Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Plausible Reasoning In our daily lives, we are
rarely faced with the task of finding the perfect solution to a problem. If we
are running out of gasoline in the middle of the night, we are happy with
finding a gas station along our route, even if its gasoline may not be the best
or the cheapest. We almost never pause to figure out the best option among the
ones that are available. We pick one that leads to a desired outcome. What our
mind is looking for all the time is plausible solutions to problems, as
opposed to exact ones. Mathematics demands exact solutions, but in our daily
lives we content ourselves with plausible ones. The reason is that sometimes a
plausible solution enables us to survive, whereas looking for an exact one
would jeopardize our lives. A gazelle who paused to work out the best escape
route while a lion is closing in on her wouldnt stand a chance. Often, finding
the perfect solution is simply
pointless, because by the time we find it the problem would have
escalated, i.e. we would be dead.
This became a popular subject of research after the publication of "Plausible Reasoning" (1976) by the German-born philosopher Nicholas Rescher at the University of Pittsburgh and of "Logic and Conversation" (1975) by the British-born philosopher Paul Grice at UC Berkeley.
Classical Logic is very
powerful, but lacks this basic attribute: quick, efficient response to problems
when an exact solution is not necessary (and sometimes counterproductive). Several techniques have been
proposed for augmenting Logic with plausible reasoning: degrees of belief,
default rules, inference in the face of absence of information, inference about
vague quantities, analogical reasoning, etc. |
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