Instead of obsessing about such philosophical conundrums we should, in my opinion, set about our research empirically. Many of the efforts to build intelligent educational software and intelligent problem solving environments could, in my view, take great advantage of and contribute to such work. Opening Remarks Jon Shultis Logicians have too much neglected the study of vagueness, not suspecting the important part it plays in mathematical thought. The same situation can be described by a variety of semantically distinct expressions that embody different ways of construing or structuring it. Our ability to impose alternate structurings on a conceived phenomenon is fundamental to lexical and grammatical variability.
Facts just twist the truth around.
I am very excited to be here, and gratified that such an impressive and enthusiastic group was willing to come here on such short notice. We are here because we sense that a good deal of human understanding and communication is informal, and that informality underlies much of our ability to adapt and function in the real world. We want to understand this. In one way, our being here speaks of growing dissatisfaction with the standard litany of formal software development. It is an acknowledgement of the criticisms that have been leveled over the past decade or so at the widespread assumption within computer science and related fields that, because computers can be described as formal symbol manipulators, that that is what they are.