Metaknowledge and Metareasoning

This chapter discusses the metaknowledge and metareasoning. The existence of a formal description for the process of inference is important because it allows refining characterization of belief. It is inappropriate to assume that an intelligent agent believes the logical closure of the sentences in its database. It is more appropriate to define an agents beliefs as those sentences that it can derive in a given amount of time using a given inference procedure. The conceptualization of the inference process allows defining this notion of belief formally, and as a result, one can create agents capable of reasoning in detail about the inferential abilities, and beliefs of other agents. Another important use of conceptualization and vocabulary is in introspection. An intelligent agent should be able to observe, and describe its own problem-solving processes, and it should be able to understand problem solving hints provided by others.