On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 12:36:10PM -0700, Charles D Hixson wrote: > Edward W. Porter wrote: > > > > Fred is a human > > Fred is an animal > > You REALLY can't do good reasoning using formal logic in natural > language...at least in English. That's why the invention of symbolic > logic was so important.
I suppose this was pounded to death in the rest of the thread, (which I haven't read) but still: syllogistic reasoning does occur in hypothesis formation, and thus, learning: -- maybe humans are animals? What evidence do I have to support this? -- maybe animals are human? Can that be? If Fred has an artificial heart, then perhaps he isn't simply just a special case of an animal. If some pig has human organs in it, then perhaps its an animal that is human. Neither syllogistic deduction is purely false in the real world; there is an "it depends" aspect to it. learning AI would chalk it up as a "maybe", and see is this reasoning leads anywhere. I beleive Pei Wang's NARS system tries to do this; it seems more structured than the "fuzzy logic" type approaches that antedate it. --linas ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=51598751-972d92
