The chapter presents the prototyping of a thinking routine designed to foster good inference habits in children ages 6 to 11. The prototyping was developed at Ninho, an educational project for children from underprivileged households in Brazil. The thinking routines by Ritchhart and colleagues (2006) served as our starting point. Following a Virtue Education (VE) approach, we supposed that the repeated application would conduce to habituation. In addition, to increase peer-to-peer interactions, the teacher applying the routines worked as a facilitator (...) in a Community of Inquiry (CI). After six months of application, the results were partially successful. We identified that the repeated exposition to the magic question “What makes you say that?” made children more aware of the evidence supporting their assumptions. Furthermore, the interactions between peers made them recognize different perspectives. However, we also identified some shortcomings. Most of them seemed to arise from cognitive biases. At the individual level, belief perseverance kept children too attached to their first assumptions. They preferred self-serving rationalizations instead of accepting a counter-argument. At the group level, we identified problems of social contagion such as information cascades. The effects of a first opinion rhetorically voiced were hard to efface. Since none of the steps on the previous routines addressed these biases, we prototyped a routine to start filling this gap. Following Critical Thinking (CT) theorists, we added a step of structured instruction concerning one specific reasoning technique - the inference to the best explanation. Moreover, the recommendation of cognitive psychologists motivated the inclusion of some extra features to avoid groupthink biases. For instance, a visual table that juxtaposes contrasting arguments should facilitate comparative evaluations. Also, a star-based evaluation scale should help different individuals to discuss their assessments based on a common ground. As described in the end, the prototype with elements from VE, CI and CT presented promising results. (shrink)

Expert reasoning combines voluminous domain‐specific knowledge with more general factual and strategic knowledge. Whereas expert system builders have recognized the need for specificity and problem‐solving researchers the need for generality, few attempts have been made to develop expert reasoning engines combining different kinds of knowledge at different levels of generality. This paper reports on the FERMI project, a computer‐implemented expert reasoner in the natural sciences that encodes factual and strategic knowledge in separate semantic hierarchies. The principled decomposition of knowledge according (...) to type and level of specificity yields both power and cross‐doman generality, as demonstrated in FERMI's ability to apply the same principles of invariance and decomposition to solve problems in fluid statics, DC‐circuits, and centroid location. Hierarchical knowledge representation and problem‐solving principles are discussed, and illustrative problem‐solving traces are presented. (shrink)

This paper studies emotional inferencing triggered by emotion terms using Pragma-Dialectics and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The corpus, in French, is an excerpt of a video-recorded testimony in which a middle school teacher evokes her experience of being in class the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack, thus presenting a case of argumentation in context. The analysis focuses on the argumentative structure and on the rhetorical strategies that trigger emotional inferencing. The emotional inferencing derives from a (...) Locus of Ontological Implication, which links a situation and an emotion, while the culture-bound elements tend to be part of the endoxon. (shrink)

This new and important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. In the last few decades there has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based (...) on data taken out of context. This book is the first detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy. (shrink)

A formal, computational, semantically clean representation of natural language is presented. This representation captures the fact that logical inferences in natural language crucially depend on the semantic relation of entailment between sentential constituents such as determiner, noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, and verb phrases.The representation parallels natural language in that it accounts for human intuition about entailment of sentences, it preserves its structure, it reflects the semantics of different syntactic categories, it simulates conjunction, disjunction, and negation in natural language by computable (...) operations with provable mathematical properties, and it allows one to represent coordination on different syntactic levels. (shrink)

Political communication in modern democratic societies often requires the speaker to address multiple audiences with heterogeneous values, interests and agendas. This creates an incentive for communication strategies that allow politicians to send, along with the explicit content of their speech, concealed messages that seek to secure the approval of certain groups without alienating the rest of the electorate. These strategies have been labeled dogwhistling in recent literature. In this article, we provide an analysis of overt intentional dogwhistling. We recognize two (...) main stages within the OIDs’ way of conveying a concealed message: the expression of a perspective together with the transmission of an accompanying positioning message vis-à-vis the OID targeted sub-audience, and the inferential extraction of a set of cognitive and non-cognitive contents inferred on the basis of the former stage. Furthermore, we identify three linguistic mechanisms whereby these contents may be transmitted: conventional meaning, conversational implicature and perlocutionary inferencing. Hence, on our view OIDs are not a uniform category, as they may differ as to what extent the concealed content is speaker-meant, and thus actually communicated by the speaker. (shrink)

