Reasoning in the Absence of Goals

In creative industries such as design and research it is common to reason about ‘problem-finding’ before tasks or goals can be established. Problem-finding may also continue throughout the problem-solving process, so achieving goals may be an ongoing process of discovery as well as iterative improvement and refinement. This paper considers the design of cognitive systems with complementary processes for both problem-finding and problem-solving. We review a range of approaches that may complement goal-directed reasoning when an artificial system does not or cannot know precisely what it is looking for. We argue that there is a spectrum of approaches that can be used for reasoning in the absence of goals, which make progressively weaker assumptions about the definition and presence goals, and that goal-oriented behavior can be an intermediate result of problem-finding, rather than as a starting point for problem-solving. We demonstrate one such approach based on implicit motives and incentives.