Resource-origins of Nonmonotonicity

摘要

Formal nonmonotonic systems try to model the phenomenon that commonsense reasoners are able to "jump" in their reasoning from assumptions Δ to conclusionsC without their being any deductive chain from Δ to C. Such jumps are done by variousmechanisms which are strongly dependent on context and knowledge of how the actualworld functions. Our aim is to motivate these jump rules as inference rules designed tooptimise survival in an environment with scant resources of effort and time. We begin witha general discussion and quickly move to Section 3 where we introduce five resource prin-ciples. We show that these principles lead to some well known nonmonotonic systems suchas Nute's defeasible logic. We also give several examples of practical reasoning situationsto illustrate our principles.