Abstract
Since its inception, situation theory has been concerned with the situated nature of meaning and cognition, a theme which has also recently gained some prominence in Artificial Intelligence. Channel theory is a recently developed framework which builds on concepts introduced in situation theory, in an attempt to provide a general theory of information flow. In particular, the channel theoretic framework offers an account of fallible regularities, regularities which provide enough structure to an agent's environment to support efficient cognitive processing but which are limited in their reliability to specific circumstances. This paper describes how this framework can lead to a different perspective on defeasible reasoning: rather than being seen as reasoning with incomplete information, an agent makes use of a situated regularity, choosing to use the regularity that seems best suited (trading off reliability and simplicity) to the circumstances it happens to find itself in. We present a formal model for this task, based on the channel theoretic framework, and sketch how the model may be used as the basis for a methodology of defeasible situated reasoning, whereby agents reason with simple monotonic regularities but may revise their choice of regularity on learning more about their circumstances.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Barwise, J. (1986), 'Conditionals and conditional information', in J. Barwise (ed.). The Situation in Logic. CSLI Lecture Notes 17, Stanford: CSLI Publications. pp. 97–135.
Barwise, J. (1996), 'State spaces, local logics and non-monotonicity', in Proceedings of the Second Conference on Information-Theoretic Approaches to Logic, Language and Computation, London, pp. 1–13.
Barwise, J. and Seligman, J. (1993), 'Imperfect information flow'. in Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, Montreal, pp. 252–261.
Barwise, J. and Seligman, J. (1994), 'The rights and wrongs of natural regularity', in J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 8. California: Ridgeview.
Barwise, J. and Seligman, J. (1997), Information Flow: The Logic of Distributed Systems. Cambridge University Press.
Bouquet, P. and Giunchiglia, F. (1995), 'Reasoning about theory adequacy: a new solution to the qualification problem', Fundamenta Informatica 23, pp. 247–262.
Boutilier, C. (1992), Conditional Logics for Default Reasoning and Belief Revision. Ph. D. thesis, Department of Computer Science, Univerity of Toronto.
Brewka, G., Dix, J. and Konolige, K. (1997), Nonmonotonic Reasoning: An Overview. CSLI Lecture Notes Number 73, Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Buvač, S., Buvač, V. and Mason, I. A. (1995), 'Metamathematics of contexts'. Fundamenta Informaticae, 3, pp. 263–301.
Cavedon, L. (1995), A Channel Theoretic Approach to Conditional Reasoning. Ph. D. thesis, Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh.
Cavedon, L., (1996), 'A channel-theoretic model for conditional logics (extended abstract)', in J. Seligman and D. Westerstähl (eds.), Logic, Language and Computation, Volume 1. CSLI Lecture Notes Number 73, Stanford: CSLI Publications, pp. 121–136.
Cavedon, L., and Glasbey, S. (1994), 'Outline of an information-flow model of generics'. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 42, 227–245.
Cavedon, L. and Glasbey, S. (1995), 'The role of context in the interpretation of generics', in Tenth Amsterdam Colloquium on Logic and Language, Amsterdam.
Delgrande, J. P. (1988), 'An approach to default reasoning based on a first-order conditional logic'. Artificial Intelligence 36, pp. 63–90.
Delgrande, J. P. (1992), 'Miscellaneous examples for default reasoning', Technical Report CMPT TR 92–05, Centre for Systems Science, Simon Fraser University. British Columbia, Canada.
Devlin, K. (1991), Logic and Information. Cambridge University Press.
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ferber, J. and Muller, J.-P. (1996), 'Influences and reaction: a model of situated multiagent systems', in Proceedings of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems, Kyoto, pp. 72–79.
Guha, R. V. (1991). Contexts: A Formalization and Some Applications. Ph. D. thesis, Stanford University.
Healey, P. and Vogel, C. (1994), 'A situation theoretic model of dialogue'. in K. Jokinen (ed.), Pragmatics in Dialogue Management. Gothenburg Monographs in Linguistics.
Kraus, S., Lehmann, D. and Magidor, M. (1990), 'Nonmonotonic reasoning, preferential models and cumulative logics', Artificial Intelligence 44, pp. 167–207.
Lifschitz, V. (1989), 'Benchmark problems for formal nonmonotonic theories', in M. Reinfrank, J. de Kleer, M. Ginsburg. and F. Sandewall (eds.), Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 346, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 202–219.
McCarthy, J. (1993), 'Notes on formalizing context', in Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Chambery, France. pp. 555–560.
Morreau, M. (1992), Conditionals in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence. Ph. D. thesis, Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam.
Nakashima, H., Noda, I. and Handa, K. (1996), 'Organic programming language Gaea for multiagents'. in Proceedings of the International Conference on Multi Agent Systems, Kyoto, pp. 236–243.
Nute, D. (1980), Topics in Conditional Logic. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Pelletier, F. and Carlson, G. (eds.) (1995), The Generic(s) Book. Chicago University Press.
Pollock, J. L. (1987), 'Defeasible reasoning'. Cognitive Science 11.
Restall, G. A. (1996), 'Information flow and relevant logics', in J. Seligman and D. Westerstähl (eds.), Logic, Language and Computation, Volume 1. CSLI Lecture Notes Number 73, Stanford: CSLI Publications, pp. 463–477.
Rosenschein, S. J. and Kaelbling, L. P. (1986), 'The synthesis of machines with provable epistemic properties', in J. Halpern (ed.), Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge: Proceedings of the 1986 Conference. Los Altos: Morgan Kaufman, pp. 83–98.
Seligman, J. (1990), 'Perspectives in situation theory', in R. Cooper, K. Mukai, and J. Perry (eds.), Situation Theory and its Applications I, Stanford. CSLI Lecture Notes 22, CSLI Publications.
Shoham, Y. (1988), Reasoning About Change: Time and Causation from the Stand-point of Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cavedon, L. Default Reasoning as Situated Monotonic Inference*. Minds and Machines 8, 509–531 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008362411391
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008362411391