clarke@utcsri.UUCP (02/03/87)
COLLOQUIUM, Tuesday, February 10, 11 am, SF1101 (SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Road) Professor L.A. Zadeh University of California ``The Role of Fuzzy Logic in Common Sense Reasoning and Knowledge Representation" Among the best-known approaches to commonsense reasoning are default reasoning and non-monotonic logic. In an alternative approach which is described in our talk, the conceptual framework of fuzzy logic is employed as a basis for both representation of and inference from commonsense knowledge. The point of departure in our approach is the assumption that commonsense knowledge may be represented as a collection of dispositions, that is, propositions which are preponderantly, but no necessarily always, true. Through a process of explicitation, dispositions may be transformed into dispositional propositions with explicit fuzzy quantifiers, e.g., most, almost all, usually, etc. Then, a variety of fuzzy syllogisms may be employed to infer a dispositional conclusion from dispositional premises. And finally, the dispositional conclusion may be transformed into a dispo- sition through the suppression of fuzzy quantifiers. Viewed in this per- spective, non-monotonic reasoning may be seen as a monotonic reasoning with dispositions. The concept of a disposition gives rise to a number of other disposi- tional concepts, among them dispositional predicates, dispositional com- mands, dispositional relations, etc. Possible applications of disposi- tional concepts are described and illustrated by examples. -- Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 (416) 978-4058 {allegra,cornell,decvax,linus,utzoo}!utcsri!clarke