[ CogSci Summaries home | UP | email ]

D. McDermott and J. Doyle, Non-Monotonic Logic I. Artificial Intelligence, 13 (1\&2), 1980.

Author of the summary: J. William Murdock, 1997, murdock@cc.gatech.edu

Cite this paper for:



Keywords: Non-Monotonic Logic

Systems: TMS (Truth Maintenance System)

Summary: Introduces the notion of non-monotonic logic, a logical
system in which new information may be added to invalidate old
conclusions.  Motivates this concept by observing the necessity of
revising incomplete world models in real life situations.  Introduces
a new operator {\sf M} which denotes that a proposition is consistent
with the current knowledge base.  Discusses a variety of approaches to
processing consistency.  Defines a broad array of terms relating to
non-monotonic logic, concentrating on the notion of a ``fixed point''
which is an extension of a notion from monotonic logic.  Uses these
terms to prove some theorems.  Establishes a proof procedure (i.e. a
processing account) based on the development of internally coherent
"tableaus" (i.e. truth table entries).  Briefly introduces TMS and
related programs as a rough implementation of these ideas.  Raises
some open technical questions.

Summary author's notes:


Back to the Cognitive Science Summaries homepage
Cognitive Science Summaries Webmaster:
JimDavies ( jim@jimdavies.org )
Last modified: Tue Mar 9 18:11:13 EST 1999