FLAP Journal 2017 Journal Article
What are the basic logical notions and skills that all beginning students should learn, and that might stay with them as a useful cultural travel kit for their lives, even when an overwhelming majority will not become professional logicians? The course “Logic in Action” http: //www. logicinaction. org/ tries to convey the idea that logic is about reasoning but also much more: including information and action, both by individuals and in multi-agent settings, studied by semantic and syntactic tools, and still confirming to the standards of preci- sion of an exact and mathematized discipline. Viewed in this way, modern logic sits at a crossroads of academic disciplines where interesting new developments occur every day. In this light introduction, I explain the main ideas behind the design of the course, which combines predicate logic with various modal log- ics, and I lightly discuss its current manifestations and dialects in Amsterdam, Beijing and the Bay Area, as well as its future as an EdX pilot course. 1 History of the course There is a thriving international market of new on-line logic courses today, witness the many projects presented at the successive TTL conferences 1 and the links there to earlier conferences in this series. Roughly speaking these endeavors fall into two kinds. Sometimes the new technology is used to create high-tech versions of largely standard fare in the traditional curriculum with, say, sophisticated graphics interfaces for classical natural deduction proof systems, like a Latin Mass with rock I thank the organizers of the Conference on Tools for Teaching Logic, Rennes 2015, for giving me an opportunity and a forum for reflecting on the course “Logic in Action”. I also thank the members of the core LiA development team for the course as well as the users that we know of, and finally, I am grateful to the two referees for this paper for providing very useful critical comments. 1 See the website http: //ttl2015. irisa. fr of these conferences.