PROCESS AND POLICY - RESOURCE-BOUNDED NONDEMONSTRATIVE REASONING

This paper investigates the appropriateness of formal dialectics as a basis for nonmonotonic reasoning and defeasible reasoning that takes c omputational limits seriously. Rules that can come into conflict shoul d be regarded as policies, which are inputs to deliberative processes. Dialectical protocols are appropriate for such deliberations when res ources are bounded and search is serial.AI, it is claimed here, is now perfectly positioned to correct many misconceptions about reasoning t hat have resulted from mathematical logic's enormous success in this c entury: among them, (1) that all reasons are demonstrative, (2) that r ational belief is constrained, not constructed, and (3) that process a nd disputation are not essential to reasoning. AI mainly provides new impetus to formalize the alternative (but older) conception of reasoni ng, and AI provides mechanisms with which to create compelling formali sm that describes the control of processes. The technical contribution s here are: the partial justification of dialectic based on controllin g search; the observation that nonmonotonic reasoning can be subsumed under certain kinds of dialectics; the portrayal of inference in knowl edge bases as policy reasoning; the review of logics of dialogue and p roposed extensions; and the preformal and initial formal discussion of aspects and variations of dialectical systems with nondemonstrative r easons.