Deborah J. Bennett

An interesting and accessible introduction to logic. Deborah J. Bennett described syllogisms so that I finally understood them, and the whole book was a good reminder to think more critically and pay attention to all the information available. I also enjoyed the sample logic problems throughout the book, and even answered a few of them correctly after much cudgeling of my brain.

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 show more 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. show less

A concise and interesting history. I like the emphasis on differentiating random sequence from randomn generation and the important of looking at the practical need. For example, a series of like numbers are totally expected in a long series but may be undesirable for small samples. Many applications really need some basis of disorder. The comprehensive history includes the eventual agreement that both e and pi contain a seemingly random sequence of digits.

Deborah Bennett explains logic (both mathematical and word) through an easy-to-read style. She explains everything in detail and cites all her sources. After reading Logic Made Easy, I feel better about using logic and knowing when it's being used against me. One of my goals was to learn this to become a better communicator and this book helped.