First-Order Logic
as a
Knowledge-Representation and Reasoning System

1. Pro:
   McCarthy, John (1958/1963), "Programs with Common Sense", in Marvin Minsky (ed.), Semantic Information Processing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968): 403-417.
   • The link to the paper is actually only to Section 1, "The Advice Taker", which Brachman & Levesque call "the paper that started it all".

   • Highlighted version of that website.

   • Reprinted in:
     Brachman, Ronald J. & Levesque, Hector J. (eds.) (1985), Readings in Knowledge Representation (Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann): 299-307.

   • Brought up to date in:
     Lifschitz, Vladimir; McCain, Norman; Remolina, Emilio; & Tacchella, Armando (2000), "Getting to the Airport: The Oldest Planning Problem in AI" [.ps file], in Jack Minker (ed.), Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence (Boston: Kluwer): 147-165.
     • "Walking isn't a lost art: one must, by some means, get to the garage." —Evan Esar, American Humorist (1899–1995)

   • McCarthy's line of research has been continued not only by McCarthy (visit his website), but also by Doug Lenat's CYC project.

2. Pro:
   Hayes, Patrick J. (1977), "In Defence of Logic", Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-77, MIT) (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Department of Computer Science): 559-565.
   • PDF

3. Con:
   Newell, Allen (1981), "The Knowledge Level", AI Magazine 2(2) (Summer): 1-20.
   • PDF
   • Longer(?) version later appeared as:
     Newell, Allen (1982), "The Knowledge Level", Artificial Intelligence, 18: 87-127.

4. Pro:
   Moore, Robert C. (1982), "The Role of Logic in Knowledge Representation and Commonsense Reasoning", Proceedings of the [2nd] National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-82, Pittsburgh) (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann): 428-433.
   • PDF
   • Longer version later appeared as: Moore, Robert C. (1986), "The Role of Logic in Intelligent Systems", in I. Benson (ed.), Intelligent Machinery: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).
     • The longer version was later reprinted as:
       Moore, Robert C. (1995), "The Role of Logic in Artificial Intelligence", in Robert C. Moore, Logic and Representation (Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications): 3-17.

5. Pro:
   Israel, David J. (1983), "The Role of Logic in Knowledge Representation", in Special Issue on Knowledge Representation, Computer 16(10) (October): 37-41.
   • PDF
   • A longer(?) version appeared later as:
     Israel, David J. (1987), "Some Remarks on the Place of Logic in Knowledge Representation", in Nick Cercone & Gordon McCalla (eds.), The Knowledge Frontier: Essays in the Representation of Knowledge (New York: Springer-Verlag): 80-91.

For a general overview of related issues, see:

• Rapaport, William J. (1992), "Logic", in Stuart C. Shapiro (ed.), Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, 2nd edition (New York: John Wiley): 851-853.