Logic

Logic is a formal communications tool that defines the rules of correct reasoning.  Logical reasoning is about arriving at a conclusion in a rigorous way.  Inference is the steps in logical reasoning.  There two broad categories of logical reasoning: deductive and non-deductive.

Deductive reasoning provides a result that is guaranteed to be certain, therefore the result can be relied upon without doubt and humans need not be involved in a process because of the certainty of deductive reasoning.

Non-deductive reasoning, on the other hand, is not certain, meaning it could be correct but it could also be incorrect.  Non-deductive reasoning is based on probability.  And so non-deductive reasoning approaches must have a human in the loop to deal with that uncertainty.  There are three types of non-deductive reasoning: inductive, abductive, and analogy.

The elements of logic are the fundamental building blocks of logical theories that describe the logical conceptualization of some natural or man-made logical system.  An area of knowledge can describe the important logic of that system using these building blocks.

There are many logics. The standard logic we use is DATALOG which is a safe subset of first order logic that is implementable within computer software which eliminates the possibility of catastrophic system failure.

Additional Information:

• Area of Knowledge
• System
• Agent
• Elements of Logic
• Complexity
• Overview