A computational model of inference during story comprehension is presented, in which story situations are represented distributively as points in a high‐dimensional “situation‐state space.” This state space organizes itself on the basis of a constructed microworld description. From the same description, causal/temporal world knowledge is extracted. The distributed representation of story situations is more flexible than Golden and Rumelhart's [Discourse Proc 16 (1993) 203] localist representation.A story taking place in the microworld corresponds to a trajectory through situation‐state space. During the (...) inference process, world knowledge is applied to the story trajectory. This results in an adjusted trajectory, reflecting the inference of propositions that are likely to be the case. Although inferences do not result from a search for coherence, they do cause story coherence to increase. The results of simulations correspond to empirical data concerning inference, reading time, and depth of processing.An extension of the model for simulating story retention shows how coherence is preserved during retention without controlling the retention process. Simulation results correspond to empirical data concerning story recall and intrusion. (shrink)

Learn to think critically with the leading introduction to reasoning and argumentation. Highlights In clear, reader-friendly language, The Power of Critical Thinking provides an engaging introduction to argumentation, deductive and inductive reasoning, inferencing, and evaluating scientific theories New Critical Thinking and the Media boxes in each chapter apply the principles of critical thinking to the realms of media, advertising, and news New content on "fake news," the COVID-19 pandemic, and other important contemporary topics reflects the changing world in which (...) today's students must apply their critical thinking abilities New and updated exercises offer extensive opportunities for students to practise the skills through which they will become active, engaged critical thinkers Additional online resources-including a study guide and practice quizzes for students as well as an instructor's manual, a test bank, and PowerPoint slides for instructors-offer stimulating materials to enhance the learning and teaching experiences. About the Authors Chris MacDonald is an associate professor and chair of the Law and Business Department at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University. Lewis Vaughn is an independent scholar and author of several textbooks on philosophy, ethics, and critical thinking. (shrink)

This collection of contributions from both linguists and lawyers brings a pragmatic perspective to the linguistic basis for legal meaning and for finding a norm by which to decide a case. That is, it turns from notions of linguistic meaning as residing in the text, as literal meaning waiting to be dug out, to focus instead on how readers infer pragmatic meaning, and on the kinds of inferencing that characterise legal discourse.

POLITICS is a system of computer programs which simulates humans in comprehending and responding to world events from a given political or ideological perspective. The primary theoretical motivations were: (1) the implemention of a functional system which applies the knowledge structures of Schank and Abelson (1977) to the domain of simulating political belief systems; (2) the development of a tentative theory of intentional goal conflicts and counterplanning. Secondary goals of the POLITICS project include developing a representation for belief systems, investigating (...) cognitive processes such as goal‐directed inferencing, and the integration of several types of knowledge representations into a functional system. (shrink)

This paper describes an AFOSR-supported basic research program that focuses on developing a new framework for combining hard with soft data in order to improve space situational awareness. The goal is to provide, in an automatic and near real-time fashion, a ranking of possible threats to blue assets (assets trying to be protected) from red assets (assets with hostile intentions). The approach is based on Conceptual Spaces models, which combine features from traditional associative and symbolic cognitive models. While Conceptual Spaces (...) are revolutionary, they lack an underlying mathematical framework. Several such frameworks have attempted to represent Conceptual Spaces, but by far the most robust is the model developed by Holender. His model utilizes integer linear programming in order to obtain an overall similarity value between observations and concepts that support the formation of hypotheses. This paper will describe a method for building Conceptual Spaces models for threats that utilizes ontologies as a means to provide a clear semantic foundation for this inferencing process; in particular threat ontologies and space domain ontologies are developed and employed in this approach. A space situational awareness use-case is presented involving a kinetic kill scenario and results are shown to assess the performance of this fusion-based inferencing framework. (shrink)

