Heterogeneous Logic

Abstract

A major concern to the founders of modern logic—Frege, Peirce, Russell, and Hilbert—was to give an account of the logical structure of valid reasoning. Taking valid reasoning in mathematics as paradigmatic, these pioneers led the way in developing the accounts of logic which we teach today and that underwrite the work in model theory, proof theory, and definability theory. The resulting notions of proof, model, formal system, soundness, and completeness are things that no one claiming familiarity with logic can fail to understand, and they have also played an enormous role in the revolution known as computer science. The success of this model of inference led to an explosion of results and applications. But it also led most logicians—and those computer scientists most influenced by the logic tradition—to neglect forms of reasoning that did not fit well within this model. We are thinking, of course, of reasoning that uses devices like diagrams, graphs, charts, frames, nets, maps, and pictures. The attitude of the traditional logician to these forms of representation is evident in the quotation of Neil Tennant in Chapter I, which expresses the standard view of the role of diagrams in geometrical proofs. One aim of our work, as explained there, is to demonstrate that this dogma is misguided. We believe that many of the problems people have putting their knowledge of logic to work, whether in machines or in their own lives, stems from the logocentricity that has pervaded its study for the past hundred years. Recently, some researchers outside the logic tradition have explored uses of diagrams in knowledge representation and automated reasoning, finding inspiration in the work of Euler, Venn, and especially C. S. Peirce. This volume is a testament to this resurgence of interest in nonlinguistic representations in reasoning. While we applaud this resurgence, the aim of this chapter is to strike a cautionary note or two. Enchanted by the potential of nonlinguistic representations, it is all too easy to overreact and so to repeat the errors of the past.