Review: Making Up Your Own Mind: Thinking Effectively Through Creative Puzzle-Solving

Making Up Your Own Mind: Thinking Effectively Through Creative Puzzle-Solving by Edward Burger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Early in a semester, I like to pose to my college algebra students:
Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?
This is from the 2010 book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith E Stanovich. From the same book I suggest to the students that they apply “fully disjunctive reasoning”, a phrase I find is a koan-like tool for disruption of quick, reactive thought and nudging students into thinking of categories as a movement toward proof construction. During this time, we work in logic leaving strictly mathematical topics aside. Such exercises in critical thinking are also germane to this text and can be of benefit to students of mathematics, philosophy, engineering, and, well, life. The promotion line here is, “How you can become better at solving real-world problems by learning creative puzzle-solving skills.” […]

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