I Think, Therefore I Laugh

The preeminent explicator of mathematical logic to non-mathematicians, John Allen Paulos is familiar to general readers not only from his bestselling books but also from his media appearances, including The David Letterman Show and National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" and "Science Friday," as well as articles in Newsweek, Nature, Discover, Business Week, the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. Paulos originally wrote this charming little book on analytic logic, its mathematics, and its puzzles in 1985. And as in his later books, he uses jokes, stories, parables, and anecdotes to elucidate difficult concepts, in this case, some of the fundamental problems in modern philosophy.

ISBN	0231119151	Pages	192
ISBN13	9780231119153 (What's this?)	Volumes	1
Publisher	Columbia University Press	Weight (grammes)	170
Imprint	Columbia University Press	Published in	New York
Format	Paperback	Height (mm)	229
Publication date	21 Dec 1999	Width (mm)	152
Library of Congress	BC71.P38 2	Spine width (mm)	6
DEWEY	190.207	Academic level	Professional / Scholarly
DEWEY edition	DC21

	Preface to the Second Edition
ch. 1	Two Unlikely Pairs of Men	1
	Introduction	2
	Wittgenstein and Carroll	4
	Groucho Meets Russell	8
ch. 2	Logic	13
	Either-Or	14
	You Bet Your Life	20
	Sillygisms	23
	The Titl of This Section Contains Three Erors	30
	Russell's Dr. Goldberg and Dr. Rubin	35
	Language and Metalanguage: Do You Get It?	40
	Meaning, Reference, and Dora Black's First Husband	48
	Analytic vs. Synthetic, Boole vs. Boyle, and Mathematics vs. Cookery	52
	Miscellany	58
ch. 3	Science	63
	Induction, Causality, and Hume's Eggs	64
	The Tortoise Came First?	71
	Of Birds and Strange Colors	76
	Truths, Half-Truths, and Statistics	83
	Duhem, Poincare, and the Poconos-Catskill Diet	89
	Reductionism, Fallibilism, and Opportunism	95
	Randomness and the Berry Task	102
	Determinism and Smart Computers	110
	Bell's Inequality and Weirdness	114
	On Assumptions	124
ch. 4	People	131
	Context, Complexity, and Artificial Intelligence	132
	Why Did He Just Now Touch His Head?	139
	More...

If, like me, you find fun in logical conundrums and absurdities, you will find plenty [here]. On the other hand, if youre of the type that finds people like Paulos and me tedious, you should look into his book anyway, just to see what youve been missing.

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