Using Exemplary Knowledge for Justified Analogical Reasoning
Manfred Kerber, Erica Melis⋆ · 1999
Typical instances, that is, instances that are representative for a particular situation or concept, play an important role in human knowledge representation and reasoning, in particular in analogical reasoning. This well-known observation has been a motivation for investigations in cognitive psychology which provide a basis for our characterization of typical instances within concept structures and for a new inference rule for justified analogical reasoning with typical instances. In a nutshell this paper suggests to augment the propositional knowledge representation system by a non-propositional part consisting of concept structures which may have directly represented instances as elements. The traditional reasoning system is extended by a rule for justified analogical inference with typical instances using information extracted from both knowledge representation subsystems.