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49
Reaching agreements through argumentation: a logical model and implementation
- ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
, 1998
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Rationality and its Roles in Reasoning
- Computational Intelligence
, 1994
"... The economic theory of rationality promises to equal mathematical logic in its importance for the mechanization of reasoning. We survey the growing literature on how the basic notions of probability, utility, and rational choice, coupled with practical limitations on information and resources, in ..."
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Cited by 114 (6 self)
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The economic theory of rationality promises to equal mathematical logic in its importance for the mechanization of reasoning. We survey the growing literature on how the basic notions of probability, utility, and rational choice, coupled with practical limitations on information and resources, influence the design and analysis of reasoning and representation systems. 1 Introduction People make judgments of rationality all the time, usually in criticizing someone else's thoughts or deeds as irrational, or in defending their own as rational. Artificial intelligence researchers construct systems and theories to perform or describe rational thought and action, criticizing and defending these systems and theories in terms similar to but more formal than those of the man or woman on the street. Judgments of human rationality commonly involve several different conceptions of rationality, including a logical conception used to judge thoughts, and an economic one used to judge actions or...
Reasoning Situated in Time I: Basic Concepts
, 1990
"... The needs of a real-time reasoner situated in an environment may make it appropriate to view error-correction and non-monotonicity as much the same thing. This has led us to formulate situated (or step) logic, an approach to reasoning in which the formalism has a kind of real-time self-reference tha ..."
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Cited by 101 (44 self)
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The needs of a real-time reasoner situated in an environment may make it appropriate to view error-correction and non-monotonicity as much the same thing. This has led us to formulate situated (or step) logic, an approach to reasoning in which the formalism has a kind of real-time self-reference that affects the course of deduction itself. Here we seek to motivate this as a useful vehicle for exploring certain issues in commonsensereasoning. In particular, a chief drawback of more traditional logics is avoided: from a contradiction we do not have all wffs swamping the (growing) conclusion set. Rather, we seek potentially inconsistent, but nevertheless useful, logics where the real-time self-referential feature allows a direct contradiction to be spotted and corrective action taken, as part of the same system of reasoning. Some specific inference mechanisms for real-time default reasoning are suggested, notably a form of introspection relevant to default reasoning. Special treatment of ...
Impediments to Universal Preference-Based Default Theories
- Artificial Intelligence
, 1989
"... Research on nonmonotonic and default reasoning has identified several important criteria for preferring alternative default inferences. The theories of reasoning based on each of these criteria may uniformly be viewed as theories of rational inference, in which the reasoner selects maximally preferr ..."
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Cited by 72 (14 self)
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Research on nonmonotonic and default reasoning has identified several important criteria for preferring alternative default inferences. The theories of reasoning based on each of these criteria may uniformly be viewed as theories of rational inference, in which the reasoner selects maximally preferred states of belief. Though researchers have noted some cases of apparent conflict between the preferences supported by different theories, it has been hoped that these special theories of reasoning may be combined into a universal logic of nonmonotonic reasoning. We show that the different categories of preferences conflict more than has been realized, and adapt formal results from social choice theory to prove that every universal theory of default reasoning will violate at least one reasonable principle of rational reasoning. Our results can be interpreted as demonstrating that, within the preferential framework, we cannot expect much improvement on the rigid lexicographic priority mechanisms that have been proposed for conflict resolution.
Prospects for preferences
- Computational Intelligence
, 2004
"... This article examines prospects for theories and methods of preferences, both in the specific sense of the preferences of the ideal rational agents considered in economics and decision theory and in the broader interplay between reasoning and rationality considered in philosophy, psychology, and art ..."
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Cited by 65 (0 self)
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This article examines prospects for theories and methods of preferences, both in the specific sense of the preferences of the ideal rational agents considered in economics and decision theory and in the broader interplay between reasoning and rationality considered in philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Modern applications seek to employ preferences as means for specifying, designing, and controlling rational behaviors as well as descriptive means for understanding behaviors. We seek to understand the nature and representation of preferences by examining the roles, origins, meaning, structure, evolution, and application of preferences.
Reason Maintenance and Belief Revision - Foundations vs. Coherence Theories
- Belief Revision
, 1992
"... this paper, we examine Gardenfors's criticisms of the foundations approach. We argue that the coherence and foundations approaches differ less than has been supposed, in that the fundamental concerns of the coherence approach for conservatism in belief revision apply in exactly the same way in ..."
