Rating: 7.7/10. Overall an okay but not superb book. The parts about pragmatics were the least familiar to me, but the writing was poor as a lot of advanced concepts were introduced too quickly for me. Ch2: What is Meaning? One way to represent meaning is by assigning logical forms to sentences. Modal logic adds…
Category: Topics
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Rating: 7.2/10. Explains how relationships between countries are affected by geography, sort of like the CaspianReport YouTube channel, but in book format. Russia is concerned with getting access to a warm-water port, which explains why they invaded Afghanistan and recently Crimea. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it’s lost a lot of territory, and…
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
Rating: 7.7/10. Novel about the history of philosophy, set in Norway, in the form of monologues between a 14-year-old girl Sophie and a mysterious philosopher Alberto Knox, who sends her letters teaching her philosophy. This has the purpose of explaining philosophical ideas in the form that a teenager can understand. In the first half of…
Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics by Fernandez and Cairns
Rating: 8.3/10. Ch1: Beginning Concepts Language has finite rules and symbols, but has infinite generation. Can think of language as a system to connect signals (acoustic, or words on a page) to meaning. This is done through phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. Linguistic competence is the knowledge of a language’s lexicon and grammar; linguistic performance is…
Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders
Rating: 7.5/10. Book with collections of diagnoses, similar to the House TV show. There’s not really a central “point” that the book is trying to make, more like a bunch of insights about the art of diagnosis, interspersed with real-life examples of patients with various diseases and how the doctors figured out what’s wrong with…
Four Views on Free Will by Kane, Fischer, Pereboom, and Vargas
Rating: 8.7/10. Ch1: Libertarianism (Robert Kane) Libertarianism is the view that the universe is not deterministic, and this is necessary for FW; also, FW is necessary for moral responsibility. It’s closest to laymen’s intuitions about FW. Compatibilists attack it in two ways: (1) by claiming that determinism doesn’t conflict with FW, and (2) that indeterminism…
Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye by Ellie Phillips
Rating: 7.4/10. A lot of people have tooth decay, but the usual treatment is fillings, followed by root canals, crowns, extraction, and there’s not as much emphasis on prevention. This book outlines a program to get healthier teeth. Often, tooth decay is viewed as problems of individual teeth, but actually, tooth decay has to do…
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Rating: 7.1/10. A common mistake in economics is to enact a policy that benefits some group of people, without realizing that it harms some other group (usually the broad society not taking part in the transaction). The most basic example is with the “broken window theory”: when a window is broken, the glassmaker gets work,…
The Lexicon: An Introduction by Elisabetta Jezek
Rating: 8.2/10. Ch1: Basic notions The lexicon is the set of words in a language, abstract object stores in our mind; a dictionary is a concrete object (printed book or electronic) that describes the lexicon. Dictionaries do not always store everything in the lexicon, either intentionally or unintentionally. A vocabulary can refer to either a…
The Price We Pay by Marty Makary
Rating: 8.0/10. The American healthcare system is rotten to its core: the country spends about twice as much on healthcare as other developed countries, and gets worse outcomes. This book by a surgeon and public health researcher examines what’s wrong with the healthcare system. In short, the free market brings prices down only with transparency…
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson
Rating: 6.6/10. Jordan Peterson’s first book, written in 1999, two decades before he became famous and wrote “12 Rules for Life“. This one is over 400 pages and is a lot more dense, although not written for academic philosophers. The basic theme is that mythology should be studied as a representation of meaning, in an…
The Perfect Theory by Pedro G. Ferreira
Rating: 5.0/10. Book about Einstein’s theory of general relativity; I got bored after reading about 90 pages. Given that the author is a theoretical physics professor, I expected a more satisfying explanation of general relativity. Instead, this book is entirely about the history of general relativity, with descriptions of various scientists’ personalities. It overlaps substantially…