language: en

Observations on Cognitive Judgments

David McAllester
dam@ai.mit.edu

Abstract It is obvious to anyone familiar with the rules of the game of chess that a king on an empty board can reach every square. It is true, but not obvious, that a knight can reach every square. Why is the first fact obvious but the second fact not? This paper presents an analytic theory of a class of obviousness judgments of this type. Whether or not the specifics of this analysis are correct, it seems that the study of obviousness judgments can be used to construct integrated theories of linguistics, knowledge representation, and inference.

[This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the work described in this paper was provided in part by Misubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-85-K-0124.]

[This paper appeared in AAAI-91.]

[A postscript electronic source for this paper can be found in ftp.ai.mit.edu:/pub/dam/aaai91a.ps. A bibtex reference can be found in ftp.ai.mit.edu:/pub/dam/dam.bib.]