Its topic – clear writing – was also practical and digestible. That style guide, with its “sentence trees” and “arcs of coherence,” is arguably a more effective tool for writers than Strunk and White’s beloved Elements of Style. It’s an approach that worked wonderfully with 2014’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. To Pinker’s credit, Rationality primarily seeks to show methods of reasoning rather than simply tell us why reasoning is important. For example: “Just because I believe P implies Q, and I believe P, why should I believe Q? Is it because I also believe implies Q? But why should I believe that? Is it because I have still another belief, implies Q?” As you can see, passages like this (and they’re plentiful) hardly leap off the page and grab you by the throat. Every chapter contains numerous diagrams and tables seemingly ripped from a Statistics 101 textbook, and features a healthy amount of formal logic.

The book can get surprisingly technical, given that it’s targeted at a general audience. Though its earliest and latest chapters veer into polemic, Rationality is mostly intended to be something of a how-to manual for rational thinking. Unlike those pro-reason tomes, Pinker’s latest is less interested in making the case for “making sense” and instead functions as an introduction to logic, statistical inference and probability theory. In a way, Rationality is part three of a trilogy that includes The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018). Though American culture has long made room for both (the Moon landing and Woodstock were separated by a few weeks in the summer of 1969), Pinker argues our irrational Dionysian tendencies have been ascendant, and to the detriment of Apollonian clear-headed logic. And in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche popularized this ongoing tension as a duel between two Greek gods: Apollo (who appeals to rational thinking and order) and Dionysus (who represents emotion and chaos). How can we make sense of making sense – and its opposite?” How, indeed? The question of rationality versus the passions has been debated since the dawn of philosophy. “ an era blessed with unprecedented resources for reasoning,” he writes in the book’s preface, “the public sphere is infested with fake news, quack cures, conspiracy theories and ‘post-truth’ rhetoric. The central thesis of Steven Pinker’s Rationality is undeniable.

Rationality pinker