Logic is the study of types or forms of inference.
Systematic analysis and evaluation of forms of inference can be traced far back. All the way to Aristotle. In this long history, a huge share of the importance of semiotics also falls.
Charles S. Peirce, one of the co-founders (along with Ferdinand de Saussure) of modern semiotics, considers logic as a normative science divided into three parts:
What is called logic today corresponds to what Peirce called Critique.
Seen as a normative science, logic has the task of showing how we as researchers could guide ourselves in any context of inquiry (search for truth).
If we are driven by the desire to discover the truth (or, in other words, to reach the most credible and understandable ones on a subject), certain courses of action would facilitate its realization, or at least destroy the inquiry. The task of logicians is to identify the forms of this facilitated inquiry.
Here, leadership must be understood in a very broad sense, covering all the ways in which we manage ourselves, with implications that we could exercise some control over that leadership. In this sense, the forms of inference are forms of guidance, because in their depth the naïve, in which we guide ourselves as thinkers (the way we behave in thinking or tearing), determine the forms of inference.
Thus, the normative approach to human leadership deals with gaining a fuller awareness of what we have done or are doing, and on this basis – a finer assessment of our achievements and endeavors.
In turn, such an assessment is aimed at achieving more complete control over ourselves and our self-management.
In short, self-awareness is subject to self-criticism, and he is subject to self-control.
Just as mathematics involves many rudimentary actions, such as counting, addition, and subtraction, etc., so logic involves rudimentary actions, such as adding two and two, or drawing a conclusion of one kind or another.
And just as mathematics progresses through its ability to create symbols that are too far removed from those from which it originated, so logic progresses through the same ability. The creation of such symbols involves the abstraction of each and all content, and such an abstraction allows logicians no less than mathematicians to consider operations in a purely formal aspect. But such operations, no matter how abstract and formal they are considered and studied, are procedures by which human inquiry goes and transmits its results in the field of thinking. And as such, they are criticized in the light of the norms and ideals of this inquiry.
Part of the motivation for formalizing these procedures, especially in the case of these procedures, especially in the case of logic, is the perceived need for a canon of criticism through which erroneous steps in inference or evidence can be detected and avoided.
