A beginner's guide to belief revision and truth maintenance systems

This brief note is intended to familiarize the non-TMS audience with some of the basic ideas surrounding classic TMS's (truth maintenance systems), namely the justification-based TMS and the assumption-based TMS. Topics of further interest include the relation between non-monotonic logics and TMS's, efficiency and search issues, complexity concerns, as well as the variety of TMS systems that have surfaced in the past decade or so. These include probabilistic-based TMS systems, fuzzy TMS systems, tri-valued belief systems, and so on

Cognitive architectures as Lakatosian research programmes: two case studies

Cognitive architectures - task-general theories of the structure and function of the complete cognitive system - are sometimes argued to be more akin to frameworks or belief systems than scientific theories. The argument stems from the apparent non-falsifiability of existing cognitive architectures. Newell was aware of this criticism and argued that architectures should be viewed not as theories subject to Popperian falsification, but rather as Lakatosian research programs based on cumulative growth. Newell's argument is undermined because he failed to demonstrate that the development of Soar, his own candidate architecture, adhered to Lakatosian principles. This paper presents detailed case studies of the development of two cognitive architectures, Soar and ACT-R, from a Lakatosian perspective. It is demonstrated that both are broadly Lakatosian, but that in both cases there have been theoretical progressions that, according to Lakatosian criteria, are pseudo-scientific. Thus, Newell's defense of Soar as a scientific rather than pseudo-scientific theory is not supported in practice. The ACT series of architectures has fewer pseudo-scientific progressions than Soar, but it too is vulnerable to accusations of pseudo-science. From this analysis, it is argued that successive versions of theories of the human cognitive architecture must explicitly address five questions to maintain scientific credibility

Social working memory: neurocognitive networks and directions for future research.

Navigating the social world requires the ability to maintain and manipulate information about people's beliefs, traits, and mental states. We characterize this capacity as social working memory (SWM). To date, very little research has explored this phenomenon, in part because of the assumption that general working memory systems would support working memory for social information. Various lines of research, however, suggest that social cognitive processing relies on a neurocognitive network (i.e., the "mentalizing network") that is functionally distinct from, and considered antagonistic with, the canonical working memory network. Here, we review evidence suggesting that demanding social cognition requires SWM and that both the mentalizing and canonical working memory neurocognitive networks support SWM. The neural data run counter to the common finding of parametric decreases in mentalizing regions as a function of working memory demand and suggest that the mentalizing network can support demanding cognition, when it is demanding social cognition. Implications for individual differences in social cognition and pathologies of social cognition are discussed

ADJECTIVISH INDONESIAN VERBS: A COGNITIVE SEMANTICS PERSPECTIVE

There has been a deeply rooted belief that parts of speech can be discretely categorized. It is somethingwidely accepted in linguistics. There is a tendency of taking for granted of such an academic beliefTherefore it happens from time to time without being thought critically the degree of its empirical truthThose studying linguistics will sooner or later read many linguistics text books stating that once a word hasits own category, there will be no potential of the word to have another word category. Most people learninglinguistics considered it as something necessary to occur. This linguistic phenomenon is not just taken tobe true, yet it comes to be taken as something conclusive. Factually, there are Indonesian verbs behavingadjectivishly. They are, to some extent, verbs, yet to another one, they are adjectives. It is evidenced by thefact that they have the properties of adjective. These linguistic phenomena demonstrate that there are Indonesian verbs that have stronger quality of their verbness. It means that there are Indonesian verbs thaare verbier than others. Based on the data found, Indonesian transitive verbs have higher potential to behaveadjectivishly than the Indonesian intransitive ones. A certain kind of Indonesian transitive verbs can betreated adjectivishly. This finding shows that the degree of word category discreteness, particularly verb, isnot something clear and cut. There are possibilities to emerge that word categories can, to some extent, be fuzzy. The fuzzy quality can be referred to the attributions of adjective to the Indonesian transitive verbs. Imeans that categorizing word class is not as simple as we thought before

Context for goal-level product line derivation

Product line engineering aims at developing a family of products and facilitating the derivation of product variants from it. Context can be a main factor in determining what products to derive. Yet, there is gap in incorporating context with variability models. We advocate that, in the first place, variability originates from human intentions and choices even before software systems are constructed, and context influences variability at this intentional level before the functional one. Thus, we propose to analyze variability at an early phase of analysis adopting the intentional ontology of goal models, and studying how context can influence such variability. Below we present a classification of variation points on goal models, analyze their relation with context, and show the process of constructing and maintaining the models. Our approach is illustrated with an example of a smarthome for people with dementia problems. 1