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Cited by 52 (7 self)
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this paper, we examine Gardenfors's criticisms of the foundations approach. We argue that the coherence and foundations approaches differ less than has been supposed, in that the fundamental concerns of the coherence approach for conservatism in belief revision apply in exactly the same way in the foundations approach. We also argue that the foundations approach represents the most direct way of mechanizing the coherence approach. Moreover, the computational costs of revisions based on epistemic entrenchment appear to equal or exceed those of revisions based on reasons, in the sense that any entrenchment ordering from which information about reasons may be recovered will be at least as costly to update as the reasons it represents. We conclude that while the coherence approach offers a valuable perspective on belief revision, it does not yet provide an adequate theoretical or practical basis for characterizing or mechanizing belief revision.
Active Logics: A Unified Formal Approach to Episodic Reasoning
"... Artificial intelligence research falls roughly into two categories: formal and implementational. This division is not completely firm: there are implementational studies based on (formal or informal) theories (e.g., CYC, SOAR, OSCAR), and there are theories framed with an eye toward implementabili ..."
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Cited by 36 (2 self)
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Artificial intelligence research falls roughly into two categories: formal and implementational. This division is not completely firm: there are implementational studies based on (formal or informal) theories (e.g., CYC, SOAR, OSCAR), and there are theories framed with an eye toward implementability (e.g., predicate circumscription). Nevertheless, formal /theoretical work tends to focus on very narrow problems (and even on very special cases of very narrow problems) while trying to get them "right" in a very strict sense, while implementational work tends to aim at fairly broad ranges of behavior but often at the expense of any kind of overall conceptually unifying framework that informs understanding. It is sometimes urged that this gap is intrinsic to the topic: intelligence is not a unitary thing for which there will be a unifying theory, but rather a "society" of subintelligences whose overall behavior cannot be reduced to useful characterizing and predictive principles.
Constructional belief and rational representation
- Computational Intelligence
, 1989
"... It is commonplace in artificial intelligence to divide an agent’s explicit beliefs into two parts: the beliefs explicitly represented or manifest in memory, and the implicitly represented or constructive beliefs that are repeatedly reconstructed when needed rather than memorized. Many theories of kn ..."
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Cited by 31 (13 self)
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It is commonplace in artificial intelligence to divide an agent’s explicit beliefs into two parts: the beliefs explicitly represented or manifest in memory, and the implicitly represented or constructive beliefs that are repeatedly reconstructed when needed rather than memorized. Many theories of knowledge view the relation between manifest and constructive beliefs as a logical relation, with the manifest beliefs representing the constructive beliefs through a logic of belief. This view, however, limits the ability of a theory to treat incomplete or inconsistent sets of beliefs in useful ways. We argue that a more illuminating view is that belief is the result of rational representation. In this theory, the agent obtains its constructive beliefs by using its manifest beliefs and preferences to rationally (in the sense of decision theory) choose the most useful conclusions indicated by the manifest beliefs. 1
An Overview of Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Logic Programming
- Journal of Logic Programming, Special Issue
, 1993
"... The focus of this paper is nonmonotonic reasoning as it relates to logic programming. I discuss the pre-history of nonmonotonic reasoning starting from approximately 1958. I then review the research that has been accomplished in the areas of circumscription, default theory, modal theories and logic ..."
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Cited by 28 (2 self)
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The focus of this paper is nonmonotonic reasoning as it relates to logic programming. I discuss the pre-history of nonmonotonic reasoning starting from approximately 1958. I then review the research that has been accomplished in the areas of circumscription, default theory, modal theories and logic programming. The overview includes the major results developed including complexity results that are known about the various theories. I then provide a summary which includes an assessment of the field and what must be done to further research in nonmonotonic reasoning and logic programming. 1 Introduction Classical logic has played a major role in computer science. It has been an important tool both for the development of architecture and of software. Logicians have contended that reasoning, as performed by humans, is also amenable to analysis using classical logic. However, workers in the field of artificial 1 This paper is an updated version of an invited Banquet Address, First Interna...
Rational Belief Revision
- Proceedings of the Second Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
, 1991
"... Theories of rational belief revision recently proposed by Alchourr'on, Gardenfors, Makinson, and Nebel illuminate many important issues but impose unnecessarily strong standards for correct revisions and make strong assumptions about what information is available to guide revisions. We reconstr ..."
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Cited by 27 (3 self)
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Theories of rational belief revision recently proposed by Alchourr'on, Gardenfors, Makinson, and Nebel illuminate many important issues but impose unnecessarily strong standards for correct revisions and make strong assumptions about what information is available to guide revisions. We reconstruct these theories according to an economic standard of rationality in which preferences are used to select among alternative possible revisions. By permitting multiple partial specifications of preferences in ways closely related to preference-based nonmonotonic logics, the reconstructed theory employs information closer to that available in practice and offers more flexible ways of selecting revisions. We formally compare this new conception of rational belief revision with the original theories, adapt results about universal default theories to prove that there is unlikely to be any universal method of rational belief revision, and examine formally how different limitations on rationality affe...
