Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Logic and Artificial Intelligence: Divorced, Still Married, Separated ...?

  • Published:
Minds and Machines Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Though it's difficult to agree on the exact date of their union, logic and artificial intelligence (AI) were married by the late 1950s, and, at least during their honeymoon, were happily united. What connubial permutation do logic and AI find themselves in now? Are they still (happily) married? Are they divorced? Or are they only separated, both still keeping alive the promise of a future in which the old magic is rekindled? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions via a review of six books. Encapsulated, our answer is that (i) logic and AI, despite tabloidish reports to the contrary, still enjoy matrimonial bliss, and (ii) only their future robotic offspring (as opposed to the children of connectionist AI) will mark real progress in the attempt to understand cognition.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Allen, James F. (1984), ‘Towards a General Theory of Action and Time’, Artificial Intelligence 23, pp. 123–154.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, Alan Ross, and Belnap, Nuel (1975), Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity I, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barwise, Jon, and Perry, John (1983), Situations and Attitudes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boolos, George and Jeffrey, Richard (1989), Computability and Logic, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowen, Kenneth A. and Kowalski, Robert A. (1982), ‘Amalgamating Language and Metalanguage in Logic Programming’, in Keith L. Clark and Sten-Ake Tarlund, eds., (1982), Logic Programming, Orlando, FL: Academic Press, pp. 153–172.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boyer, Robert S. and Moore, J Strother (1972), ‘The Sharing of Structure in Theorem Proving Programs’, Machine Intelligence 7, pp. 101–116.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bringsjord, Selmer, and Ferrucci, David A. (forthcoming), Artificial Intelligence, Literary Creativity and Story Generation: The State of the Art, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

  • Bringsjord, Selmer (1992), What Robots Can and Can't Be, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bringsjord, Selmer (1991), ‘Is the Connectionist-Logicist Clash One of AI's Wonderful Red Herrings?’, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 3.4, pp. 319–349.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bringsjord, Selmer and Zenzen, Michael (1991), ‘In Defense of Hyper-Logicist AI’, Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91; Sydney, Australia), Mountain View, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 1066–1072.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carnap, Rudolf (1967), The Logical Construction of the World, R. A. George, trans., Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dennett, Daniel C. (1994), ‘The Practical Requirements for Making a Conscious Robot’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 349, pp. 133–146.

    Google Scholar 

  • Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (1984), ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’, in The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes, Minneapolis, MN: Amarenth Press, pp. 172–187.

    Google Scholar 

  • Doyle, Jon (1988), ‘Big Problems for Artificial Intelligence’, AI Magazine 9.1, pp. 19–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ebbinghaus, Heinz-Dieter; Flum, Jorg; and Thomas, Wolfgang (1984), Mathematical Logic, New York: Springer-Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fetzer, James H. (1994), ‘Mental Algorithms: Are Minds Computational Systems?’, Pragmatics and Cognition 2, pp. 1–29.

    Google Scholar 

  • Genesereth, Michael R., and Nilsson, Nils J. (1987), Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gentzen, Gerhard (1969), The Collected Papers of Gerhard Gentzen, M. E. Szabo, ed., Amsterdam: North-Holland.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kamp, Hans (1984), ‘A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation’, in J. Groenendijk, T. M. V. Janssen, and M. Stokhof, eds., Truth, Interpretation, and Information, Dordrecht: Foris: 1–41.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lifschitz, Vladimir (1987), ‘Circumscriptive Theories: A Logic-Based Framework for Knowledge Representation (Preliminary Report)’, Proceedings of the 6th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-87, Seattle), Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 364–368.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martins, João P., and Shapiro, Stuart C. (1988), ‘A Model for Belief Revision’, Artificial Intelligence 35, pp. 25–79.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCarthy, John (1968), ‘Programs with Common Sense’, in Marvin L. Minsky, ed., Semantic Information Processing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 403–418.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCarthy, John (1980), ‘Circumscription: A Form of Non-Monotonic Reasoning’, Artificial Intelligence 13, pp. 27–39.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCulloch, Warren S., and Pitts, Walter (1943), ‘A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity’, Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5, pp. 115–137.

    Google Scholar 

  • McDermott, Drew (1982), ‘Non-Monotonic Logic II: Non-Monotonic Modal Theories’, Journal of the ACM 29.1, pp. 34–57.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moore, Robert C. (1985), ‘Semantical Considerations on Non-Monotonic Logic’, Artificial Intelligence 25, pp. 75–94.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pollock, John (1992), ‘How to Reason Defeasibly’, Artificial Intelligence 57, pp. 1–42.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pollock, John (1995), Cognitive Carpentry, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reiter, Ray (1980), ‘A Logic for Default Reasoning’, Artificial Intelligence 13, pp. 81–131.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robinson, J. Alan (1992), ‘Logic and Logic Programming’, Communications of the ACM 35.3, pp. 40–65.

    Google Scholar 

  • Russinoff, Susan (1995), Review of Clark Glymour's Thinking Things Through’, Journal of Symbolic Logic 60.3, pp. 1012–1013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shapiro, Stuart C., and Rapaport, William J. (1987), ‘SNePS Considered as a Fully Intensional Propositional Semantic Network’, in Nick Cercone and Gordon McCalla, eds., The Knowledge Frontier: Essays in the Representation of Knowledge, New York: Springer-Verlag), pp. 262–315.

    Google Scholar 

  • Siegelmann, Hava T. (1995), ‘Computation beyond the Turing Limit’, Science 268, pp. 545–548.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smolensky, Paul (1988a), ‘On the Proper Treatment of Connectionism’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11, pp. 1–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smolensky, Paul (1988b), ‘Putting Together Connectionism — Again’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11, pp. 59–70.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tarski, Alfred (1956), Logic, Semantics and Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938, J. H. Woodger, trans., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thayse, André (1989a), From Standard Logic to Logic Programming: Introducing a Logic Based Approach to Artificial Intelligence, Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomason, Richmond, ed. (1974), Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  • Ybarra, Michael J. (1996), ‘Discovering an Answer in the Flames’, The New York Times (4 February 1996), Sect. A, p. 13.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Psychology and Cognitive Science, and Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 12180, USA. E-mail: Email

    Selmer Bringsjord & David A. Ferrucci

Authors
  1. Selmer Bringsjord
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. David A. Ferrucci
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Selmer Bringsjord, Ferrucci, D.A. Logic and Artificial Intelligence: Divorced, Still Married, Separated ...?. Minds and Machines 8, 273–308 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008250617134

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008250617134

Keywords

Search

Navigation