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- Robert L. Causey (1991). The Epistemic Basis of Defeasible Reasoning. Minds and Machines 1 (4).This article argues that: (i) Defeasible reasoning is the use of distinctive procedures for belief revision when new evidence or new authoritative judgment is interpolated into a system of beliefs about an application domain. (ii) These procedures can be explicated and implemented using standard higher-order logic combined with epistemic assumptions about the system of beliefs. The procedures mentioned in (i) depend on the explication in (ii), which is largely described in terms of a Prolog program, EVID, which implements a system for interactive, defeasible reasoning when combined with an application knowledge base. It is shown that defeasible reasoning depends on a meta-level Closed World Assumption applied to the relationship between supporting evidence and a defeasible conclusion based on this evidence. Thesis (i) is then further defended by showing that the EVID explication of defeasible reasoning has sufficient representational power to cover a wide variety of practical applications of defeasible reasoning, especially in the context of decision making.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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The general conditions of epistemic defeat are naturally represented through the interplay of two distinct kinds of entailment, deductive and defeasible. Many of the current approaches to modeling defeasible reasoning seek to define defeasible entailment via model-theoretic notions like truth and satisfiability, which, I argue, fails to capture this fundamental distinction between truthpreserving and justification-preserving entailments. I present an alternative account of defeasible entailment and show how logic programming offers a paradigm in which the distinction can be captured, allowing for the modeling of a larger range of types of defeat. This is possible through a natural extension of the declarative and procedural semantics of Horn clauses.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this paper we explore the thesis that the role of argumentation in practical reasoning in general and legal reasoning in particular is to justify the use of defeasible rules to derive a conclusion in preference to the use of other defeasible rules to derive a conflicting conclusion. The defeasibility of rules is expressed by means of non-provability claims as additional conditions of the rules.We outline an abstract approach to defeasible reasoning and argumentation which includes many existing formalisms, including default logic, extended logic programming, non-monotonic modal logic and auto-epistemic logic, as special cases. We show, in particular, that the admissibility semantics for all these formalisms has a natural argumentation-theoretic interpretation and proof procedure, which seem to correspond well with informal argumentation.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This is a title on the foundations of defeasible logic, which explores the formal properties of everyday reasoning patterns whereby people jump to conclusions, reserving the right to retract them in the light of further information. Although technical in nature the book contains sections that outline basic issues by means of intuitive and simple examples. This book is primarily targeted at philosophers interested in the foundations of defeasible logic, logicians, and specialists in artificial intelligence and theoretical computer science.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this paper, the Carneades argumentation system is extended to represent a procedural view of inquiry in which evidence is marshalled to support or defeat claims to knowledge. The model is a sequence of moves in a collaborative group inquiry in which parties take turns making assertions about what is known or not known, putting forward evidence to support them, and subjecting these moves to criticisms. It is shown how this model of evaluating evidence in an inquiry is based on a defeasible logic using forms of argument that admit exceptions. It is contended that reasoning from absence of knowledge is as important to inquiry as positive reasoning from evidence to knowledge. The philosophical conflict between this view of reasoning about knowledge and the true-belief-plus view is explored by airing objections and replies on both sides.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... OSCAR is a fully implemented architecture for a cognitive agent, based largely on the author’s work in philosophy concerning epistemology and practical cognition. The seminal idea is that a generally intelligent agent must be able to function in an environment in which it is ignorant of most matters of fact. The architecture incorporates a general-purpose defeasible reasoner, built on top of an efficient natural deduction reasoner for first-order logic. It is based upon a detailed theory about how the various aspects of epistemic and practical cognition should interact, and many of the details are driven by theoretical results concerning defeasible reasoning. The architecture is easily extensible by changing the set of inference schemes supplied to the reasoner. Existing inference schemes handle many kinds of epistemic cognition, including reasoning from perceptual input, causal reasoning and the frame problem, and reasoning defeasibly about probabilities. Work is underway to implement a system of defeasible decisiontheoretic planning.
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| | Scholar | More options ... This paper argues that some traditional fallacies should be considered as reasonable arguments when used as part of a properly conducted dialog. It is shown that argumentation schemes, formal dialog models, and profiles of dialog are useful tools for studying properties of defeasible reasoning and fallacies. It is explained how defeasible reasoning of the most common sort can deteriorate into fallacious argumentation in some instances. Conditions are formulated that can be used as normative tools to judge whether a given defeasible argument is fallacious or not. It is shown that three leading violations of proper dialog standards for defeasible reasoning necessary to see how fallacies work are: (a) improper failure to retract a commitment, (b) failure of openness to defeat, and (c) illicit reversal of burden of proof.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... An argument is self-defeating when it contains defeaters for some of its own defeasible lines. It is shown that the obvious rules for defeat among arguments do not handle self-defeating arguments correctly. It turns out that they constitute a pervasive phenomenon that threatens to cripple defeasible reasoning, leading to almost all defeasible reasoning being defeated by unexpected interactions with self-defeating arguments. This leads to some important changes in the general theory of defeasible reasoning.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... One of the most striking characteristics of human beings is their ability to function successfully in complex environments about which they know very little. In light of our pervasive ignorance, we cannot get around in the world just reasoning deductively from our prior beliefs together with new perceptual input. As our conclusions are not guaranteed to be true, we must countenance the possibility that new information will lead us to change our minds, withdrawing previously adopted beliefs. In this sense, our reasoning is “defeasible”. The question arises how defeasible reasoning works, or ought to work. In particular we need rules governing what a cognizer ought to believe given a set of interacting arguments some of which defeat others. That is what is called a “semantics” for defeasible reasoning, and this chapter will propose a new semantics that avoids certain clear counter-examples to all existing semantics.
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| | Scholar | More options ... This article begins with an introduction to defeasible (nonmonotonic) reasoning and a brief description of a computer program, EVID, which can perform such reasoning. I then explain, and illustrate with examples, how this program can be applied in computational representations of ordinary dialogic argumentation. The program represents the beliefs and doubts of the dialoguers, and uses these propositional attitudes, which can include commonsense defeasible inference rules, to infer various changing conclusions as a dialogue progresses. It is proposed that computational representations of this kind are a useful tool in the analysis of dialogic argumentation, and, in particular, demonstrate the important role of defeasible reasoning in everyday arguments using commonsense reasoning.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Proceedings of the 2008 AAAI Spring Symposium on Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents. “OSCAR is a fully implemented architecture for a cognitive agent, based largely on the author’s work in philosophy concerning epistemology and practical cognition. The seminal idea is that a generally intelligent agent must be able to function in an environment in which it is ignorant of most matters of fact. The architecture incorporates a general-purpose defeasible reasoner, built on top of an efficient natural deduction reasoner for first-order logic. It is based upon a detailed theory about how the various aspects of epistemic and practical cognition should interact, and many of the details are driven by theoretical results concerning defeasible reasoning.”.
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| | Scholar | More options ... Discussion of Robert L. Causey, The epistemic basis of defeasible reasoning
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