Logic and Liberal Learning: Some Salient Issues

“Logic” nominally belongs to the classical trivium, the common ground, the crossroads of traditional liberal education, through which all educated persons would travel. But what sort of “logic” should or could fill that role today?

Many teachers of logic today feel pulled in what seem two different directions: towards the more apparently practical utility of the emerging “informal logic” agenda; and towards the more apparently rigorous canon of formal logic, be it deductive or inductive. These alternatives are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive of the possibilities of what might constitute an organon for the liberally educated person today. I will review some salient approaches to teaching logic, and some salient issues attending those approaches, focusing on issues regarding the utility of formal deductive logic in modern symbolic guise.