TThis paper aims to evidence the inherently metonymic nature of co-speech gestures. Arguing that motivation in gesture involves iconicity (similarity), indexicality (contiguity), and habit (conventionality) to varying degrees, it demonstrates how a set of metonymic principles may lend a certain systematicity to experientially grounded processes of gestural abstraction and enaction. Introducing visuo-kinetic signs as an umbrella term for co-speech gestures and signed languages, the paper shows how a frame-based approach to gesture may integrate different cognitive/functional linguistic and semiotic accounts of (...) metonymy (e.g., experiential domains, frame metonymy, contiguity, and pragmatic inferencing). The guiding assumption is that gestures metonymically profile deeply embodied, routinized aspects of familiar scenes, that is, the motivating context of frames. The discussion shows how gestures may evoke frame structures exhibiting varying degrees of groundedness, complexity, and schematicity: basic physical action and object frames; more complex frames; and highly abstract, complex frame structures. It thereby provides gestural evidence for the idea that metonymy is more basic and more directly experientially grounded than metaphor and thus often feeds into correlated metaphoric processes. Furthermore, the paper offers some initial insights into how metonymy also seems to induce the emergence of schematic patterns in gesture which may result from action-based and discourse-driven processes of habituation and conventionalization. It exemplifies how these forces may engender grammaticalization of a basic physical action into a gestural marker that shows strong metonymic form reduction, decreased transitivity, and interacting pragmatic functions. Finally, addressing basic metonymic operations in signed lexemes elucidates certain similarities regarding sign constitution in gesture and sign. English and German multimodal discourse data as well as German Sign Language (DGS) are drawn upon to illustrate the theoretical points of the paper. Overall, this paper presents a unified account of metonymy’s role in underpinning forms, functions, and patterns in visuo-kinetic signs. (shrink)

Learn to think critically with the leading introduction to reasoning and argumentation. Highlights In clear, reader-friendly language, The Power of Critical Thinking provides an engaging introduction to argumentation, deductive and inductive reasoning, inferencing, and evaluating scientific theories New Critical Thinking and the Media boxes in each chapter apply the principles of critical thinking to the realms of media, advertising, and news New content on "fake news," the COVID-19 pandemic, and other important contemporary topics reflects the changing world in which (...) today's students must apply their critical thinking abilities New and updated exercises offer extensive opportunities for students to practise the skills through which they will become active, engaged critical thinkers Additional online resources-including a study guide and practice quizzes for students as well as an instructor's manual, a test bank, and PowerPoint slides for instructors-offer stimulating materials to enhance the learning and teaching experiences. About the Authors Chris MacDonald is an associate professor and chair of the Law and Business Department at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University. Lewis Vaughn is an independent scholar and author of several textbooks on philosophy, ethics, and critical thinking. (shrink)

A cognitive pragmatic approach is taken to some long-standing problem cases of negation, the so-called presupposition denial cases. It is argued that a full account of the processes and levels of representation involved in their interpretation typically requires the sequential pragmatic derivation of two different propositions expressed. The first is one in which the presupposition is preserved and, following the rejection of this, the second involves the echoic (metalinguistic) use of material falling in the scope of the negation. The semantic (...) base for these processes is the standard anti-presuppositionalist wide-scope negation. A different view, developed by Burton-Roberts (1989a, 1989b), takes presupposition to be a semantic relation encoded in natural language and so argues for a negation operator that does not cancel presuppositions. This view is shown to be flawed, in that it makes the false prediction that presupposition denial cases are semantic contradictions and it is based on too narrow a view of the role of pragmatic inferencing. (shrink)

Thought experiments have played a prominent role in numerous cases of conceptual change in science. I propose that research in cognitive psychology into the role of mental modeling in narrative comprehension can illuminate how and why thought experiments work. In thought experimenting a scientist constructs and manipulates a mental simulation of the experimental situation. During this process, she makes use of inferencing mechanisms, existing representations, and general world knowledge to make realistic transformations from one possible physical state to the (...) next. The simulation reveals the impossibility of integrating multiple constraints drawn from existing representations and the world and pinpoints the locus of the required conceptual reform. (shrink)

This paper presents an adaptive logic enhancement of conditional logics of normality that allows for defeasible applications of Modus Ponens to conditionals. In addition to the possibilities these logics already offer in terms of reasoning about conditionals, this way they are enriched by the ability to perform default inferencing. The idea is to apply Modus Ponens defeasibly to a conditional and a fact on the condition that it is ‘safe' to do so concerning the factual and conditional knowledge at (...) hand. It is for instance not safe if the given information describes exceptional circumstances: although birds usually fly, penguins are exceptional to this rule. The two adaptive standard strategies are shown to correspond to different intuitions, a skeptical and a credulous reasoning type, which manifest themselves in the handling of so-called floating conclusions. (shrink)

