Knowledge processing and commonsense

Abstract

Symbolic expert systems have been developed during the last three decades to model knowledge-based human intelligent behaviour. A general criticism of such expert systems is that they lack commonsense. But there is little consensus among AI workers on what constitutes commonsense. In this paper a characterization of commonsense is attempted. The limitations and open problems relating to current approaches to expert systems design are discussed. In addition, open problems that need to be studied to adequately model commonsense behaviour are discussed. Our basic arguments hinge on the distinctions between tacit knowledge and propositionizable knowledge. The thesis is that commonsense behaviour is essentially underpinned by tacit knowledge.