Skip to main content

Radical Thinking - Peter Lamont *****

It's not often you start reading a book and within a few pages are thinking 'this is something special.' Peter Lamont writes with a distinctive style, in places verging on poetry or liturgy in the way he uses repeated sentences for emphasis. There's also something of the dance of the seven veils about the whole thing - he glides around a subject, letting the reader catch a glimpse of something interesting, but taking his time to coyly reveal things. That can be a touch irritating at times, but it certainly catches the attention.

What this book isn't despite the subtitle, is a 'how to' guide, except at the most basic level. And it probably isn't about radical thinking per se either - it's more about the nature of thinking in general, and critical thinking in particular. Lamont uses various walks around bits of Edinburgh (where he lives and works), using historical connections to expose us to the nature of what we think about things and what to make of our thinking. And it's brilliant - I was captivated. It helps, I think that as well as being a professor of the history and theory of psychology, the author has also been a professional magician, understanding not only how we communicate things but how we conceal them.

Lamont stresses that we can only truly think critically if we consider ideas rather than people - playing down the modern tendency to discount an idea because the thinker did something we don't like. He's also quite down on the psychologists' collection of biases - not in the sense that they don't exist, but rather that they are unavoidable - and sometimes necessary to function. We need to be aware of them, but we can't 'fix' them - just act in a more considered way thanks to our awareness.

The closest we get to 'how to' is that when presented with information we ought to consider what the claim is (this can take some digging - it's not always at all clear in how it's put across), what the basis is for that claim, and what the purpose is of making the claim. But this is a tiny part of the way in which Lamont encourages us to think about how we think about things - what we see, what we feel, what we hear, the pros and cons of the scientific method, and the importance of considering viewpoints beyond our own. As he notes, we see the world through a narrow window and need to look beyond that.

Don't expect magic answers on how to become a super-thinker, or a radical. And I think it's fair to say that some people will find the way that Lamont dances around the subject in a teasing fashion, rarely taking it straight on, frustrating. But I found the book hugely readable - I kept wanting to come back to it when I had to put it down - and at risk of coming up with a cliché it genuinely makes you think, which can't be a bad thing. Highly recommended.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more