One of the most striking characteristics of human beings is their ability to function successfully in complex environments about which they know very little. Reflect on how little you really know about all the individual matters of fact that characterize the world. What, other than vague generalizations, do you know about the apples on the trees of China, individual grains of sand, or even the residents of Cincinnati? But that does not prevent you from eating an apple while visiting China, lying on the beach in Hawaii, or giving a lecture in Cincinnati. Our ignorance of individual matters of fact is many orders of magnitude greater than our knowledge. And the situation does not improve when we turn to knowledge of general facts. Modern science apprises us of some generalizations, and our experience teaches us numerous higher-level although less precise general truths, but surely we are ignorant of most general truths.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
M. A. Covington, D. Nute, and A. Vellino. Prolog Programming in Depth. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, second edition, 1997.
P. M. Dung. On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming, and n-person games. Artificial Intelligence, 77(2):321–357, 1995.
H. E. Kyburg, Jr. Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conneticut, 1961.
D. Makinson and K. Schlechta. Floating conclusions and zombie paths: Two deep difficulties in the “directly skeptical” approach to inheritance nets. Artificial Intelligence, 48(2):199–209, 1991.
J. McCarthy. Applications of circumscription to formalizing common sense knowledge. Artificial Intelligence, 28(1):89–116, 1986.
D. Nute. Basic defeasible logic. In L. F. del Cerro and M. Penttonen, editors, Intensional Logics for Programming, pages 125–154. Oxford University Press, USA, 1992.
D. Nute. Norms, priorities, and defeasibility. In P. McNamara and H. Prakken, editors, Norms, Logics and Information Systems, pages 201–218. IOS Press, Amsterdam, 1999.
J. Pollock. Defeasible reasoning. Cognitive Science, 11(4):481–518, 1987.
J. Pollock. Justification and defeat. Artificial Intelligence, 67(2):377–408, 1994.
J. Pollock. Cognitive Carpentry: A Blueprint for How to Build a Person. MIT Press, 1995.
J. Pollock. Perceiving and reasoning about a changing world. Computational Intelligence, 14(4):498–562, 1998.
J. Pollock and I. Oved. Vision, knowledge, and the mystery link. Philosophical Perspectives 19, pages 309–351, 2005.
R. Reiter. A Logic for Default Reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 13(1,2):81–132, 1980.
D. S. Touretzky, J. F. Horty, and R. H. Thomason. A clash of intuitions: the current state of nonmonotonic multiple inheritance systems. In Proceedings IJCAI, pages 476–482, 1987.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag US
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pollock, J.L. (2009). A Recursive Semantics for Defeasible Reasoning. In: Simari, G., Rahwan, I. (eds) Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-98197-0_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-98197-0_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-98196-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-98197-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)