Linguistics

The revival of interest insemantics among theoretical linguists in the late 1960s awakened their interest in the interrelations of logic and linguistic theory as well. It was also discovered that certain grammatical problems are closely related to logicians’concepts and theories. A near-identity of linguistics and “natural logic” has been claimed by the U.S. linguistGeorge Lakoff. Among the many conflicting and controversial developments in this area, special mention may perhaps be made of attempts byJerrold J. Katz, a U.S. grammarian-philosopher, and others to give a linguistic characterization of such fundamental logical notions as analyticity; the sketch by Montague of a “universal grammar” based on his intensional logic; and the suggestion (by several logicians and linguists) that what linguists call “deep structure” is to be identified with logical form. Of a much less controversial nature is the extensive and fruitful use ofrecursive function theory and related areas of logic in formal grammars and in the formal models of language users.

Psychology

Although the “laws of thought” studied in logic are not theempirical generalizations of a psychologist, they can serve as aconceptual framework for psychological theorizing. Probably the best known recent example of such theorizing is the large-scale attempt made in the mid-20th century byJean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, to characterize the developmental stages of a child’s thought by reference to the logical structures that he can master.

Elsewhere in psychology, logic is employed mostly as an ingredient of various models using mathematical ideas or ideas drawn from such areas as automata orinformation theory. Large-scale direct uses are rare, however, partly because of the problems mentioned above in the section on logic and information.

Law

Of the great variety of kinds of argumentation used in the law, some are persuasive rather than strictly logical, and others exemplify different procedures inapplied logic rather than the formulas of pure logic. Examinations of “Lawiers Logike”—as the subject was called in 1588—have also uncovered a variety of arguments belonging to the various departments of logic mentioned above. Such inquiries do not seem to catch the most characteristic kinds of legal conceptualization, however—with one exception, viz., a theory developed byWesley Newcomb Hohfeld, a pre-World War I U.S. legal scholar, of what he called the fundamental legalconceptions. Although originally presented in informal terms, this theory is closely related to recentdeontic logic (in some cases in combination with suitable causal notions). Even some of the apparent difficulties are shared by the two approaches: the deonticlogician’s notion of permission, for example, which is often thought of as being unduly weak, is to all practical purposes a generalization of Hohfeld’s concept of privilege.

Education

After having been one of the main ingredients of the general school curriculum for centuries, logic virtually disappeared from liberal education during the first half of the 20th century. It has made major inroads back into school curricula, however, as a part of the new mathematical curriculum that came into fairly general use in the 1960s, which normally includes the elements of propositional logic and ofset theory. Logic is also easily adapted to being taught by computers and has been used in experiments with computer-based education.