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I feel a strong desire to develop systems to help me reason and communicate, and I am frequently reminded of the need for this kind of software. For example, whenever I have difficulty communicating an abstract idea with someone.
Suppose you want to communicate a simple argument (e.g. a scientific or philosophical deduction) to someone.
The medium of Natural Language is the standard way of communicating arguments, and most of the time it succeeds with only a few words (with the intended audience, at least).
Yet, there are many advantages of communicating in logical form (one of which is that computers can understand you then). But because the context / background knowledge may be quite large, it can be very hard to translate a NL expression into a logical form: first we would need to have a formal theory of the domain!
In the domains of scientific theories, this problem is solvable by doing logical formalizations of the domain, preferably multiple parallel formalizations, to reflect the multiple ways people can think about things, and the multiple ways in which they argue (or "prove") things.
There exist people doing work on argumentation systems, common sense reasoning, multimodal reasoning and on formal theories of science, but I don't know of anyone integrating these ideas towards creating a medium for theorizing. I dream of a medium where people could communicate their theories naturally and yet formally.
I want to speak a language that everyone understands (or can come to understand by following a well-defined sequence of steps); once this exists, there will be little room left for rational disagreement (and when there is any, it will be clear exactly *where* they disagree). Philosophy books will be much shorter.
I sometimes find this inexpressibility of natural language very frustrating and this is part of my motivation to be interested in such systems. I am also quite excited about the possibility of interacting with computers. Once someone formalizes a scientific theory meaningfully, it can be privately tutored to millions of people. The computer would help students play with the theories, using things such as example generation and diagram generation to illustrate principles (theorems); it could create homework problems and correct them, etc. and at a more advanced stage it could help the theorist concretize his intuitions about relations with other theories (e.g. analogy) or the meta-theory.
Suppose you want to communicate a simple argument (e.g. a scientific or philosophical deduction) to someone.
The medium of Natural Language is the standard way of communicating arguments, and most of the time it succeeds with only a few words (with the intended audience, at least).
Yet, there are many advantages of communicating in logical form (one of which is that computers can understand you then). But because the context / background knowledge may be quite large, it can be very hard to translate a NL expression into a logical form: first we would need to have a formal theory of the domain!
In the domains of scientific theories, this problem is solvable by doing logical formalizations of the domain, preferably multiple parallel formalizations, to reflect the multiple ways people can think about things, and the multiple ways in which they argue (or "prove") things.
There exist people doing work on argumentation systems, common sense reasoning, multimodal reasoning and on formal theories of science, but I don't know of anyone integrating these ideas towards creating a medium for theorizing. I dream of a medium where people could communicate their theories naturally and yet formally.
I want to speak a language that everyone understands (or can come to understand by following a well-defined sequence of steps); once this exists, there will be little room left for rational disagreement (and when there is any, it will be clear exactly *where* they disagree). Philosophy books will be much shorter.
I sometimes find this inexpressibility of natural language very frustrating and this is part of my motivation to be interested in such systems. I am also quite excited about the possibility of interacting with computers. Once someone formalizes a scientific theory meaningfully, it can be privately tutored to millions of people. The computer would help students play with the theories, using things such as example generation and diagram generation to illustrate principles (theorems); it could create homework problems and correct them, etc. and at a more advanced stage it could help the theorist concretize his intuitions about relations with other theories (e.g. analogy) or the meta-theory.