FDE Circumscription

In his article "Reassurance via Translation" Marcel Crabbe proposed a formalism to obtain reassurance and classical recapture in the setting of minimal FDE. His formalism proved to be general enough to be extended in order to formalize other forms of non-monotonic systems based on preference relations. It is the aim of this article to show how his result can be extended in a natural way by combining two different reasoning systems, namely minimal FDE and circumscription, in order to get a paraconsistent and paracomplete version of circumscription, which we will call paracomplistent circumscription, which has the advantages of FDE and circumscription but is neither explosive nor lacks modus ponens in consistent contexts. Furthermore, we will complete a proof Crabbe left unfinished

Natural language acquisition and rhetoric in artificial intelligence

During the 1980s, artificial intelligence research started to undergo a quiet, but important shift in focus from research in computer science to research in the human sciences and humanities. Though in the past, artificial intelligence has primarily been researched by computer scientists, the need for input from the human sciences has invited a great amount of cross-disciplinary work by members of many different callings. Rarely do people start out in the field of artificial intelligence; rather, the dream of building an intelligent machine infects them as they see the parallels between their work and the projects being undertaken in artificial intelligence. Because artificial intelligence is, in essence, studying the qualities of humanness, few disciplines can avoid somehow being tied in

Using Extended Logic Programs to Formalize Commonsense Reasoning

In this dissertation, we investigate how commonsense reasoning can be formalized by using extended logic programs. In this investigation, we first use extended logic programs to formalize inheritance hierarchies with exceptions by adopting McCarthy's simple abnormality formalism to express uncertain knowledge. In our representation, not only credulous reasoning can be performed but also the ambiguity-blocking inheritance and the ambiguity-propagating inheritance in skeptical reasoning are simulated. In response to the anomalous extension problem, we explore and discover that the intuition underlying commonsense reasoning is a kind of forward reasoning. The unidirectional nature of this reasoning is applied by many reformulations of the Yale shooting problem to exclude the undesired conclusion. We then identify defeasible conclusions in our representation based on the syntax of extended logic programs. A similar idea is also applied to other formalizations of commonsense reasoning to achieve such a purpose

Autocircumscription

Reasoning can be used to select among various possible interpretations of events. But how are these possibilities determined? We isolate two key technical features of circumscription (consistency and minimization), and use the first as the basis for a reformulation of the circumscription principle in a way related to possibility, self knowledge, and negative introspection. The second (minimization) then can be separately expressed on its own. Conceptual clarity and a kind of validity are results of this separation, as well as a computational means to determine (sometimes) when a wff isnot among a reasoner’s conclusions. I