CONSISTENCY AT THE CORE OF COMMONSENSE

This paper argues for a "commonsense core" hypothesis, with emphasis on the issue of consistency in agent knowledge bases. This is part of a long-term research program, in which the hypothesis itself is being gradually refined, in light of various sorts of evidence. The gist is that a commonsense reasoning agent that would otherwise become incapacitated in the presence of inconsistent data may by means of a modest additional error-handling "core" component carry out more effective real-time reasoning, and also that there may be cases of interest in which the "core" is more usefully integrated into the knowledge base itself.