Deborah J. Bennett

The title here is misleading. This a book on the history of logic and on the psychological experiments testing people's use of logic. The point of the book is not to teach you how to do formal logic or how to apply logic, or even really how logic applies to the psychology of normal situations (although that last one does come up as a byproduct of describing psychology experiments). As such, this book lives in an odd middling space. On one hand it is meant as an introductory primer to logical thought, but it gets sidetracked by unnecessary history lessons and anecdotal asides. In addition, it skips on technical facets that would have helped to illuminate the concepts. Were the book more thorough it covering all of the relevant background information, that would have been fascinating in its own right, though it would have been a much slower read and less of an introductory popular science type book. If it had been trimmed to the bones, losing mainly the historical parts, it would be a more riveting read and truer to the subtitle.… (meer)