Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many efforts have been made to use nonnative theories of rational decision-making, such as Bayesian decision theory, to consruct and model agents exhibiting intelligent behavior. In order to accommodate agents possessing only limited computational resources to apply to their decision making, however, a significant change is required in how the role of formal rationality is to be viewed. This paper argues that rationality is best seen as a property of the relationship between the agent and a designer. Such a perspective has several consequences for the design and modelling of agents, bearing on assessment of rationality, induction, reactivity, and metalevel control. It also illuminates several concerns put forth by critics of the work of the artificial intelligence community.