Speaker:
Patrick Blackburn
 
Title:
The New Trivium
 
Abstract:
The medieval trivium consisted of logic, grammar and rhetoric. It was the `linguistic' component of medieval education as opposed to the more mathematical quadrivium. Over the last thirty years or so, something worth calling the New Trivium has emerged: logics and their applications to fields such as linguistics, social and cognitive psychology, knowledge representation, artificial intelligence, and theoretical computer science.  The European Summer Schools in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) have played a big part in this emergence.

In this talk I will discuss the New Trivium and why it is important, but I will mostly be concerned with a pedagogical issue: how best to teach it to humanities students with little or no formal background. Indeed, much of this talk is a meditation on how to teach logic without teaching logic.