How to Think Straight: An Introduction to Critical Reasoning
Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/560728/how-to-think-straight-by-antony-flew/ ↗
Flew's book is a careful introduction to critical reasoning — the skills of noticing ambiguous terms, identifying implicit assumptions, catching the classic fallacies.
The register is academic-philosophical rather than self-help; Flew was a serious philosopher and the book takes its readers seriously as potential thinkers rather than as consumers of thinking tips.
For product direction the useful skill is noticing bad reasoning in real time, in meetings and in documents, which is harder than it sounds.
Pair with Weston for the complementary construction side of argumentation. A short book, repeatedly worth returning to.
Central argument
Flew argues that clear thinking is primarily a defensive discipline: the central skill is not constructing brilliant arguments but detecting where reasoning goes wrong — through ambiguous terms, concealed assumptions, and the classic informal fallacies. He treats these failures not as rhetorical tricks to be memorized but as systematic errors that recur because language and motivated reasoning reliably produce them. The implicit thesis is that most poor decisions trace back to linguistic imprecision or unexamined premises, not to lack of information.
Critique
The book's philosophical register, while intellectually serious, means it draws almost exclusively on political and ethical examples from a mid-twentieth-century academic context, which can make the transfer of skills to other domains — commercial, organizational, technical — something the reader must do entirely unaided. More substantially, Flew treats fallacy-detection as largely a logical competence, underweighting the social and institutional pressures that cause intelligent people to suppress recognition of bad reasoning even when they could identify it — a gap that limits the book's practical reach.
Why it matters for product
A CPO's working environment is dense with reasoning failures that nobody names: strategy documents that smuggle in contested assumptions as facts, roadmap debates where 'user needs' functions as an equivocal term meaning different things to engineering, design, and commercial stakeholders simultaneously, OKR discussions where correlation is treated as evidence of causation. Flew's framework gives a product leader a precise vocabulary for interrupting these patterns in real time — not to win arguments, but to surface the actual disagreement that is blocking progress.