Actions and Inconsistency: The Closure Problem of Practical Reasoning

Abstract

This article formulates a fundamental problem in the philosophy of action. It will become apparent that the same problem is also an abstract and general, but very important question for the field of artificial intelligence — and robotics in particular. As well, the nature of the problem, as revealed below, will make evident its importance in the field of logical evaluation of natural language argumentation. The problem is one of when a knowledge-based goal-directed inference leading to an action (or a recommendation for a course of action to be taken) may be said to be structurally correct (or closed), parallel to the sense in which a deductive argument is said to be valid (deductively closed).