Is Logic Really Dead or Only Just Sleeping?

Abstract

There was a time when Logic was the dominant paradigm for human reasoning. As George Boole put it around one hundred and fifty years ago,Logic was synonymous with the “Laws of Thought”. Later, for most of the latter half of the twentieth century,it was the mainstream of Artificial Intelligence. But then it all went wrong. Artificial Intelligence researchers, frustrated by the lack of progress, blamed many of their problems on the logic-based approach. They argued that humans do not reason logically, and therefore machines should not be designed to reason logically either. Other approaches began to make progress where Logic was judged to have failed - approaches that were designed to simulate directly the neurological mechanisms of animal and human intelligence. Insect-like robots began to appear,and the beginning of a new Machine Intelligence was born. Logic seemed to be dieing - and to be taking Logic Programming (LP) with it.