Editorial: An Undergraduate Degree in Practical Reasoning

Logic as a single, unified academic discipline does not exist today. To be a logician today, you need to train as a mathematician, philosopher or computer scientist. Not only will you need to master topics that might be peripheral to your main area of interest, but you will have less and less in common with fellow logicians working in other disciplines. Eventually you may even lose touch with the original purpose of logic: to develop and put into practice tools and techniques to help people reason and communicate more clearly and more effectively. Only a few decades ago, students were taught Latin and geometry, largely for the purpose of teaching logic by osmosis. Today these subjects have fallen out of fashion, and no subject more directly concerned with teaching logic seems to have taken their place-a sad reflection of the lack of impact of academic logic on education and everyday life. Ironically, never before has there been greater progress in the development of logic for practical purposes-applications in computer science to programming languages, program specification languages and databases; and applications in artificial intelligence to expert systems, natural language processing, and to knowledge representation and reasoning more generally. And never before has logic been so influential in other disciplines concerned with human language and human reasoning. Indeed a number of scholars working in those disciplines have obtained important results of direct relevance to the theory and practice of human logic-about the deductive processing of natural language communications in linguistics, about human deduction in psychology and about the logic of norms and argumentation in the law. But these results have had little impact on the work of logicians working in the mainstream disciplines of mathematics, philosophy and computer science. It would be unrealistic to expect logicians to abandon their host disciplines and to establish themselves in newly instituted departments of logic. It is not too ambitious, however, for like-minded logicians in different academic departments to collaborate on the development of an interdisciplinary, undergraduate degree course in practical, logic-based reasoning. It is important that such a degree course should focus on teaching practical skills and should draw upon more academically oriented logic primarily to support more practical objectives. For this purpose, I propose that the course be driven by practical exercises in English composition (or any other natural language), legal reasoning, computing and artificial intelligence. These exercises should be supported by more theoretical …