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>From: harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad)
Subject: Call for Book Reviewers: The Frame Problem (Ford/Hayes)
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Call For Multiple Book Reviews: Ford/Hayes: "The Frame Problem"

PSYCOLOQUY is calling for multiple electronic book reviews. Qualified
professionals from the spectrum of disciplines covered by PSYCOLOQUY
(psychology, the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, behavioral and
evolutionary biology, computer science, linguisitics and philosophy)
are invited to submit reviews (~500 lines) on the volume below (or on
other books you would like to see reviewed in PSYCOLOQUY). All
submissions are subject to editorial review.

If book authors wish to submit a summary of their recent books and to
send review copies to the PSYCOLOQUY editorial office, a Call for
Reviewers like this one will be posted, and the copies will be
distributed to selected reviewers. Note that what appears below is just
a brief synopsis of an edited volume, and hence will NOT be archived
but will only appear in PSYC's newsletter section; if a monograph's
authors submit an article-length author's Precis, however (~500 lines),
it will be refereed and may appear in the archival journal portion of
PSYCOLOQUY.

For the article below, please let us know if you wish to review it,
indicating your qualifications (and including a CV). If you already
have the book and wish to submit a review directly without checking
first, that is fine too (but publication is in no case guaranteed).

Send queries and reviews to:
                   psyc@pucc.bitnet or psyc@pucc.princeton.edu
or to:             sci.psychology.digest (Usenet)

----------------------------------------------------------------
Summary of: 

           Kenneth M. Ford and Patrick J. Hayes (Eds.) (1991)
           Reasoning Agents in a Dynamic World: The Frame Problem
           JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, 289 pages, ISBN 1-55938-082-9

                    Pat Hayes
                    Beckman Institute
                    405 North Mathews Avenue
                    Urbana IL 61801
                    hayes@cs.stanford.edu

What happens when one picks up a brick? Any child knows that the brick
is now held in the air, there is one fewer object on the ground, and
THAT'S ALL. For over twenty years it has been astonishingly hard to
make a computer draw this last conclusion reliably and convincingly, or
even to say precisely what it means. This "frame problem" is
symptomatic of a host of problems in how to properly represent common
knowledge about everyday actions. The papers in this collection
(originally presented at a 1989 workshop) discuss some of these
problems, develop approaches to solving them, or draw philosophical
conclusions from them.

Some approaches to action reasoning assume that what is needed is more
information for the programs to use. Others focus rather on the
reasoning methods they use. In the former spirit, Haugh develops an
axiomatic theory of causal relationships, and Weld argues that system
dynamics are needed. Tenenberg, however, urges the use of a
probabilistic approach to knowledge representation, and Brown develops
a new quantified modal logic which contains the seeds of its own
description.

Some of the papers develop or criticise themes that are familiar in AI.
Etherington, Kraus and Perlis explain and extend McCarthy's technique
of circumscriptive reasoning. Goodwin and Trudel relate the idea of
"persistence" - that things should stay true unless there is a reason
to falsify them - to that of time as a continuum (a surprisingly
underdeveloped idea in this area). Weber criticises persistence as an
unrealistically strong assumption and shows that it has some
unintuitive consequences.

Erik Sandewall makes a revisionist survey of the classical AI
literature and suggests that what has always been regarded as an
unfortunate pun - the frame problem and Minsky's representational
notation of frames - should in fact be taken seriously.

Some of the chapters discuss broader questions. Perlis relates this
whole complex of representational difficulties to the fact that the
agents we are trying to imitate have evolved with only very partial
knowledge of their worlds. Stein generalises the frame problem, as
usually described, to the point where it seems to be the general
problem of counterfactual reasoning: an alarming and controversial
conclusion. Fetzer, a philosopher of science, and Hayes, one of the
book's editors, give us a debate on the relevance of philosophy to AI.
Fetzer argues that the frame problem is really the problem of
scientific induction, so a successful robot must have solved Hume's
problem. Hayes argues that Fetzer misunderstands the nature of the AI
enterprise and Fetzer replies with a suggestion that a new kind of
programming might be the answer.

Most of the papers are self-contained and some provide excellent
introductions to the frame problem and the history of attempts to solve
it.

                      Table of Contents

Framing The Problem
      Kenneth M. Ford, University of West Florida
      Patrick J. Hayes, Xerox PARC

The Modal Quantificational Logic Z Applied to the Frame Problem
      Frank M. Brown, University of Kansas

Limited Scope and Circumscriptive Reasoning
      David Etherington, AT&T Bell Laboratories
      Sarit Kraus, Hebrew University - Israel
      Donald Perlis, University of Maryland

The Frame Problem:  Artificial Intelligence Meets David Hume
      James H. Fetzer, University of Minnesota
	
Commentary on:
"The Frame Problem:  Artificial Intelligence Meets David Hume" 
      Pat Hayes, Xerox PARC
	
A Response to Pat Hayes
      J. H. Fetzer

Persistence in Continuous First Order Temporal Logics
      Scott D. Goodwin, University of Waterloo
      Andre Trudel, Acadia University

Omniscience Isn't Needed to Solve the Frame Problem
      Brian A. Haugh, Martin Marietta Laboratories

Knowledge and the Frame Problem
      Leora Morgenstern, IBM T. J. Watson Labs

Focus of Attention, Context, and the Frame Problem
      J. Terry Nutter, Virginia Tech.

Intentionality and Defaults
      Donald Perlis, University of Maryland

Towards a Logic of Dynamic Frames
      Erik Sandewall, University of Linkoping - Sweden

An Atemporal Frame Problem
      Lynn Andrea Stein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abandoning the Completeness Assumptions:
A Statistical Approach to the Frame Problem
      Josh D. Tenenberg, University of Rochester

The Myth of Domain-Independent Persistence
      Jay C. Weber, Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center

System Dynamics and the Qualification Problem
      Daniel S. Weld, University of Washington

-- 
Stevan Harnad  Department of Psychology  Princeton University
harnad@clarity.princeton.edu / harnad@pucc.bitnet / srh@flash.bellcore.com 
harnad@learning.siemens.com / harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu / (609)-921-7771


