Since the forum has settled down a bit, I thought I'd send
a note about an article I wrote, which appears in the current
issue of the IEEE Journal of Intelligent Systems: (01)
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIS.2007.29
Fads and Fallacies about Logic (02)
The HTML preprint version is on my web site: (03)
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/fflogic.htm
Fads and Fallacies about Logic (04)
One point in its favor is that Jim Hendler, who is the
editor of that journal and with whom I often have long
arguments, actually liked the article. (05)
Following is the opening paragraph. (06)
John Sowa
____________________________________________________________ (07)
Fads and Fallacies about Logic (08)
John F. Sowa
VivoMind Intelligence, Inc. (09)
Throughout the history of AI, logic has been praised by its admirers,
maligned by its detractors, and discussed in confusing and misleading
terms by almost everybody. Among the pioneers of AI, John McCarthy has
always been a strong promoter of logic, but Marvin Minsky has been a
skeptic who experimented with a wide range of alternatives. Roger Schank
had no doubts about logic, which he denounced at every opportunity. He
introduced the distinction between the _neats_ who used logic for
everything vs. the _scruffies_ like himself who developed notations that
were specifically designed for the problem at hand. Even advocates of
logic have disagreed among themselves about the role of logic, the
subset appropriate to any particular problem, and the trade offs of ease
of use, expressive power, and computational complexity. The debates
introduced many valuable ideas, but the hype and polemics confused the
issues and often led to unfortunate design decisions. Controversies
arise in several areas: relationships between language and logic; the
range of notations for logic; procedural vs. declarative
representations; distinctions between object level and metalevel
statements; expressive power and complexity; and the role of logic in
readable, usable, efficient interfaces. (010)
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