Thinking Rationally: The Laws of Thought Approach

The Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to attempt to codify "right thinking," that is, irrefutable reasoning processes. His famous syllogisms provided patterns for argument structures that always gave correct conclusions given correct premises. For example, "Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal.



"These laws of thought were supposed to govern the operation of the mind, and initiated the field of logic. The development of formal logic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which we describe in more detail in Chapter 6, provided a precise notation for statements about all kinds of things in the world and the relations between them.

(Contrast this with ordinary arithmetic notation, which provides mainly for equality and inequality statements about numbers.) By 1965, programs existed that could, given enough time and memory, take a description of a problem in logical notation and find the solution to the problem, if one exists. (If there is no solution, the program might never stop looking for it). The so-called logicist tradition within artificial intelligence hopes to build on such programs to create intelligent systems.



There are two main obstacles to this approach. First, it is not easy to take informal knowledge and state it in the formal terms required by logical notation, particularly when the knowledge is less than 100% certain. Second, there is a big difference between being able to solve a problem "in principle" and doing so in practice. Even problems with just a few dozen facts can exhaust the computational resources of any computer unless it has some guidance as to which reasoning steps to try first. Although both of these obstacles apply to any attempt to build computational reasoning systems, they appeared first in the logicist tradition because the power of the representation and reasoning systems are well-defined and fairly well understood.