This paper looks at the need for a better understanding of the impediments to critical thinking in relation to graduate student work. The paper argues that a distinction is needed between two vectors that influence student writing: (1) the word-level–sentence-level vector; and (2) the grammar–inferencing vector. It is suggested that much of the work being done to assist students is only done on the first vector. This paper suggests a combination of explicit use of deductive syllogistic inferences and computer-aided (...) argument mapping is needed. A methodology is suggested for tackling assignments that require students to ‘make an argument’. It is argued that what lecturers understand tacitly, now needs to be made a focus of deliberate educational practices. (shrink)

Semantics plays a role in grammar in at least three guises. (A) Linguists seek to account for speakers‘ knowledge of what linguistic expressions mean. This goal is typically achieved by assigning a model theoretic interpretation in a compositional fashion. For example, *No whale flies* is true if and only if the intersection of the sets of whales and fliers is empty in the model. (B) Linguists seek to account for the ability of speakers to make various inferences based on semantic (...) knowledge. For example, *No whale flies* entails *No blue whale flies* and *No whale flies high*. (C) The wellformedness of a variety of syntactic constructions depends on morpho-syntactic features with a semantic flavor. For example, *Under no circumstances would a whale fly* is grammatical, whereas *Under some circumstances would a whale fly* is not, corresponding to the downward vs. upward monotonic features of the preposed phrases. It is usually assumed that once a compositional model theoretic interpretation is assigned to all expressions, its fruits can be freely enjoyed by inferencing and syntax. What place might proof theory have in this picture? (shrink)

Despite overwhelming evidence suggesting that quantifier scope is a phenomenon that must be treated at the pragmatic level, most computational treatments of scope ambiguities have thus far been a collection of syntactically motivated preference rules. This might be in part due to the prevailing wisdom that a commonsense inferencing strategy would require the storage of and reasoning with a vast amount of background knowledge. In this paper we hope to demonstrate that the challenge in developing a commonsense inferencing (...) strategy is in the discovery of the relevant commonsense data and in a proper formulation of the inferencing strategy itself, and that a massive amount of background knowledge is not always required. In particular, we present a very effective procedure for resolving quantifier scope ambiguities at the pragmatic level using simple quantitative data that is readily available in most database environments. (shrink)

This study explored the effect of word knowledge facets on second language Chinese lexical inference by highlighting the moderating effect of language proficiency level and learners’ heritage status. L2 Chinese learners with a mixture of linguistic and cultural backgrounds completed a series of word-knowledge measurements as well as a lexical inferencing task. Through a moderated path model, the study demonstrated that word-general knowledge and word-specific knowledge contributed to L2 Chinese lexical inference. In addition, the study underlined the moderating effect (...) of heritage status on the correlation between word knowledge and lexical inference. Given the distinct patterns between heritage and non-heritage learners, morphological awareness may define the characteristics of reading profiles in the Chinese heritage learner population. (shrink)

Lepore and Stone seek to replace the rationality-based Gricean picture of coordination between speaker and hearer with one leaning more strongly on the roles of convention and speaker knowledge while doing away with conversational implicature. Focusing on the phenomena of indirect speech acts, asymmetric conjunction, and scalar inferencing, I argue that the case for abandoning implicature as an analytical tool is not ultimately compelling. I seek further to demonstrate the utility of the classical Gricean distinction between what is said (...) and what is implicated in the construction of an intuitively appealing approach to the perennial question of how to distinguish lying from misleading inside and outside the legal domain. (shrink)

Many types of part-whole relations have been proposed in the literature to aid the conceptual modeller to choose the most appropriate type, but many of those relations lack a formal specification to give clear and unambiguous semantics to them. To remedy this, a formal taxonomy of types of mereological and meronymic part-whole relations is presented that distinguishes between transitive and intransitive relations and the kind of entity types that are related. The demand to use it effectively brings afore new requirements (...) for automated reasoning over a hierarchy of relations. To ensure logically and ontologically correct inferencing over both the class and role hierarchy, the new reasoning service RBox compatibility for Description Logics reasoners is introduced. The proposed combination of formal semantics and the new reasoning service will improve the representation of the application domain when using part-whole relations in conceptual models and ontologies. (shrink)

