This involves taking familiar concepts, like knowledge, belief, explanation, and anger, and exploring their structure. What sorts of things can they be applied to, how are they related to other concepts, and what is their role in our thinking and communication? To meet the above criticism of AI in full, it is necessary to engage in extensive analysis of many concepts which refer to mental states and processes of kinds which AI work does not at present say much about, concepts like want, like, enjoy, prefer, intend, afraid, sad, pleasure, pain, embarrassed, disgusted, exultation, and the like.
This is not an easy task, since we are largely unconscious of how our own concepts work. However, by showing how motives of many kinds might co-exist in a single system, generating many different kinds of processes, some of which disturb or disrupt others, we may begin to see how, for example, emotional states might be accounted for. This would require considerable extension of the ideas of this book. This theme is developed in Sloman (1987).