Jumping to Conclusions

Loizos Michael

Abstract: Inspired by the profound effortlessness (but also the substantial carelessness) with which humans seem to draw inferences when given even only partial information, we consider a unified formal framework for computational cognition, placing our emphasis on the existence of naturalistic mechanisms for representing, manipulating, and acquiring knowledge. Through formal results and discussion, we suggest that such fast and loose mechanisms could provide a concrete basis for the design of cognitive systems.