This paper presents an information-based logic that is applied to the analysis of entailment, implicature and presupposition in natural language. The logic is very fine-grained and is able to make distinctions that are outside the scope of classical logic. It is independently motivated by certain properties of natural human reasoning, namely partiality, paraconsistency, relevance, and defeasibility: once these are accounted for, the data on implicature and presupposition comes quite naturally.The logic is based on the family of semantic spaces known as (...) bilattices, originally proposed by Ginsberg (1988), and used extensively by Fitting (1989, 1992). Specifically, the logic is based on a subset of bilattices that I call evidential bilattices, constructed as the Cartesian product of certain algebras with themselves. The specific details of the epistemic agent approach of the logical system is derived from the work of Belnap (1975, 1977), augmented by the use of evidential links for inferencing. An important property of the system is that it has been implemented using an extension of Fitting's work on bilattice logic programming (1989, 1991) to build a model-based inference engine for the augmented Belnap logic. This theorem prover is very efficient for a reasonably wide range of inferences. (shrink)

This paper presents a sound and complete proof system for the first order fragment of Discourse Representation Theory. Since the inferences that human language users draw from the verbal input they receive for the most transcend the capacities of such a system, it can be no more than a basis on which more powerful systems, which are capable of producing those inferences, may then be built. Nevertheless, even within the general setting of first order logic the structure of the formulas (...) of DRS-languages, i.e. of the Discourse Representation Structures suggest for the components of such a system inference rules that differ somewhat from those usually found in proof systems for the first order predicate calculus and which are, we believe, more in keeping with inference patterns that are actually employed in common sense reasoning.This is why we have decided to publish the present exercise, in spite of the fact that it is not one for which a great deal of originality could be claimed. In fact, it could be argued that the problem addressed in this paper was solved when Gödel first established the completeness of the system of Principia Mathematica for first order logic. For the DRS-languages we consider here are straightforwardly intertranslatable with standard formulations of the predicate calculus; in fact the translations are so straightforward that any sound and complete proof system for first order logic can be used as a sound and complete proof system for DRSs: simply translate the DRSs into formulas of predicate logic and then proceed as usual. As a matter of fact, this is how one has chosen to proceed in some implementations of DRT, which involve inferencing as well as semantic representation; an example is the Lex system developed jointly by IBM and the University of Tübingen ). (shrink)

The social philosophy of meaning and emotions represented in the work of Susanne Langer was recognized by Talcott Parsons, but has yet to be incorporated into mainstream sociological theoritizations. Langer's work is as potentially important to contemporary microsociology, and the sociology of emotions, as the work of Peirce, Mead, or Schutz. The impediment to appreciating her work resides in contemporary confusions regarding the nature of logic. Sociologists often subscribe to Wittgenstein's denial of the validity of formal logic in constructing theories (...) of human behavior. Langer has been misunderstood because her theoretizations address more than discursive logics and meanings. The thrust of Langer's work is that logic and meaning exist on a nondiscursive level of emotions. Though her work is more than 50 years old, we are now in a position to appreciate it because we are now exploring and conceptualizing the notion of social inferencing as existing beyond formal logic. (shrink)

To study the different mechanisms of understanding figurative language in a speaker’s native language and their second language, this study investigated how scientific metaphors in Chinese and English are electrophysiologically processed via event-related potential experimentation. Compared with the metaphors from daily life or in literary works, scientific metaphors tend to involve both a more complicated context structure and a distinct knowledge-inferencing process. During the N400 time window, English scientific metaphors elicited more negative N400s than Chinese ones at the parietal (...) region. In the late positive component time window, English scientific metaphors elicited less positive LPCs than Chinese ones at the parietal region, and larger late negativities encompassing smaller areas of the brain. The findings might indicate that for late unbalanced bilingual speakers, L2 scientific metaphor comprehension requires more effort in information retrieval or access to the non-literal route. Altogether, the possible findings are that non-native and non-dominant language processing involves decreased automaticity of cognitive mechanisms, and decreased sensitivity to the levels of conventionality of metaphoric meanings. (shrink)

