Analogical constructivism : the emergence of reasoning through analogy and action schemas
Author
Licato, JohnOther Contributors
Bringsjord, Selmer; Sun, Ron, 1960-; Nirenburg, Sergei; Hummel, John E.; Bello, Paul;Date Issued
2015-05Subject
Computer scienceDegree
PhD;Terms of Use
This electronic version is a licensed copy owned by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. Copyright of original work retained by author.; Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
After a defense of the claim that cognitive structure cannot exist apart from actions (a claim which I refer to as "No-semantically-empty-structure"), I introduce PAGI World, a simulation environment rich enough in possible actions to foster the growth of artificial agents capable of producing their own cognitive structures. I conclude with a brief demonstration of an agent in PAGI World, and discuss future work.; The ability to reason analogically is a central marker of human-level cognition. Analogy involves mapping, reorganizing, and creating structural knowledge, a particular type of cognitive construct commonly understood as residing purely within the domain of declarative knowledge. Yet existing computational models of analogy struggle to show human-level performance on any data sets not manually constructed for the purposes of demonstration, a problem referred to as the tailorability concern. Solving the tailorability concern may require more investigation into the nature of cognitive structures, defined as those elements in mental representation which are referred to whenever contemporary literature on analogy discusses "structured" knowledge.; I propose to develop the theory of Analogical Constructivism. This theory builds on Piaget's constructivist epistemology, first refining its concepts by clarifying the modifications Piaget himself made in his later, less-discussed works. I reconcile Piaget's assertion that meaning is, first and foremost, rooted in the action schemas that the agent is both born with and develops throughout life, with an account of cognitive structure, concluding that cognitive structure is inseparable from action-centered/procedural knowledge.;Description
May 2015; School of ScienceDepartment
Dept. of Computer Science;Publisher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NYRelationships
Rensselaer Theses and Dissertations Online Collection;Access
CC BY-NC-ND. Users may download and share copies with attribution in accordance with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. No commercial use or derivatives are permitted without the explicit approval of the author.;Collections
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as CC BY-NC-ND. Users may download and share copies with attribution in accordance with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. No commercial use or derivatives are permitted without the explicit approval of the author.