PREPRINT of the penultimate version submitted, the final version will be available on the forthcoming issue of Philosophia Scientiae Journal. Abstract One of the main problems of most contemporary concept oriented knowledge representation systems consists in the fact that, for technical convenience, the representation of knowledge in prototypical terms, and the possibility of exploiting forms of typicality-based conceptual reasoning, is not permitted. Conversely, in cognitive sciences, evidence exists in favor of prototypical concepts and non-monotonic forms of conceptual reasoning have been extensively studied. This “cognitive ” representational and reasoning gap constitutes a problem for the computational systems, since prototypical information plays a crucial role in many relevant tasks. Taking inspiration from the so-called dual process theories of reasoning and rationality, we propose that conceptual representation in computational systems should be demanded to (at least) two representational components, each specialized in dealing with different kinds of reasoning processes. In this article, the theoretical and computational advantages of such “dual process” proposal are presented and briefly compared with other logic-oriented solutions adopted for facing the same problem.

IOS Press Engineering ontologies for question answering