Relating Belief Revision and Circumscription

Abstract

Nonmonotonic formalisms and belief revision operators have been introduced as useful tools to describe and reason about evolving scenarios. Both approaches have been proven effective in a number of different situations. However, little is known about their relationship. Previous work by Winslett has shown some correlations between a specific operator and circumscription. In this paper we greatly extend Winslett's work by establishing new relations between circumscription and a large number of belief revision operators. This highlights similarities and differences between these formalisms. Furthermore, these connections provide us with the possibility of importing results in one field into the other one. 1 Introduction During the last years, many formalisms have been proposed in the AI literature to model commonsense reasoning. Particular emphasis has been put in the formal modeling of a distinct feature of commonsense reasoning, that is, its nonmonotonic nature. The AI goal of providi...