Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking [Paperback]

This is a great book for the right audience. By design, it starts with the most basic concepts of logical thought in order to build a solid foundation. For a student beginning a study of philosophy, this will be very valuable.

If your interest in logical thought is more casual, however, you may find that about 2/3 of this book is so basic as to not hold your attention very well. In the final third of the book McInerny addresses the common pitfalls of logical thought and the book becomes interesting even if you are a non-academic reader.

For that reason, I'd recommend "Crimes Against Logic" by Jamie Whyte for the reader interested in day-to-day logical thought rather than this book. This is a great one, however, if you are beginning an academic study of philosophy.

I'm on my way to grad school in the fall, and I picked up D.Q. McInerny's book with the thinking that since I never took an undergrad course in logic, it might be nice to learn the basics. Couldn't hurt to learn how to think in preparation for the most challenging time of your academic life, right?

As it turns out, I'm not sure this is the book that will help me do it. What I thought was going to be a primer on the ins and outs of rational thought read a lot more like the intro to a textbook. It's potentially interesting stuff, but the book ends too soon, before we get to the real meat of it all.

This is a short read -- 137 pages, including the index -- so it might not be a surprise that my main problem was McInerny trying to cover too much ground with too little space. There are issues with the format and pacing: Each chapter starts with a subject -- "The Basic Principles of Logic," for instance -- and moves through numbered subsections dealing with various aspects of that subject, like "Distinguish Among Causes" or "The Categorical Statement."

But the problem is twofold:

1) With usually only a page or less given to each subsection, the information itself is too brief to seriously mull over and usually simplistic enough as to border on the obvious (Example: One of McInerny's tips for effective communcation? "Speak in complete sentences."); and

2) Very often, there seems to be no correlation between subsections in a given chapter (or at the very least, the transitions need work).

What does this mean? Since the information is presented as it is (in list form), you're basically reading a glossary, only the terms in the glossary aren't specific enough to be of any real help to you. You might be just as well off reading about the concepts of logic on Wikipedia.

The bulk of the book is spent on the notion of argument, which McInerny says is the most basic and effective way that logic is disseminated. He spends a great deal of time and space on the terminology of argument, noting, for instance, the differences between the universal and particular (the former applies to everything, the latter only to some things; again, very intuitive), but never connects the importance of the terminology to the real world, as he promises he will. For example, I understand that "Every bird is a vertebrate" (80) is a universal affirmative statement, and I understand that you can't use two affirmative statements for your premises and come up with a negative conclusion. But that should be obvious to anyone who's given the subject even a little bit of thought. Understanding and using such terminology might allow me to put labels on premises or arguments, but does it help me make distinctions between the logical and the illogical any more so than I already could?

That's not to say that this book has nothing going for it. Some of McInerny's examples are very useful in helping to understand the structures that different arguments can take (conjunctive, disjunctive, conditional, syllogistic, etc.). In those cases, there was a bit of real-world application, because it helps you understand that all arguments are not -- and should not -- be similarly constructed. The author also points out a very necessary difference between an arugment's truth and its validity. (An argument is true or false based on the value of its premises; an argument is valid based on the structural soundness of its form. Arguments can be true but not valid, valid but untrue.) And it was fun reading through McInerny's list of logical fallacies, and connecting some (a little too easily) to arguments often used by prominent politicians and pundits.

"Being Logical" would probably best be used by people who are unfamiliar with logic as a formal area of study, and even then, only as a reference until they have a better grasp on the subject. I understand it's supposed to serve as an overview, but many overviews still delve a little more than surface-deep into a subject. In the end, I didn't feel this book provided even enough information to help you decide if you'd be interested in studying the subject further, to say nothing of providing no real insight into logical thought.

Maybe it's because this is an extremely partisan election year. But these days, a seeker of truth knows that reason, clarity, and honesty are in short supply.

How wonderful, then, to find these virtues and more in one resource. I'm alluding to D.Q. McInerny and his mighty mite of a book, "Being Logical."

Be assured that McInerny deftly covers the positive principles and the tempting pitfalls governing everyone's attempts to think logically. And he accomplishes this with quiet humor, with the patience of the best kind of teacher.

Although I wish I'd encountered him much earlier, I'm happy to discover him now.

Yet there's more to this book. Simply put, it places the force of inspiration in the reader's mind. Every day, now, in his congenial way, McInerny is there, exhorting me to think straighter and better. And he makes me want to do this despite the prospect of failure, which (for me) is usually lurking just around the corner.

What more could be asked of an author than that?

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge have asserted that "the writing of good English is...a moral matter." So is the practice of effective logic, as successfully demonstrated by D.Q. McInerny in "Being Logical."

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