The first Think Better piece, at the conclusion of Chapter 1 (Volume I), talks about the importance of background knowledge in developing one’s critical thinking skills. Recall that background knowledge is the sum total of all our knowledge and experiences. In particular, increasing your background knowledge of marketing and logical fallacies will enhance your ability to develop good and persuasive marketing arguments. But that’s just the beginning.
If you are committed to expanding your background knowledge you’ll need to explore additional subject areas such as the philosophy of science, epistemology, marketing theory, behavioral economics, and heuristics. To this end, this chapter introduces you to selected topics in these fields:
Philosophy of Science: This field studies what it means for a body of knowledge to be called a “science.” The word science comes from the Latin, Scientia, meaning “to know.” Most people associate the term science with the hard sciences—physics, chemistry, and biology—and are skeptical that a “soft” science such as sociology, economics, or marketing is deserving of that appellation. The Think Better piece, “Marketing as a Science,” presents an argument claiming that, indeed, marketing is a science. Since a critical topic of all scientific inquiries is the nature of causation, the Think Better piece, “Correlation and Causation,” provides an introduction to this subject.
Epistemology: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines epistemology as “the study of knowledge and justified belief.”1 As such, epistemology is not completely separate from the philosophy of science. Often books on both topics cover similar material. The following Think Better pieces cover selected epistemological topics:
“What is a Concept” examines the nature of concepts and how they are defined.
“David Hume” introduces you to this 18th-century Scottish philosopher who wrote about how, if at all, inductive arguments can be justified.
Marketing Theory: Byron Sharp and the researchers of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have written several books on marketing laws that their primary research, conducted over decades and supported by some of the world’s largest marketing organizations, has uncovered. The Think Better piece, “The Double Jeopardy Law,” introduces you to the nature of these laws, and the Double Jeopardy law in particular.
Behavioral Economics: This Think Better piece of the same name provides an introduction to this field “of economic analysis that applies psychological insights into human behavior to explain economic decision-making.”2 A major finding of behavioral economists is that human beings’ decision making is often “irrational,” as that term is often construed, and this finding has significant implications for marketing.
Heuristics: “A heuristic is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.”3 “The 5 Whys?” discusses this popular heuristic in solving marketing and business problems. Note that a list of 19 heuristic tools with discussions of their application to marketing is contained in Chapter 8 of Grapentine’s book, Applying Scientific Reasoning to the Field of Marketing, which is referenced in the bibliography.