Nonfiction: Deborah J. Bennett’s Logic Made Easy

[Rating: 3.5]

Does Bennett’s book live up to its title? Does it make logic easy? No, not really. However, Logic Made Easy is a good read. It’s a basic book on logic. It covers a lot of ground. It talks of paradoxes, proofs, history, truth tables, thinking, fuzzy logic, fallacies, and language (not’s, and’s, and if’s). It’s sprinkled with puzzles and tricky questions. Overall, it’s fun (because of the puzzles) and engaging (because it encourages thinking and reflecting on one’s own thought patterns).

Ideally, if you read Logic Made Easy, you will

• Laugh (remember, it’s a fun read!)
• Learn how the words contrary and contradict differ
• Work a few puzzles (like the little brain test I gave readers of my blog)

For a nonfiction book, the majority of Logic Made Easy reads very quickly and is very easy to understand. But 5 to 10 percent of it is a little dry, a little complex, and a little confusing. If you can handle the quote below, you can handle the entirety of Logic Made Easy.

How does one assign a truth value to a statement like, “The king of France is bald”? There is no king of France. Perhaps we should declare the proposition to be false. If there is no king of France then he can’t possibly be bald. However, if the proposition is false then its negative must be true. We would be forced to accept the truth of “The present king of France is not bald,” but once again we find ourself in a quandary…

If you’re still with me and if the quote above amuses you more than it annoys you, you may want to pick up this book. If you’re a member of Mensa, I strongly recommend it. If you’re a programmer, a linguist, or a psychologist (or interested in becoming any of those things), I recommend Logic Made Easy to you too.

On a final note, I enjoyed the section on paradoxes to the utmost. There, Bennett notes one question that “[brought] on crises in thought” in my brain. The question: Is the word heterological heterological (a word that does not describe itself)? Long is heterological because long is not a long word. French is heterological because French is not a French word. Heterological is heterological because … ?

Paradoxes ftl; Logic Made Easy ftw.