Abstract

Symbolic logic is sited at intersection of philosophy, mathematics, linguistics and computer science. It deals with the structure of reasoning, and the formal features of information. Work in symbolic logic has almost exclusively treated the deductive validity of arguments: those arguments for which it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. However, techniques from twentieth-century logic have found a place in the study of inductive or probabilistic reasoning, in which premises need not render their conclusions certain.