The extant literature on discourse comprehension distinguishes between two types of texts: narrative and expository. Narrative discourse tells readers a story by giving them an account of events; the narration informs and/or persuades the readership by using textual elements such as theme, plot, and characters. Expository discourse explains or informs the readership by using concepts and techniques such as definition, sequence, categorization, and cause-effect relations. The present study is based on two experiments. In Experiment 1, we compared the two discourse (...) types to examine if college students would be better at extracting the meanings of novel words from one of the two types of discourse structure than from the other. The findings indicated that participants were significantly better at inferring the meaning of novel words from narrative compared to expository discourse. In Experiment 2, we examined the number of situation models that a reader is required to mentally construct, as a possible characteristic that influences the difficulty of learning new word meaning within narrative discourse. Contrary to intuition, fewer novel words were learned in a single-situation, as opposed to a multi-situation model condition, suggesting that the additional inferencing needed to construct multiple models also promotes word learning. Results are discussed with respect to how the structure of written discourse can facilitate word learning in a reader’s native language. Implications for education and assessment are also discussed. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’s suggestion that there are valid material inferences entails that validity is not limited to formal inferences. Because material inferences are expressed in ordinary language and deal with both conceptual and empirical matters, an interesting prospect unfolds: valid reasoning is irreducibly plural. However, it is not clear what the validity of inferences composed of non-logical and descriptive vocabulary means. I argue that it is better to speak of the legitimacy rather than the validity of material inferences. A material inference (...) can be understood as legitimate when one has a pragmatic propriety to infer from an assertion A to an assertion B. Pragmatic propriety designates the social-normative entitlement of inferencing. Because pragmatic proprieties are discipline-specific and local, legitimate reasoning is plural. Nevertheless, the shared general feature of reasoning practices is to preserve and improve the coherence of one’s system of belief. (shrink)

O'Brien et al. reported that readers generated elaborative inferences only when a text contained characteristics that made it easy to predict the specific inference that a reader would draw, and virtually eliminated the possibility of the inference being discon-firmed. Garrod et al., however, offered two qualifications to these conclusions. First, the two text characteristics manipulated may have produced different types of elaborative inferencing: a biasing context results in a passive form of elaborative inferencing, involving setting up a context (...) of interpretation, whereas the presence of a demand sentence invites the reader to actively predict a subsequent expression. Secondly, clear evidence for either type of inference will be apparent only with truly anaphoric materials. This work describes how a passive form of elaborative inferencing, reported by Garrod et al, may be implemented in a connectionist manner. We take the connectionist model proposed by Shastri and Ajjanagadde in order to represent a text in the form of a network. Next we analyze and discuss how an attentional focus could operate with the proposed reasoner system in order to deal with inference control and anaphora resolution, during text understanding. Our own suggestion is that the system proposed by Shastri and Ajjanagadde could be extended by incorporating focus in order to apply it to some open problems related to text processing. However, this extension presents implementational problems due to its local character. Distributed models seem to be in a better position to deal with the shift of the attentional states, given that these systems can learn. Particularly, the model proposed by Sun is close to our aims, and so we will discuss its implications in order to design a cognitive architecture for text comprehension. (shrink)

O'Brien et al. reported that readers generated elaborative inferences only when a text contained characteristics that made it easy to predict the specific inference that a reader would draw, and virtually eliminated the possibility of the inference being discon-firmed. Garrod et al., however, offered two qualifications to these conclusions. First, the two text characteristics manipulated may have produced different types of elaborative inferencing: a biasing context results in a passive form of elaborative inferencing, involving setting up a context (...) of interpretation, whereas the presence of a demand sentence invites the reader to actively predict a subsequent expression. Secondly, clear evidence for either type of inference will be apparent only with truly anaphoric materials. This work describes how a passive form of elaborative inferencing, reported by Garrod et al, may be implemented in a connectionist manner. We take the connectionist model proposed by Shastri and Ajjanagadde in order to represent a text in the form of a network. Next we analyze and discuss how an attentional focus could operate with the proposed reasoner system in order to deal with inference control and anaphora resolution, during text understanding. Our own suggestion is that the system proposed by Shastri and Ajjanagadde could be extended by incorporating focus in order to apply it to some open problems related to text processing. However, this extension presents implementational problems due to its local character. Distributed models seem to be in a better position to deal with the shift of the attentional states, given that these systems can learn. Particularly, the model proposed by Sun is close to our aims, and so we will discuss its implications in order to design a cognitive architecture for text comprehension. (shrink)

