The Frame Problem: The Dynamics of Logic Systems

Abstract

The motivation behind the development of non-monotonic reasoning was to formalize the notion of “jumping to conclusions,” and thus solve the frame problem. Unfortunately, Hanks and McDermott [28] showed that McCarthy’s circumscription and Reiter’s default logic yield unwanted results for the Yale shooting problem: they both yield a model where the gun gets mysteriously unloaded during the wait period. There have been various attempts to alter the formalization of non-monotonic reasoning in some way to rule out the anomalous model.

Where has logic originated in men’s heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally have been immense. But innumerable beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to the truth than we! Whoever, for example, could not discern the “like” often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality. ... In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every skeptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination—to affirm rather than to suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right—had been cultivated with extraordinary assiduity.—The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us.

(F. Nietzsche, “The joyful science”, 111)