Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper identifies goal handling processes that begin to account for the kind of processes involved in invention. We identify new goal properties and mechanisms for processing goals, as well as means of integrating opportunism, deliberation, and social interaction into goal/plan processes. We focus on enterprise goals, which extend traditional design goals and knowledge goals to address significant enterprises associated with an inventor. Enterprise goals represent "seed" goals of an expert, around which the whole knowledge of an expert gets reorganized and grows more or less opportunistically. Enterprise goals reflect the idiosyncrasy of thematic goals among experts. They constantly increase the sensitivity of individuals for particular events that might contribute to their satisfaction. Our exploration is based on a well-documented example: the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. We propose mechanisms to explain: (1) how Bell's early thematic goals gave rise to the new goals to invent the multiple telegraph and the telephone, and (2) how the new goals interacted opportunistically. Finally we describe our implemented computational model, ALEC (Analogical Learning by Explaining Creatively), that accounts for the role of enterprise goals in invention.