Keith Devlin (Stanford University)
Taking logic into the workplace — where it rolls up its sleeves and does some useful (but dirty) work
Attempts in the 1980s and 90s at Stanford and elsewhere to apply concepts and methods of logic to study language, human communication, and real-world reasoning met with only limited success, at least in terms of their original aims. What did come out of those efforts were applications of ideas ad methods from logic in several domains, among them education, manufacturing process design, systems design, business planning, intelligence analysis, and defense technologies. In each case, those efforts met with success, when measured in terms of outcomes of significance within the domain.