From the cover

Elio, R. (2002) Common Sense, Reasoning, and Rationality. New York: Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-514766-9 (hardcover) ISBN 0-19-5144767-7 (pbk.)

How can people, with their apparent failures of logical and statistical inference, succeed in reasoning about the everyday world, which presents them with uncertain, incomplete, and dynamic information? In short, how can people be so good at commonsense reasoning if they are so irrational? And why is it that efforts in machine intelligence, long successful in meeting or even setting normative standards of rationality, still fall short of human standards in reasoning about the events and properties of the everyday world? Common Sense, Reasoning, and Rationality provides a point of entry for exploring these questions. It brings together an outstanding group of scholars from the fields of artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive psychology to consider what it means for people and machines to be rational and to reason successfully about the world. The theoretical and empirical efforts described in these chapters underscore the key issue of whether and how the rationality of commonsense reasoning is fundamentally at odds with the sense of rationality required by other sorts of epistemic and pragmatic goals. They also invite the reader to consider whether there is an underlying rationality to the mechanisms that enable commonsense reasoning, both for people and machines. This groundbreaking book broadens the debate on rationality by acknowledging human success in everyday reasoning and considering the underlying elements that might account for this success. Offering inroads into topics such as metareasoning, induction, planning, nonmonotonic reasoning, belief revision, cognitive architectures, and explanation, this book promises to be of great influence across disciplines.

Table of Contents
Renée Elio	Issues in Common Sense Reasoning
Stuart Russell	Rationality and Intelligence
John Pollock	The Logical Foundations of Means-End Reasoning
Henry E. Kyburg, Jr.	Induction and Consistency
Gilbert Harman	The Logic of Ordinary Language
Paul Thagard, Chris Eliasmith, Paul Rusnock, and Cameron Shelly	Knowledge and Coherence
Denise Dellarose Cummins	The Evolutionary Roots of Intelligence and Rationality
Gerd Gigerenzer, Jena Czerlinksi, and Laura Martignon	How Good are Fast and Frugal Heuristics?
Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater	Commonsense Reasoning, Logic, and Human Rationality
Lance Rips	Reasoning Imperialism
Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich, and Michael Bishop	Ending the Rationality Wars: How to Make Disputes about Human Rationality Disappear

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