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Choosing reference classes and building provisional models

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Abstract

A well-known problem in default logic is the ability of naive reasoners to “explain” bothg and ¬g from a set of observations. This problem is treated in at least two different ways within that camp.

One approach is examination of the various explanations and choosing among them on the basis of various “explanation comparators”. A typical comparator is choosing the explanation that depends on the “most specific” observation, similar to the notion of narrowest reference class.

Others examine default extensions of the observations and choose whatever is true in any extension, or what is true in all extensions or what is true in “preferred” extensions. Default extensions are sometimes thought of as acceptable models of the world that are discarded as more knowledge becomes available.

We argue that the notions of “specificity” and “extension” lack clear semantics. Furthermore, we show that the problems these ideas were supposed to solve can be handled easily within a probabilistic framework.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computational Science, University of Saskatchewan, S7N 0W0, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Eric Neufeld

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  1. Eric Neufeld
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Neufeld, E. Choosing reference classes and building provisional models. Ann Math Artif Intell 2, 277–290 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01531012

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