The Handbook of the Logic of Argument and Inference is an authoritative reference work in a single volume, designed for the attention of senior undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in all the leading research areas concerned with the logic of practical argument and inference. After an introductory chapter, the role of standard logics is surveyed in two chapters. These chapters can serve as a mini-course for interested readers, in deductive and inductive logic, or as a refresher. Then follow two chapters of criticism; one the internal critique and the other the empirical critique. The first deals with objections to standard logics (as theories of argument and inference) arising from the research programme in philosophical logic. The second canvasses criticisms arising from work in cognitive and experimental psychology. The next five chapters deal with developments in dialogue logic, interrogative logic, informal logic, probability logic and artificial intelligence. The last chapter surveys formal approaches to practical reasoning and anticipates possible future developments. Taken as a whole the Handbook is a single-volume indication of the present state of the logic of argument and inference at its conceptual and theoretical best. Future editions will periodically incorporate significant new developments.

This book provides a rigorous algebraic study of the most popular inference formalisms with a special focus on their wide application area, showing that all these tasks can be performed by a single generic inference algorithm. Written by the leading international authority on the topic, it includes an algebraic perspective (study of the valuation algebra framework), an algorithmic perspective (study of the generic inference schemes) and a "practical" perspective (formalisms and applications). Researchers in a number of fields including artificial intelligence, operational research, databases and other areas of computer science; graduate students; and professional programmers of inference methods will benefit from this work.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th InternationalConference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams, Diagrams 2016,held in Philadelphia, PA, USA, in August 2016. The 12 revised full papers and 11 short papers presented together with 5 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: cognitive aspects of diagrams; logic and diagrams; Euler and Venn diagrams; diagrams and education; design principles for diagrams; diagrams layout.

The Sixth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI2002) was held in Amsterdam on September 23-25th, 2002. ICGI2002 was the sixth in a series of successful biennial international conferenceson the area of grammatical inference. Previous meetings were held in Essex, U.K.; Alicante, Spain; Mo- pellier, France; Ames, Iowa, USA; Lisbon, Portugal. This series of meetings seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of original research on all aspects of grammatical inference. Gr- matical inference, the process of inferring grammars from given data, is a ?eld that not only is challenging from a purely scienti?c standpoint but also ?nds many applications in real-world problems. Despite the fact that grammatical inference addresses problems in a re- tively narrow area, it uses techniques from many domains, and is positioned at the intersection of a number of di?erent disciplines. Researchers in grammatical inference come from ?elds as diverse as machine learning, theoretical computer science, computational linguistics, pattern recognition, and arti?cial neural n- works. From a practical standpoint, applications in areas like natural language - quisition, computational biology, structural pattern recognition, information - trieval, text processing, data compression and adaptive intelligent agents have either been demonstrated or proposed in the literature. The technical program included the presentation of 23 accepted papers (out of 41 submitted). Moreover, for the ?rst time a software presentation was or- nized at ICGI. Short descriptions of the corresponding software are included in these proceedings, too.

Biological and Cultural Bases of Human Inference addresses the interface between social science and cognitive science. In this volume, Viale and colleagues explore which human social cognitive powers evolve naturally and which are influenced by culture. Updating the debate between innatism and culturalism regarding human cognitive abilities, this book represents a much-needed articulation of these diverse bases of cognition. Chapters throughout the book provide social science and philosophical reflections, in addition to the perspective of evolutionary theory and the central assumptions of cognitive science. The overall approach of the text is based on three complementary levels: adult performance, cognitive development, and cultural history and prehistory. Scholars from several disciplines contribute to this volume, including researchers in cognitive, developmental, social and evolutionary psychology, neuropsychology, cognitive anthropology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. This contemporary, important collection appeals to researchers in the fields of cognitive, social, developmental, and evolutionary psychology and will prove valuable to researchers in the decision sciences.

The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding sentient behavior—a theory that characterizes perception, planning, and action in terms of probabilistic inference. Developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston over years of groundbreaking research, active inference provides an integrated perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Active inference puts the action into perception. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of active inference, covering theory, applications, and cognitive domains. Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behavior and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy. The book emphasizes the implications of the free energy principle for understanding how the brain works. It first introduces active inference both conceptually and formally, contextualizing it within current theories of cognition. It then provides specific examples of computational models that use active inference to explain such cognitive phenomena as perception, attention, memory, and planning.

This book provides a theory, a formal language, and a practical methodology for the specification, use, and reuse of problem-solving methods. The framework developed by the author characterizes knowledge-based systems as a particular type of software architecture where the applications are developed by integrating generic task specifications, problem solving methods, and domain models: this approach turns knowledge engineering into a software engineering discipline. All in all, this work, as an applicable theory of knowledge engineering, consolidates research work done during several decades. The present popularity of Internet-based services will provide unprecedented opportunities for deploying and sharing knowledge-based services and anybody wanting to participate in this area can learn from this book what knowledge engineering is about.