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"Computing can change our ways of thinking about many things, mathematics, biology, engineering, administrative procedures, and many more. But my main concern is that it can change our thinking about ourselves: giving us new models, metaphors, and other thinking tools to aid our efforts to fathom the mysteries of the human mind and heart. The new discipline of Artificial Intelligence is the branch of computing most directly concerned with this revolution. By giving us new, deeper, insights into some of our inner processes, it changes our thinking about ourselves. It therefore changes some of our inner processes, and so changes what we are, like all social, technological and intellectual revolutions." This book, published in 1978 by Harvester Press and Humanities Press, has been out of print for many years, and is now online, produced from a scanned in copy of the original, digitised by OCR software and made available in September 2001. Since then a number of notes and corrections have been added. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

In one major section we discuss the imprecision, the incompleteness, the openendedness, and the uncertainty of people's knowledge. In the other major section we discuss strategies people use to make different types of deductive, negative, and functional inferences, and the way uncertainties combine in these inferences. Keywords Semantics, inference, cognitive processes, natural language processing, human memory, question-answering systems, deduction, analogy 1. Introduction In this paper we will discuss how to represent and process information in a computer in ways that are natural to people. This does not mean doing away completely with representations and procedures which computers have traditionally used, but adding new representations and procedures which they have not used. People often store and communicate imprecise, incomplete, and unquantified information; they often assert truth or falsity in relative terms; and they seldom seem to use rigorous logic in their inferential processes. Because of these conditions, people seem to have an almost infinite information processing capacity, with inference making and problem solving abilities more refined and far more flexible than any existing computer program. How can we study these human capabilities in order to make our machines show similar performance? A combination of approaches is perhaps best. Observation of people's behavior, introspection, some experimentation, protocol analysis, and synthesis of computer programs can all be valuable techniques.