Paper: A Semantical Approach to Nonmonotonic Logics (at LICS 1987)

Authors: Yoav Shoham

Abstract

Recent years have seen a proliferation of so-called nonmonotonic logics, or formalisms that allow "jumping to conclusions," assigning formulas "default truth values", or making "defeasible inferences". The different systems that have been proposed have strong surface dissimilarities, and comparison between them has proven difficult.
In this paper we propose a uniform approach to constructing and understanding nonmonotonic logics. This framework subsumes existing nonmonotonic formalisms, and yet is remarkably simple, adding almost no extra baggage to traditional logic. In the new framework we redefine classical notions such as satisfiability and entailment, and look at what happens to some standard results from classical logic, such as the deduction theorem. We also briefly discuss how existing nonmonotonic logics are special cases of our general formulation, and how their new analysis serves to clarify them and relate them to one another.

BibTeX

  @InProceedings{Shoham-ASemanticalApproach,
    author = 	 {Yoav Shoham},
    title = 	 {A Semantical Approach to Nonmonotonic Logics},
    booktitle =  {Proceedings of the Second Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 1987)},
    year =	 {1987},
    month =	 {June}, 
    pages =      {275--279},
    location =   {Ithaca, NY, USA}, 
    publisher =	 {IEEE Computer Society Press}
  }