Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

cognitive agent uses representations to reason about the world. An "introspective" cognitive agent has the ability to manipulate representations (meta representations) of its own representations. If such an agent were to embody its beliefs in its representations, then the agent could reason about its own beliefs by manipulating its meta representations. A "belief reasoner" can reason about the beliefs of other agents. There has been considerable research in the construction of belief reasoners. This paper observes that the construction of such systems can, in large part, be reduced to the task of constructing introspective systems. We illustrate how an introspective agent can use analogy-based reasoning to construct an architecture for belief reasoning on the basis of examining its own architecture.