PhD Proposal: Time-Situated Metacognitive Agency and Other Aspects of Commonsense Reasoning

Much research in commonsense reasoning (CSR) involves use of external representations of an agent's reasoning, based on compelling features of classical logic such as soundness and completeness. These advantages however also come with severe costs, including: omniscience, consistency, static semantics, frozen deadlines, lack of self-knowledge, and lack of expressive power to represent the reasoning of others. Active logic was developed to address many of these, but work to date still leaves serious gaps. The present work will focus largely on major extensions of active logic to deal with self-knowledge, and the implementation of these into a newly-developed automated reasoner for commonsense active logic reasoning. Dealing with self-knowledge will be via a new treatment of quotation, which has been designed and implemented into the reasoner in a preliminary manner using initially a simple form of nesting. More sophisticated varieties of nesting, particularly quasi-quotation mechanisms, are proposed to be incorporated as extensions to the basic form of quotation. Applications of active logic to classical issues in CSR (including a preliminary treatment of one agent having the knowledge and inferential mechanisms to reason about another's time-situated reasoning) will also be pursued.Examining Committee:

Chair: Dr. Don Perlis Dept rep: Dr. Michelle Mazurek Members: Dr. James Reggia