This section discussed reason. In reasoning is a whole plethora of different processes and steps to gaining knowledge, and understanding through reason. Reason involves knowledge, and its three types, experiential, authoritative, and reasoned. It also includes the two ways in which one gains reasoned knowledge: induction and deduction. Knowledge (knowing) and critical thinking are crucial to reason. One must have knowledge to know the facts about what he is thinking critically about. This allows someone to make the proper connections when thinking critically about something. Finally, there are different thinking errors that can impede progress toward true reasoned knowledge. They include the non sequitur, false and vague premises, ad hominem, begging the question, and red herrings.
I think that it is important to remember that care should be taken when categorizing perceived knowledge. Some common thinking errors could lead to an incorrect categorization in which the subject is to broadly classified based on extremely limited interaction. This can lead to stereotypes, and prejudices that are applied to people undeserving of them. Especially with people categorizing can be tricky because of how complex and unique every person is. It takes years if not a lifetime to fully understand (or not) a person and be able to accurately categorize them.
Important to critical thinking is the looking at things from another perspective besides your own to gain insights. Different perspectives may all have pieces of truth necessary to come to a correct and true conclusion, and without looking at things from at least a few perspectives, your outlook on life can become extremely slanted toward one way of thinking. This is because only one side of an argument is considered. Looking at things from only your own perspective when thinking about them is like having only one person on a teeter totter, it will always be slanted one way.
In reasoning, it is important to avoid false premises that may give an inaccurate and false conclusion. This can be one of the most deadly thinking errors because it does not seem like an error, and it can be hard to go back and fix in your mind whatever the premise error may be. A few small flaws in premises can lead to a viewpoint completely slanted by a single error at its beginning similar to a building with an unsound foundation that leans because of a small error at the beginning of its construction.
A question that I will keep in mind from the section, but that I do not yet have an answer to is; How are we supposed to know the truth if we can only take in such a small portion of what we need to know, and what we if what we perceive is further slanted by only what we want tot know?
Finally to become a better person, I think that I should really try and look at things from every angle I can think of instead of just taking what I think as the gospel truth. This will allow me to garner more truth from my experiences, and by doing so become closer to being able to judge more fairly the situations in which my fellow man may find himself