Rational Agents

• The doxastic-conative loop

  • epistemic cognition — about
    what to believe.
  • practical cognition — about
    what to do.

• Mechanisms of Cognition

  • Reasoning (ratiocination)

    • epistemic
    • practical
  • Q&I (quick and inflexible) modules

    • catching a baseball
    • the familiarity heuristic
  • The advantage of Q&I modules is speed. The advantage of ratiocination, on the other hand, is extreme flexibility.
  • The role of ratiocination should be (1) to deal with cases to which Q&I modules do not apply and (2) to monitor and override the output of Q&I modules as necessary. A rational agent can be viewed as a bundle of Q&I modules with ratiocination sitting on t

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