Semantical considerations on nonmonotonic logic

TLDR: In this paper, the authors give a reconstruction of non-monotonic logic as a model of an Ideally rational agent's reasoning about his own beliefs, and define an Intuitively based semantics for which they can show autoeplstemlc logic to be both sound and complete.

Abstract: Commonsense reasoning is "nonmonotonic" in the sense that we often draw conclusions on the basis of partial information that we retract when we are given more complete information. Some of the most interesting products of the recent attempts to formalize nonmonotonic reasoning are the nonmonotonic logics of McDermott and Doyle [McDermott and Doyle, 1980] [McDermott, 1982]. These logics, however, all have peculiarities that suggest they do not quite succeed in capturing the intuitions that prompted their development. In this paper we give a reconstruction of nonmonotonic logic as a model of an Ideally rational agent's reasoning about his own beliefs. For the resulting system, called autoeplstemlc logic, we define an Intuitively based semantics for which we can show autoeplstemlc logic to be both sound and complete. We then compare the McDermott and Doyle logics to autoeplstemlc logic, showing how it avoids their peculiarities.