The authors argue for a generalisation of inference f rom the standard account in terms of truth preservation to one which coun tenances p r e s e r v a t i o n o f o the r desirable metalinguistic properties. The development is partly historical and partly a n a l y t i c . A r e l a t i o n a l a c c o u n t o f preservation is then presented and from this the two notions of inferential struc...

To enable human-level artificial intelligence,machinesmust have access to the same kind of commonsense knowledge about the world that people have. e best source of such knowledge is text – learning by reading. Implicit in linguistic discourse is information about what people assume to be possible or expect to happen. From these references, I obtain an extensive collection of semantically under...

It is often claimed that concepts are the building blocks of thoughts. If this claim is true, as I think it is, any adequate theory of cognition will require a theory of concepts. Both philosophers and psychologists have attempted to give such a theory, however, as with most of nature’s building blocks, developing a theory of concepts has not been an easy task. I want to argue that the difficul...

This is a slightly revised version of a paper to appear in the proceedings of the IFIP 83 Congress. This research was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DOD), ARPA Order No. 3597, monitored by the Air Force Avionics Laboratory under Contract F33615-81-K-1539, and in part by the U.S. Army Communications R&D Command under Contract DAAK80-81-K-0074. The views and c...