🚀 go-pugleaf

                         UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO
                      STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

                       DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS
                                  and
   GRADUATE RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN COGNITIVE AND LINGUISTIC SCIENCES
                                PRESENT

                              JON BARWISE
                  Director, Symbolic Systems Program,
                       Department of Philosophy,
                                  and
        Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)

                          Stanford University
                    TOWARD A NEW MODEL OF REASONING

This lecture, reporting joint work of John Etchemendy and  the  speaker,
will  discuss  a new mathematical model of inference and reasoning.  Our
basic idea is that reasoning generally consists of the  manipulation  of
_information_, not linguistic symbols.  Language is just one of the many
forms in which information can be couched.  Visual images,  for  example
in  the  form  of  diagrams  or visual scenes of real-world objects, are
other forms.  Valid inference is the general process of  extracting  new
information from information given or already obtained from a variety of
sources, including both linguistic and visual.  We think this is the way
to  think  about reasoning in most situations, even in cases which seem,
on the face of it, very symbolic, like mathematics.

There are two novel features of our approach.  One is  the  handling  of
information that is presented to us in more than one form.  The other is
that our approach is neutral between the two competing  paradigms:  rea-
soning as deduction, and reasoning as model building (Johnson-Laird).

We are developing a mathematical theory of inference based on this idea,
as  well  as  a computer program for teaching reasoning that is based on
these ideas.  The talk will present a discussion of  the  theory  and  a
demo of a mock-up of the program.

                         Monday, April 24, 1989
                               4:00 P.M.
                     684 Baldy Hall, Amherst Campus

            There will be an evening discussion at 8:00 P.M.
 at Lynne Hewitt's house, 239 Huntington Ave. (ground floor), Buffalo.

Contact Nick Goodman, Dept. of Mathematics, 716-831-3179, or Bill  Rapa-
port, Dept. of Computer Science, 716-636-3193, for further information.