Indeed, sentential logic had placed blinders on our minds' eyes, blinding us to many deductive activities that go on all the time. Many of these activities don't fit into the paradigm of sentential inference. Working with these programs ripped the blinders off and forced us to recognize the ways that people reason with information presented to them in all manner of ways. The computer is making this observation ever more important by providing increasingly powerful tools for the visualization of information. Scientific visualization, the graphic representation of massive amounts of scientific data, has become a powerful tool.
Society needs to understand how people can reason legitimately with visually presented information.
These questions have important philosophical and logical components. We foresee a time when these CAD and scientific visualization systems will have well-understood logical properties and provide computational support for logical reasoning in all its incarnations. Our own current efforts toward that distant goal are focused on the development of a computational analytical reasoning tool, one we call OpenProof . OpenProof will provide support for problem solving using both sentences and the kinds of simple visual formalism that people have found particularly useful, formalisms like position diagrams, Venn-Euler diagrams, Hasse diagrams, logic matrices, and the like. We hope that our work on OpenProof will provide insights into reasoning and lead to applications that will enhance human ability to reason both naturally and correctly.