[SystemSafety] Logic

[Patrick Graydon]

I’ll leave people who know more about formal methods than I do to specify what would be useful information for programmers and/or graduate students to have.  But I wonder if our task as educators would be easier if the primary and secondary schools taught basic formal logic.  For that matter, I think those schools should teach informal logic and the formal and rhetorical fallacies as well.  Doing so might do wonders for the sort of people Jamie Whyte rails against in Crimes Against Logic.  Certainly it might help the people who think that same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry understand why court after court has shot down the bag of appeal to emotion (think of the kids!) and appeal to antiquity fallacies that comprise their ‘argument’.  And this would free up the weeks we spend teaching basic symbolic logic to freshman for more advanced and interesting topics.

— Patrick

Dr Patrick John Graydon
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
School of Innovation, Design, and Engineering (IDT)
Mälardalens Högskola (MDH), Västerås, Sweden