[sci.logic] SUNY Buffalo Philosophy Colloquium

rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU (William J. Rapaport) (10/18/88)

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                         UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO
                      STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

                        DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
                  GRADUATE GROUP IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
                                  and
   GRADUATE RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN COGNITIVE AND LINGUISTIC SCIENCES

                                PRESENT

                              JOHN POLLOCK

                        Department of Philosophy
                         University of Arizona

                OSCAR:  A General Theory of Rationality

The enterprise is the construction of a general  theory  of  rationality
and  its  implementation  in  an automated reasoning system named OSCAR.
The paper describes a general architecture for rational  thought.   This
includes  both theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning, and builds
in important interconnections between them.  It is urged that a  sophis-
ticated  reasoner  must be an _introspective reasoner_, capable of moni-
toring its own reasoning and reasoning about it.  An introspective  rea-
soner  is  built  on top of a non-introspective reasoner that represents
the system's default reasoning strategies.  The  introspective  reasoner
engages in practical reasoning about reasoning in order to overide these
default strategies.  The paper  concludes  with  a  discussion  of  some
aspects of the default reasoner, including the manner in which reasoning
is interest-driven and the structure of defeasible reasoning.

                      Wednesday, October 26, 1988
                               4:00 P.M.
                     684 Baldy Hall, Amherst Campus

           There will be an evening discussion at 8:00 P.M.,
           at Mary Galbraith's, 130 Jewett Parkway, Buffalo.

Copies of the paper are available from Bill Rapaport, Dept. of  Computer
Science, 636-3193.  Contact Rapaport or Jim Lawler, Dept. of Philosophy,
636-2444, for further information.