Reasoning in the Absence of Goals
Mary Lou Maher, Kathryn Elizabeth Merrick, Benjamin P. Graham · 2011
In creative industries such as design and research it is com-mon to reason about ‘problem-finding ’ before tasks or goals can be established. Problem-finding may also continue throughout the problem-solving process, so achieving goals may be an ongoing process of discovery as well as iterative improvement and refinement. This paper considers the de-sign of cognitive systems with complementary processes for both problem-finding and problem-solving. We review a range of approaches that may complement goal-directed reasoning when an artificial system does not or cannot know precisely what it is looking for. We argue that there is a spectrum of approaches that can be used for reasoning in the absence of goals, which make progressively weaker as-sumptions about the definition and presence goals, and that goal-oriented behavior can be an intermediate result of problem-finding, rather than as a starting point for problem-solving. We demonstrate one such approach based on im-plicit motives and incentives.