Henry Hazlitt strongly recommended this book for all students of the social sciences. It had a formative influence on his life. In fact, it is the book that taught him how to think.
And not only Hazlitt. William Stanley Jevons’s book was the seminal contribution that educated many generations of English and American scholars that crucial discipline of logic. It teaches the rules for thinking. Now, this was a subject that every student once had to take, and not in college but quite early in life, and certainly by high school.
No more. Today, it is widely assumed that there is no structure of thinking that is worth studying. And perhaps that explains why serious thinking is so rare. It is nothing short of astonishing that most people go all the way through school with no exposure to logic at all.
We’ve long looked for a good text to bring into print. Jevons, one of the architects of the Marginal Revolution, is a great choice.
To be sure, this book is not easy. It takes patience and discipline. It offers a great challenge to anyone. However, if you can go through the book and learn from it, you will have a massive advantage over colleagues, most of whom have never studied this area.
Does it make sense that an economics publishers would bring out a book on logic? Certainly it does from a Misesian point of view. Logic is the method of economic thinking. Without it, indeed, economic theory is not possible.
May Jevons school the current generation in the way he did so many previous ones.
360 page, paperback, 2010, ISBN: 978-1-933550-74-9
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The pdf for this in the literature section is missing, just an FYI.
Here you go, Joseph.
Sounds interesting. I may get it.
http://mises.org/books/lessons_in_logic_jevons.pdf is a rotten scan because I had to shrink it down dramatically
Cool, thanks. It didn’t show up in Google Docs reader for some reason.
You know what would help? Giving the title of the book and the name of the author in the article. Yes, there is an image – but that’s no bloody use when surfing with images off or to get into search engines or whatever. That’s why they invented alt tags. Have a look at the Any Browser campaign for concrete advice.
I took electronics 1 and 2 in high school. Do you know if it’s the same logic that you are talking about? I will have to read the book otherwise. In electronics, and by extention computers, there is an off state and an on state of each switch. In economics then, is there a parallel? Because if these switches are all on then it turns on this other switch, just like there are a series of conditions in a market then a certain fanomonon happens. Seems right to me, I’m just an amateur.
There might be analogies, and indeed if there are you might want to write about them. I do think, though, that the Jevons book would introduce new concepts.
That, and listening to plenty of Mr. Spock.
Kindle edition, please.
http://www.archive.org/details/elementarylesson00jevoiala
Not sure if that scan is much better, but it is readable.
Publishing this book is a fantastic decision! The LvMI is becoming a real educational tour de force. I absolutely love the idea of your offering essentially a full curriculum of material for anyone interested in economics. You now have economics, logic, history, and some philosophy… I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Excellent!
Speaking as a college instructor, it is sad how many of my students have no exposure to the study of logic. So, it’s no surprise at all when students think that they have proven something (say, by uncovering impure motives in their opposition) when they most certainly haven’t.
This is perhaps better for the individual reasoning, but for economics a paraconsistent logic is many times often superior to classical logic.
Lucas, that’s a good point. But they are trained to do that by the media. I was watching CNBC this morning and with every issue discussed at least one of the anchors questioned the motives of someone. Questioning motives is the chief method of argument in the media.
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