Logic

Main article: Ratings system

One of the central goals of the ratings system is to help people think better. Logic is a fundamental aspect of that, along with having reliable factual information. Here we will discuss various aspects of logic and how it might be practically incorporated into the ratings system.

We start first with symbolic logic, which is really a subset of mathematics. Many arguments, through careful inspection, can be reduced to symbolic forms and analyzed using rigorous methods. Software is available for doing this and we take a brief look at how AI fares in this regard. We take this a step further by introducing methods for propositional, syllogistic, and quantificational (predicate) logic. The Prolog programming language is also useful for symbolic logic.

Logic can also be divided by argument type such as deductive and inductive arguments. Another important distinction is formal logic, which is everything we have mentioned so far, and informal logic and fallacy detection. A couple of different software packages for argumentation are analyzed but neither seem altogether suitable for incorporation into a ratings system. One of them, Carneades, can also be viewed as an argument mapping tool. Argument mapping tools seem like they offer a better avenue for incorporation.