Wykład prof. Antonisa Kakasa (Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus)

pt.: "Reconciling Formal and Informal Reasoning"

godzina 18.00

Abstrakt: 

For decades formal and informal reasoning were considered as
intrinsically different processes of human thought. While the first
one governs our strict mathematical or scientific reasoning the other
relates to the common sense reasoning that humans carry out at large
in their everyday life. Due to this quite different ``application
arena'' our epistemological or philosophical studies tend to give them
a separate identity. Yet their common root of human thinking suggests
that they are relatedin some way.

Recent work on argumentation in Artificial Intelligence (AI)
has shown that indeed formal and informal reasoning can be unified
under the umbrella of dialectic argumentative reasoning. Both types of
reasoning
are forms of argumentation. Formal reasoning sits on one end of the spectrum,
where arguments and their relative evaluation is carried out in a
rigid and strict way. On the other hand, although informal reasoning
is carried out in a structurally equivalent framework of
argumentation, a high degree of flexibility is admitted in the way
that this is applied, thus resulting in an apparent difference.
Argumentation is also strongly supported by work in Cognitive
Psychology where direct evidence is given that argumentation is
``native'' to (informal) human reasoning. It thus presents itself as a
primary and foundational notion on which we can uniformly build all
forms of reasoning. We call this Argumentation Logic.

Argumentation Logic, with its reconciliation of formal and informal
reasoning, offers the possibility to sufficiently formalize the human
forms of common sense reasoning and decision making into a logical
system that can possess similar cognitive faculties that are common in
the natural intelligence of people. Such a framework, which we call
Cognitive Argumentation, could then allow us to develop artificial
entities which can have a symbiotic relationship with their human
users (if indeed we wish to do so).