The brain attics: the strategic role of memory in single and multi-agent inquiry

Abstract

M. B. Hintikka (1939–1987) and J. Hintikka (1929–2016) claimed that their reconstruction of the ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ can “serve as an explication for the link between intelligence and memory” (1983, p. 159). The claim is vindicated, first for the single-agent case, where the reconstruction captures strategies for accessing the content of a distributed and associative memory; then, for the multi-agent case, where the reconstruction captures strategies for accessing knowledge distributed in a community. Moreover, the reconstruction of the ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ allows to conceptualize those strategies as belonging to a continuum of behavioral strategies.