Open AccessThe Naive Physics Perplex
Author(s) -
Davis Ernest
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
ai magazine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.597
H-Index - 79
eISSN - 2371-9621
pISSN - 0738-4602
DOI - 10.1609/aimag.v19i4.1424
Subject(s) - axiom , commonsense knowledge , computer science , competence (human resources) , commonsense reasoning , manifesto , representation (politics) , artificial intelligence , knowledge representation and reasoning , cognitive science , epistemology , psychology , mathematics , philosophy , social psychology , geometry , politics , economics , political science , law , market economy
The “Naive Physics Manifesto” of Pat Hayes (1978) proposes a large‐scale project to develop a formal theory encompassing the entire knowledge of physics of naive reasoners, expressed in a declarative symbolic form. The theory is organized in clusters of closely interconnected concepts and axioms. More recent work on the representation of commonsense physical knowledge has followed a somewhat different methodology. The goal has been to develop a competence theory powerful enough to justify commonsense physical inferences, and the research is organized in micro‐worlds, each microworld covering a small range of physical phenomena. In this article, I compare the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches.