COMMENT:A textbook that should find a place in elementary courses in logic, epistemology or critical reasoning. It is written with clarity and vigor about a range of issues which would generate lively discussion in a first-year class, where permissive epistemologies ("truth is what we choose to believe; reality is something we create") are curiously popular. Among its problems is the suggestion that all philosophical problems as misunderstandings generated by vagueness and equivocation, dismissing many real problems as disputes about meaning. Gray also defends a naive falsificationist view of science, an improvement on the permissive standards accepted by New Agers, but it is doubtful that practicing scientists could live with it.
