Circumscribing Equality

Abstract

One important facet of common-sense reasoning is the ability to draw default conclusions about the state of the world. Such an abili ty enables one to assume, for example, that a given bird flies in the absence of information to the contrary. One drawback of the circumscriptive approach to common-sense reasoning has been its inability to produce default conclusions about equality. For example, generally one cannot tentatively conclude that President (USA) ≠ Fido using circumscription. In this paper we give a second-order axiom and model theory for circumscribing equality, and prove that they are equivalent.

Cite

Text

Rathmann and Winslett. "Circumscribing Equality." International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1989.

Markdown

[Rathmann and Winslett. "Circumscribing Equality." International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1989.](https://mlanthology.org/ijcai/1989/rathmann1989ijcai-circumscribing/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{rathmann1989ijcai-circumscribing,
  title     = {{Circumscribing Equality}},
  author    = {Rathmann, Peter K. and Winslett, Marianne},
  booktitle = {International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year      = {1989},
  pages     = {468-476},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/ijcai/1989/rathmann1989ijcai-circumscribing/}
}