When I used to teach math, students fell into two categories when it came to logic. There were those who got it almost immediately and those who seemed to struggle with some of the ways in which logic seemed, well, illogical. For example, given the statements
If today is Tuesday, Dawn is in trouble.
and
Dawn is in trouble.
what can be determined?
Over half the students would assume that we could conclude that today is Tuesday, but implication does not work that way. In this book Bennett looks at this and a number of other logical premises and points out that in many cases, it’s experience and language that can override our understanding of the underlying logic. A logical sequence with nonsense terms is more easily correctly interpreted than the same sequence with words that run counter to experience or intuition. Overall, an excellent book and one that, were I still teaching the math for liberal arts majors I once taught, I would use as one of the textbooks.
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