Cognitive Carpentry

Book excerpt: A sequel to the author's How to Build a Person, this work builds upon that theoretical groundwork for the implementation of rationality through artificial intelligence. It argues that progress in AI has stalled because of its creators' reliance upon unformulated intuitions about rationality. Instead, the author bases the OSCAR architecture upon an explicit philosophical theory of rationality, encompassing principles of practical cognition, epistemic cognition and defeasible reasoning. One of the results is the first automated defeasible reasoner capable of reasoning in a rich, logical environment.