There Is a Logician at the Desk! A New Profile for an Old Category of Scholars

It was March 1906 when a reply to Poincaré by Louis Couturat appeared on the “Revue de metaphysique et de morale”: “Poincaré has a completely false idea of logistics, considering it as a mechanism from which intelligence is more or less excluded; and he abuses against it an inexact comparison, by assimilating it to Stanley Jevons’ logical piano. It must first be known that this logical piano concerns only the logic of classes and that it performs only the least important part, and in fact the most mechanical, of the reasoning [...] But it leaves to be done almost all the rest, namely the “putting into equations” of the logical problem...” (Couturat, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, 14: 208–250, 1906). After more than a century, we are in a context where the debate around the absolute foundations of mathematics has vanished and research in computer science has grown up. In the present paper we intend to show how, following Cellucci’s definition of analytical logic, we could see the practice of automated reasoning (for more or less concrete problems) as one of the possible ways of declining the intellectual, cultural and professional identity of the “logicians”, even if it is not in general a deductive activity. Such identity would correspond to that Couturat alluded to in his text above.