On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 08:45 +0000, Magnus Therning wrote: . . .
Nneither way may be "natural", but imperative thinking is extremely common in society, I'd say much more than "functional" thinking. Just think of cooking recipes, IKEA instructions, all the algorithms tought in math classes in grade school. I doubt that we'll ever see functional thinking tought alongside imperative thinking in lower grades in school.
It could even be that the development of the human brain as we grow up reaches a state where it can handle imperative thinking before it can handle functional thinking (I bet there's a reason why astronauts have step-wise instructions rather than a set of "functions").
All I'm trying to say is that imperative thinking is so common outside of CS/math and we learn it so early on in life that we probably can consider it the "natural thinking way".
I think you're quite right here. There's a reason that so much of Artificial Intelligence research dealt with Planning, Procedural Knowledge, and Temporal Reasoning. The so-called "Frame Problem" would not have been such a research topic if it weren't for the importance that many researchers placed on reasoning about state change. On the other hand work on declarative knowledge focused on taxonomic hierarchies and semantic nets, which dealt mostly with structural knowledge. A common view was that the two sorts of knowledge complemented each other, and corresponded in a natural way to intuitions (and some epistemological theory) about human reasoning. -- Bill Wood