Artificial general intelligence: Proceedings of the Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2009, Arlington, Virginia, USA, March 6-9, 2009

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research focuses on the original and ultimate goal of AI – to create broad human-like and transhuman intelligence, by exploring all available paths, including theoretical and experimental computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and innovative interdisciplinary methodologies. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called narrow AI – the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks. In recent years, however, more and more researchers have recognized the necessity – and feasibility – of returning to the original goals of the field. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of human level intelligence and more broadly artificial general intelligence

Modes of Truth

The aim of this volume is to open up new perspectives and to raise new research questions about a unified approach to truth, modalities, and propositional attitudes. The volume’s essays are grouped thematically around different research questions. The first theme concerns the tension between the theoretical role of the truth predicate in semantics and its expressive function in language. The second theme of the volume concerns the interaction of truth with modal and doxastic notions. The third theme covers higher-order solutions to the semantic and modal paradoxes, providing an alternative to first-order solutions embraced in the first two themes. This book will be of interest to researchers working in epistemology, logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and semantics

Modes of Truth

The aim of this volume is to open up new perspectives and to raise new research questions about a unified approach to truth, modalities, and propositional attitudes. The volume’s essays are grouped thematically around different research questions. The first theme concerns the tension between the theoretical role of the truth predicate in semantics and its expressive function in language. The second theme of the volume concerns the interaction of truth with modal and doxastic notions. The third theme covers higher-order solutions to the semantic and modal paradoxes, providing an alternative to first-order solutions embraced in the first two themes. This book will be of interest to researchers working in epistemology, logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and semantics

Pitching an Argument: Intonation, information, and inference in syllogistic discourse

Institute for Communicating and Collaborative SystemsIn the century or so that syllogisms have received the attention of psychologists, their interpretation both as and within particular types of discourse has been largely downplayed. A significant element in the guidance of interpretation is information structure as expressed in prosody. This thesis explores the role of intonation in syllogistic discourse and its effect on reasoning. A theoretical analysis of the information structures of syllogisms is presented which produces two classes of intonation patterns, the 'contextually concordant' (CC) and the 'contextually neutral' (CN), putatively corresponding to two discourse types. These are then investigated in a series of experiments. The initial observational study aims at confirming the use and significance of CC and CN patterns in a syllogism solving task. The remaining two experiments employ a purpose-built voice synthesiser to investigate the effects of imposing CC and CN contours on premises, first in a syllogism solving task and then in a syllogism evaluation task. The results show that both CC and CN intonation patterns are indeed used by participants and bear a systematic relationship to both the number and accuracy of conclusions they draw. When used in the presentation of syllogisms, however, these patterns do not influence the production of conclusions, only the evaluation of them. It is therefore argued that the discourse types to which they relate depend upon whether the syllogism is interpreted as a proof or as a problem. Further work based on these findings could aim to probe the informational links between conclusions and premises and thereby elucidate the coherence of arguments

An Electroencephalogram Investigation of Two Modes of Reasoning

The use of electroencephalography (EEG) to exam the electrical brain activity associated with reasoning provides an opportunity to quantify the functional and temporal aspects of this uniquely human capability, and at the same time expand our knowledge about what a given event-related potential (ERP) might measure. The question of what form of mental representation and transformational processes underlie human reasoning has been a central theme in cognitive psychology since its inception (Chomsky, 1957; McCarthy, 1955; Miller, 1956; Newell, Shaw, Simon, 1958). Two prominent, but competing views remain at the forefront of the discussion, one positing that human inference making is principally syntactic (Braine & O'Brien, 1998; Fodor, 1975; Pylyshyn, 1984; Rips, 1994), and the other that it is, fundamentally, semantic in nature (Gentner & Stevens, 1983; Johnson-Laird, 1983). The purpose of the proposed study is to investigate the neurophysiology of mental model (MM) and mental rule (MR) reasoning using high-density electroencephalography (EEG), with the goal of providing a characterization of the time course and a general estimate of the spatial dimensions of the brain activations correlated with these specific instances of two classic views of reasoning. The research is motivated by two questions: 1) Will violations of expectancy established by the devised MM and MR reasoning strategies evoke the N400 and P600 ERPs, respectively, and 2) Will topographical scalp distributions associated with each reasoning strategy suggest distinct psychological representations and processes? A finding of a N400 response in the MM condition suggests that reasoning about the relations between entities in the type of problems presented engages a network of cortical areas previously shown to be involved in processing violations of semantic expectancies in studies of language comprehension. By comparison, incongruent events in the MR condition are expected to evoke a bilateral anterior P600, a component previously associated with recognizing and restructuring syntactic anomalies or incongruities in sentence comprehension. If the hypothesized results are obtained they would provide potentially insightful information about the chronometry of mental processes associated with the different representations and inference making mechanisms postulated to support each mode of reasoning, and as well, broaden our understanding of the neural functionality associated with the N400 and P600 ERP