... strong and optimistic claims about the value of rationality at a moment in history that seems to have turned its back on logic and rationality. And in these pages he makes perfectly clear that he’s not dealing in empty rhetoric.

For someone who used to write sparkling books on language and the mind, Pinker has also become a player in the culture wars. The subject of this book might seem innocent—a worthy attempt to rein in the madness of the post-truth era. Some, though, will perceive it as a provocation.

For someone who so frequently and serenely proclaims that he’s right, Steven Pinker can get curiously defensive.

In recent years it has become more fashionable to dismiss Pinker as a naive whig than to laud him as an inspiring prophet.

Almost every sentence in Rationality is crisp and intelligible, which is quite a feat, given that explaining logic to humans is like teaching them Sanskrit. Pinker suggests various ways to run our collective affairs more rationally. And yet the book ends almost despondently. It’s not simply that most of us cannot think rationally. Worse than that...much of the time, most people don’t want to.

... an engaging analysis of the highest of our faculties and perhaps (ironically) the least understood.

The contrast he draws between our rational capacities and our current situation will resonate.

Plenty of this is unavoidably hard going. Formulas of conditional probability, in particular, may make some wistful for the torture of medieval syllogisms. Yet Pinker rightly treats the subject as valuable for clear thinking.

... offers a pragmatic dose of measured optimism, presenting rationality as a fragile but achievable ideal in personal and civic life.

Among other things, Rationality is also a response to these critics, a reaffirmation of critical thinking against the encroachments of critical theory.

Revealing.

The author can be heady and geeky, but seldom to the point that his discussions shade off into inaccessibility.