Commonsense Reasoning, 2nd Edition

Foreword to the First Edition

Murray Shanahan, Imperial College London

An eminent professor of logic once said to me, “Why do you bother devising all those little predicate calculus theories? We already know that first-order predicate calculus is capable of expressing almost anything, so what is the point?” This question typifies the attitude of a certain breed of logician, for whom the quintessence of intellectual endeavour is the study of the metalevel properties of various formalisms—their expressive power, their computational limitations, and the relationships between one formalism and another. Without doubt such work is, from an academic point of view, noble and worthwhile. So I did wonder, for several minutes, whether the eminent logician ...