Nonmonotonic reasoning provides formal methods that enable intelligent systems to operate adequately when faced with incomplete or changing information. In particular, it provides rigorous mechanisms for taking back conclusions that, in the presence of new information, turn out to be wrong and for deriving new, alternative conclusions instead. Nonmonotonic reasoning methods provide rigor similar to that of classical reasoning; they form a base for validation and verification and therefore increase confidence in intelligent systems that work with incomplete and changing information. Following a brief introduction to the concepts of predicate logic that are needed in the subsequent chapters, this book presents an in depth treatment of default logic. Other subjects covered include the major approaches of autoepistemic logic and circumscription, belief revision and its relationship to nonmonotonic inference, and briefly, the stable and well-founded semantics of logic programs.

When I first participated in exploring theories of nonmonotonic reasoning in the late 1970s, I had no idea of the wealth of conceptual and mathematical results that would emerge from those halting first steps. This book by Wiktor Marek and Miroslaw Truszczynski is an elegant treatment of a large body of these results. It provides the first comprehensive treatment of two influen tial nonmonotonic logics - autoepistemic and default logic - and describes a number of surprising and deep unifying relationships between them. It also relates them to various modal logics studied in the philosophical logic litera ture, and provides a thorough treatment of their applications as foundations for logic programming semantics and for truth maintenance systems. It is particularly appropriate that Marek and Truszczynski should have authored this book, since so much of the research that went into these results is due to them. Both authors were trained in the Polish school of logic and they bring to their research and writing the logical insights and sophisticated mathematics that one would expect from such a background. I believe that this book is a splendid example of the intellectual maturity of the field of artificial intelligence, and that it will provide a model of scholarship for us all for many years to come. Ray Reiter Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 and The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Table of Contents 1 1 Introduction .........

Development and environment problems have reached such alarming proportions that the very survival of humanity is now subject to critical and unprecedented threats. In its latest report, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) criticizes Germany's global change research community for its lack of international orientation, its bias towards individual disciplines and for its weaknesses in translating scientific results into a form readily accessible to policymakers. The Council identifies alternatives for restructuring the research landscape, focusing primarily on a new 'Syndrome Approach' for global change research. By applying this tool, scientists can systematically describe and analyze the 'diseases' afflicting the Earth System, and thus elaborate response options.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR '99, held in El Paso, Texas, USA, in December 1999. The volume presents 26 contributed papers and four invited talks, three appearing as extended abstracts and one as a full paper. Topics covered include logic programming, non-monotonic reasoning, knowledge representation, semantics, complexity, expressive power, and implementation and applicatons.

This is the first book that integrates nonmonotonic reasoning and belief change into a single framework from an artificial intelligence logic point-of-view. The approach to both these subjects is based on a powerful notion of an epistemic state that subsumes both existing models for nonmonotonic inference and current models for belief change. Many results and constructions in the book are completely new and have not appeared earlier in the literature.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR 2001, held in Vienna, Austria in September 2001. The 22 revised full papers and eleven system descriptions presented with five invited papers were carefully reviewed and rigorously selected. Among the topics addressed are computational logic, declarative information extraction, model checking, inductive logic programming, default theories, stable logic programming, program semantics, incomplete information processing, concept learning, declarative specification, Prolog programming, many-valued logics, etc.

The present volume of the Handbook of the History of Logic brings together two of the most important developments in 20th century non-classical logic. These are many-valuedness and non-monotonicity. On the one approach, in deference to vagueness, temporal or quantum indeterminacy or reference-failure, sentences that are classically non-bivalent are allowed as inputs and outputs to consequence relations. Many-valued, dialetheic, fuzzy and quantum logics are, among other things, principled attempts to regulate the flow-through of sentences that are neither true nor false. On the second, or non-monotonic, approach, constraints are placed on inputs (and sometimes on outputs) of a classical consequence relation, with a view to producing a notion of consequence that serves in a more realistic way the requirements of real-life inference. Many-valued logics produce an interesting problem. Non-bivalent inputs produce classically valid consequence statements, for any choice of outputs. A major task of many-valued logics of all stripes is to fashion an appropriately non-classical relation of consequence.The chief preoccupation of non-monotonic (and default) logicians is how to constrain inputs and outputs of the consequence relation. In what is called "left non-monotonicity, it is forbidden to add new sentences to the inputs of true consequence-statements. The restriction takes notice of the fact that new information will sometimes override an antecedently (and reasonably) derived consequence. In what is called "right non-monotonicity, limitations are imposed on outputs of the consequence relation. Most notably, perhaps, is the requirement that the rule of or-introduction not be given free sway on outputs. Also prominent is the effort of paraconsistent logicians, both preservationist and dialetheic, to limit the outputs of inconsistent inputs, which in classical contexts are wholly unconstrained.In some instances, our two themes coincide. Dialetheic logics are a case in point. Dialetheic logics allow certain selected sentences to have, as a third truth value, the classical values of truth and falsity together. So such logics also admit classically inconsistent inputs. A central task is to construct a right non-monotonic consequence relation that allows for these many-valued, and inconsistent, inputs.The Many Valued and Non-Monotonic Turn in Logic is an indispensable research tool for anyone interested in the development of logic, including researchers, graduate and senior undergraduate students in logic, history of logic, mathematics, history of mathematics, computer science, AI, linguistics, cognitive science, argumentation theory, and the history of ideas. - Detailed and comprehensive chapters covering the entire range of modal logic. - Contains the latest scholarly discoveries and interprative insights that answers many questions in the field of logic.