Abstract
Choosing the right plan is often choosing the more coherent plan: but what is coherence? We argue that coherence-directed practical inference ought to be represented computationally. To that end, we advance a theory of deliberative coherence, and describe its implementation in a program modelled on Thagard's ECHO. We explain how the theory can be tested and extended, and consider its bearing on instrumentalist accounts of practical rationality.
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We are grateful to Nina Amenta, Michael Bratman, Christoph Fehige, Harry Frankfurt, Susan Hardy, Derek Hawley, Wilfried Hinsch, Jenann Ismael, Ziva Kunda, Nick Littlestone, Michael Ranney, Gabriel Richardson, Patricia Schank, Bill Talbott, Carol Varey and UC/Berkeley's EMST Reasoning Group for helpful discussion. An ancestor of Section 2 benefitted from comments by and discussion with Alyssa Bernstein, Hilary Bok, Tamar Gendler, Philip Klein, Tony Laden, Mitzi Lee, Robert Nozick, Hilary Putnam, Tim Scanlon, Sanford Shieh and, especially, Candace Vogler. We thank Susan Hardy and Roy Fleck for programming assistance. Thagard's research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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Millgram, E., Thagard, P. Deliberative coherence. Synthese 108, 63–88 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00414005
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00414005