Imperative inference and practical rationality

Practical Reasoning and Rationality

In Defense of Imperative Inference

“Surrender; therefore, surrender or fight” is apparently an argument corresponding to an inference from an imperative to an imperative. Several philosophers, however (Williams 1963; Wedeking 1970; Harrison 1991; Hansen 2008), have denied that imperative inferences exist, arguing that (1) no such inferences occur in everyday life, (2) imperatives cannot be premises or conclusions of inferences b...

Rationality in human nonmonotonic inference

This article tests human inference rationality when dealing with default rules. To study human rationality, psychologists currently use classical models of logic or probability theory as normative models for evaluating human ability to reason rationally. Our position is that this approach is convincing, but only manages to capture a specific case of inferential ability with little regard to con...

A Planning Theory of Practical Rationality

This paper combines ideas from recent philosophical work on rational agency and work in artificial intelligence on hierarchical non-linear planners which combine plan generation, execution, and monitoring, to produce a planning theory of rational agency for resource-bounded agents.

Making Type Inference Practical

We present the implementation of a type inference algorithm for untyped object-oriented programs with inheritance, assignments, and late binding. The algorithm signiicantly improves our previous one, presented at OOPSLA'91, since it can handle collection classes, such as List, in a useful way. Also, the complexity has been dramatically improved, from exponential time to low polynomial time. The...