We start with Fodor's critique of cognitive science in
"The mind doesn't work that way: The scope
and limits of computational psychology": he argues that much mental activity
cannot be handled by the current methods of cognitive science
because it is nonmonotonic and, therefore, is global in nature,
is not context-free, and is thus not capable of being
formalized by a Turing-like mental architecture. We look at
the use of nonmonotonic logic in the artificial intelligence
community, particularly with the discussion of the so-called
frame problem. The mainstream approach to the frame problem
is, we argue, probably susceptible to Fodor's critique; however,
there is an alternative approach, due to McCain and Turner, which
is, when suitably reformulated, not susceptible.
In the course of our argument, we give a proof theory for
the McCain-Turner system and show that it satisfies cut
elimination. We have two substantive conclusions: first, that
Fodor's argument depends on assumptions about logical form which
not all nonmonotonic theories satisfy and, second, that
metatheory plays an important role in the context of evolutionary
accounts of rationality.