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Knowledge Representation for Philosophers

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Introduction to Formal Philosophy

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Abstract

This article provides an overview of the subfield of Artificial Intelligence known as “Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.” This field uses the techniques of philosophical logic, but aims at providing a theoretical basis for the management of declarative information in automated reasoning systems. Three topics are singled out here for attention: planning and reasoning about actions, description logics, and nonmonotonic logics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In [26], Patrick Hayes argued that frame-based representations, which had widely been taken to be an alternative to logical representations, could be reproduced in a first-order logic with a mechanism for formalizing defaults. (Hayes used an epistemic operator for this purpose.) The later history vindicated this idea, as ideas about frames and semantic nets were transformed into description logics—representation services that can be embedded in first-order logic, or in well understood extensions of first-order logic. See Sect. 18.4.2, below, for more about description logics.

  2. 2.

    These are [1, 3, 4, 11, 15, 16, 19,20,21, 23, 40, 51].

  3. 3.

    Philosophers should take note. In the philosophical literature, the Frame Problem has been widely misunderstood and wildly overgeneralized. See [58, Section 1.12].

  4. 4.

    I will ignore general default rules in this exposition, and only consider normal defaults.

  5. 5.

    John Pollock’s work, however, is an exception. Pollock developed a theory of nonmonotonic reasoning that is closely related to Argumentation Theory. See, for instance, [52].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Richmond H. Thomason

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Correspondence to Richmond H. Thomason .

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  1. Division of Philosophy, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden

    Sven Ove Hansson

  2. Center for Information and Bubble Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Vincent F. Hendricks

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Thomason, R.H. (2018). Knowledge Representation for Philosophers. In: Hansson, S., Hendricks, V. (eds) Introduction to Formal Philosophy. Springer Undergraduate Texts in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77434-3_18

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