivism | 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.” |
| Negativity bias | Attaching more weight to negative information than to positive information. |
| Obedience to authority | A tendency to comply with instructions from an authority. |
| 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. |
| Overconfidence effect | A cognitive bias that leads us to overestimate what percentage of our answers on a subject are correct. |
| Truth | The question ‘What is Truth?’ has no universally accepted answer and we don’t try to answer it here. In this course we use the concept in a commonsense way: A claim is true if it is free from error. |
