Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we explore the idea of reflection in the context of scientific exploration. How does an agent reflect upon its behavior in order to enable productive exploration? We outline an abstract cognitive architecture for combining reflection and exploration. To achieve this we present a language for modeling cognition: the Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) language. We further present a computational model based on this language, TORQUE2 (Griffith etal., 1997; Griffith, 1997). TORQUE2 is a model of exploratory reasoning in the domain of scientific problem solving. We claim that the TMK language supports both reflection and exploration, and enables them to benefit from one another.