Agenda Relevance: A Study in Formal Pragmatics

Agenda Relevance is the first volume in the authors' omnibus investigation ofthe logic of practical reasoning, under the collective title, A Practical Logicof Cognitive Systems. In this highly original approach, practical reasoning isidentified as reasoning performed with comparatively few cognitive assets,including resources such as information, time and computational capacity. Unlikewhat is proposed in optimization models of human cognition, a practical reasonerlacks perfect information, boundless time and unconstrained access tocomputational complexity. The practical reasoner is therefore obliged to be acognitive economizer and to achieve his cognitive ends with considerableefficiency. Accordingly, the practical reasoner avails himself of variousscarce-resource compensation strategies. He also possesses neurocognitivetraits that abet him in his reasoning tasks. Prominent among these is thepractical agent's striking (though not perfect) adeptness at evading irrelevantinformation and staying on task. On the approach taken here, irrelevancies areimpediments to the attainment of cognitive ends. Thus, in its most basic sense,relevant information is cognitively helpful information. Information can then besaid to be relevant for a practical reasoner to the extent that it advances orcloses some cognitive agenda of his. The book explores this idea with aconceptual detail and nuance not seen the standard semantic, probabilistic andpragmatic approaches to relevance; but wherever possible, the authors seek tointegrate alternative conceptions rather than reject them outright. A furtherattraction of the agenda-relevance approach is the extent to which its principalconceptual findings lend themselves to technically sophisticated re-expressionin formal models that marshal the resources of time and action logics andlabel led deductive systems. Agenda Relevance is necessary reading for researchers in logic, beliefdynamics, computer science, AI, psychology and neuroscience, linguistics,argumentation theory, and legal reasoning and forensic science, and will repaystudy by graduate students and senior undergraduates in these same fields.Key features:* relevance * action and agendas * practical reasoning * belief dynamics * non-classical logics * labelled deductive systems