Shastri & Ajjanagadde argue convincingly that both structured connectionist networks and parallel dynamic inferencing are necessary for reflexive reasoning - a kind of inferencing and reasoning that occurs rapidly, spontaneously, and without conscious effort, and which seems necessary for everyday tasks such as natural language understanding. As S&A describe, reflexive reasoning requires a solution to thedynamic binding problem, that is, how to encode systematic and abstract knowledge and instantiate it in specific situations to draw appropriate inferences. Although symbolic (...) artificial intelligence systems trivially solve the dynamic binding problem using computers' registers and pointers, it has remained a difficult problem for connectionist systems. S&A's temporal synchrony solution to the dynamic binding problem using synchronous firing of argument units and the entities that are bound to them illustrates one way in which connectionist networks can do thisusing a constrained but important class of long-term knowledge rules. Their structured connectionist solution allows dynamic inferencing to proceed in parallel and therefore has a number of advantages for reflexive reasoning over most other connectionist and symbolic systems. (shrink)

Avicenna is undoubtedly one of the outstanding scientists and perhaps the most prominent one in the history of Islamic-Iranian civilization. After a lifetime of trying to describe, explain and complete the Greek intellectual heritage, Avicenna admitted to have achieved a realm of philosophy which he construed as "oriental philosophy''. Avicenna's oriental logic can be defined and explained according to the very oriental philosophy in terms of method and content. The issue is what the characteristics of this oriental philosophy and particularly, (...) oriental logic is. Since there is not direct and abundant evidence in "surface" as documents, we try to reach the conclusion by a range of indirect and limited evidences in "depth". In this paper, two different and yet consistent features of Avicenna's oriental logic are inferenced and introduced. In the first sense, oriental logic can refer to a range of "non-Aristotelian innovative and established systems" in the East, and in the second aspect, it can be an oriental horizon and dawn to establish a "fuzzy logic" which is considered today multi-valued and infinite-valued logic. (shrink)

A computational model of inference during story comprehension is presented, in which story situations are represented distributively as points in a high‐dimensional “situation‐state space.” This state space organizes itself on the basis of a constructed microworld description. From the same description, causal/temporal world knowledge is extracted. The distributed representation of story situations is more flexible than Golden and Rumelhart's [Discourse Proc 16 (1993) 203] localist representation.A story taking place in the microworld corresponds to a trajectory through situation‐state space. During the (...) inference process, world knowledge is applied to the story trajectory. This results in an adjusted trajectory, reflecting the inference of propositions that are likely to be the case. Although inferences do not result from a search for coherence, they do cause story coherence to increase. The results of simulations correspond to empirical data concerning inference, reading time, and depth of processing.An extension of the model for simulating story retention shows how coherence is preserved during retention without controlling the retention process. Simulation results correspond to empirical data concerning story recall and intrusion. (shrink)

This special issue “Inferences and Information Processing in a Conditional Framework“ is dedicated to conditionals as central objects for inferencing and information processing. It presents selected revised papers of the Workshop on Conditionals, Information, and Inference, CII'04, held in Ulm, Germany, co-located with the German national conference on AI, KI'2004.Conditional statements If A then B carry a very special kind of information that can not be captured by interpreting them as material implications. Roughly speaking, the premise, A, provides a (...) context in which it seems plausible to conclude B. So, each conditional can be seen as establishing a tight but flexible link between premise and conclusion, making up a unique piece of information. This link can and has been used successfully for knowledge representation, in particular, for nonclassical inferences and revising beliefs.It is just this generic, dynamic nature of conditionals that makes them most fascinating objects which are, however, difficult to control. But it seems that the problems one typically encounters when using conditionals for reasoning, mostly occur due to the narrowness of thinking strictly along classical lines that we have been getting used to. Classical logic has imposed a rigidity on human thinking that helped a lot making reasoning formal, precise, and clear. Conditionals, on the other hand, open up dimensions beyond classical theories, leaving room for plausibility, uncertainty, intuition, and commonsense reasoning. Philosophers and logicians have been discussing their logical nature since the …. (shrink)

There is more to legal knowledge representation than knowledge-bases. It is valuable to look at legal knowledge representation and its implementation across the entire domain of computerisation of law, rather than focussing on sub-domains such as legal expert systems. The DataLex WorkStation software and applications developed using it are used to provide examples. Effective integration of inferencing, hypertext and text retrieval can overcome some of the limitations of these current paradigms of legal computerisation which are apparent when they are (...) used on a stand-alone basis. Effective integration of inferencing systems is facilitated by use of a (quasi) natural language knowledge representation, and the benefits of isomorphism are enhanced. These advantages of integration apply to all forms of inferencing, including document generation and casebased inferencing. Some principles for development of integrated legal decision support systems are proposed. (shrink)