Product Description
"The best introduction to logic you will find."—Martin Gardner

Penetrating and practical, Logic Made Easy is filled with anecdotal histories detailing the often muddy relationship between language and logic. Complete with puzzles you can try yourself and questions you can use to raise your test scores, Logic Made Easy invites readers to identify and ultimately remedy logical slips in everyday life. Even experienced logicians will be surprised by Deborah Bennett's ability to identify the illogical in everything from maddening street signs to tax forms that make April the cruelest month. Designed with dozens of visual examples, the book guides readers through those hair-raising times when logic is at odds with common sense. Logic Made Easy is indeed one of those rare books that will actually make you a more logical human being.

From the Inside Flap
A perfect primer that explains the timeless concepts of logic in a contemporary and user-friendly voice.

Penetrating and practical, Logic Made Easy details the often muddy relationship between language and logic through anecdotal histories, puzzles, and questions you can try yourself—and dozens of visual examples. Both curious students and experienced logicians will be surprised by Deborah Bennett's ability to identify the illogical in everything from maddening street signs to tax forms that can make April the cruelest month.

Although the rules of logic were invented over 2,300 years ago, people still have a difficult time applying these rules to everyday thinking. Aware of these challenges, Bennett links the historical development of logical theories with everyday hurdles by demonstrating that mistakes in spoken logic often explain the mishaps and misunderstandings that plague daily life.

From truth tables to syllogisms, fallacies to fuzzy logic, Bennett meticulously describes logical concepts and their points of intersection and departure, presenting a finely distilled survey of the entire field of logic in under three hundred pages. She explores each topic with exactly the right amount of depth, sprinkling line drawings, tables, and sample questions taken from the common standardized tests throughout her engaging narrative. For students who don't have a lot of time on their hands, Logic Made Easy is a much more effective and interesting way to get ready for exams than the phone book-sized tomes in the test-prep section of the bookstore.

A college professor, Bennett has been called "brilliantly bilingual" in her ability to translate abstract concepts into "clear, expressive English." In Logic Made Easy, theory, history, and anecdote are all brought together into one easy and fun presentation. Throughout. you can hear Bennett's command of the subject, an understanding that can only be developed during hundreds of hours in front of a classroom.

Logic Made Easy is indeed one of those rare books that will actually make you a more logical human being.

From Publishers Weekly
In this compact, fluently written survey leavened with humor, New Jersey mathematics professor Bennett (Randomness) entertains as she instructs, focusing on "the barriers we face in trying to communicate logically with each other." The author covers the ancient Greeks (the Greek word logos means "knowledge"), then such giants as Leibniz and Newton, who helped rescue the study of logic from classical languages, finally modern mathematicians and philosophers like Whitehead and Russell. In discussing topics like syllogisms, she uses tables and diagrams that shouldn't daunt anyone with a firm foundation in high school algebra and geometry. The book's most interesting chapter explains why if is perhaps the most problematical word in any verbal proposition. Everyone, including the hopelessly innumerate, will find Bennett's lessons in the tricks of speech invaluable, particularly in this election year.

Contents

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Introduction: Logic Is Rare 1 Proof 2 All 3 A NOT Tangles Everything Up 4 SOME Is Part or All of ALL 5 Syllogisms 6 When Things Are IFfy 7 Syllogisms Involving IF, AND, and OR 8 Series Syllogisms 9 Symbols That Express Our Thoughts 10 Logic Machines and Truth Tables 11 Fuzzy Logic, Fallacies, and Paradoxes 12 Common Logic and Language 13 Thinking Well—Together Notes References Acknowledgments Index

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Tags: Logic, CriticalThinking

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