The Implications of Philosophical Foundations for Knowledge Representation and Learning in Agents

N.J. Lacey and M.H. Lee, ?The Implications of Philosophical Foundations for Knowledge Representation and Learning in Agents?, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence, Vol 2636 on Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2002.

The purpose of this research is to show the relevance of philosophical theories to agent knowledge base (AKB) design, implementation, and behaviour. We will describe how artificial agent designers face important problems that philosophers have been working on for centuries. We will then show that it is possible to design different agents to be explicitly based on different philosophical approaches, and that doing so increases the range of agent behaviour exhibited by the system. We therefore argue that alternative, sometimes counter-intuitive, conceptions of the relationship between an agent and its environment may offer a useful starting point when considering the design of an agent knowledge base.