Artificial Intelligence, Logic and Formalizing Common Sense

This is a position paper about the relations among artificial intelligence (AI), mathematical logic and the formalization of common-sense knowledge and reasoning. It also treats other problems of concern to both AI and philosophy. I thank the editor for inviting it. The position advocated is that philosophy can contribute to AI if it treats some of its traditional subject matter in more detail and that this will advance the philosophical goals also. Actual formalisms (mostly first order languages) for expressing common-sense facts are described in the references. Common-sense knowledge includes the basic facts about events (including actions) and their effects, facts about knowledge and how it is obtained, facts about beliefs and desires. It also includes the basic facts about material objects and their properties. One path to human-level AI uses mathematical logic to formalize commonsense knowledge in such a way that common-sense problems can be solved by logical reasoning. This methodology requires understanding the commonsense world well enough to formalize facts about it and ways of achieving goals in it. Basing AI on understanding the common-sense world is different