Words, Proofs, and Diagrams

The last twenty years have witnessed extensive collaborative research between computer scientists, logicians, linguists, philosophers, and psychologists. These interdisciplinary studies stem from the realization that researchers drawn from all fields are studying the same problem. Specifically, a common concern amongst researchers today is how logic sheds light on the nature of information. Ancient questions concerning how humans communicate, reason and decide, and modern questions about how computers should communicate, reason and decide are of prime interest to researchers in various disciplines.

Words, Proofs and Diagrams is a collection of papers covering active research areas at the interface of logic, computer science, and linguistics. Readers of the volume will find traditional research on process logics, issues in formal semantics, and language processing. In addition, the volume also highlights a particularly new area where all three disciplines meet—the study of images and graphics as information carriers and the diagrammatic reasoning supported by them.

The volume is divided into three parts: Diagrammatic Reasoning, Computation, and Logic and Language. Each of these parts is headed by an editorial introduction that maps out the relation of the papers to each other and to the wider field. While each chapter provides an angle on the logic of information, it is their interconnections that provides the total picture of the field today.

Dave Barker-Plummer is a research scientist at Stanford Universit’s Center for the Study of Language and Information. David I. Beaver is on the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. Johan van Benthem is a professor of computer science at Amsterdam University and a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. Patrick Scotto di Luzio earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Stanford University.

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7/1/2002