Abstract

OSCAR is a fully implemented architecture for a cognitive agent, based largely on the author’s work in philosophy concerning epistemology and practical cognition. The seminal idea is that a generally intelligent agent must be able to function in an environment in which it is ignorant of most matters of fact. The architecture incorporates a general-purpose defeasible reasoner, built on top of an efficient natural deduction reasoner for first-order logic. It is based upon a detailed theory about how the various aspects of epistemic and practical cognition should interact, and many of the details are driven by theoretical results concerning defeasible reasoning. The architecture is easily extensible by changing the set of inference schemes supplied to the reasoner. Existing inference schemes handle many kinds of epistemic cognition, including reasoning from perceptual input, causal reasoning and the frame problem, and reasoning defeasibly about probabilities. Work is underway to implement a system of defeasible decisiontheoretic planning.