Nonmonotonic reasoning: from finitary relations to infinitary inference operations

A. Tarski [22] proposed the study of infinitary consequence operations as the central topic of mathematical logic. He considered monotonicity to be a property of all such operations. In this paper, we weaken the monotonicity requirement and consider more general operations, inference operations. These operations describe the nonmonotonic logics both humans and machines seem to be using when infering defeasible information from incomplete knowledge. We single out a number of interesting families of inference operations. This study of infinitary inference operations is inspired by the results of [12] on nonmonotonic inference relations, and relies on some of the definitions found there.This work was partially supported by a grant from the Basic Research Foundation, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and by the Jean and Helene Alfassa fund for research in Artificial Intelligence. Its final write-up was performed while the second author visited the Laboratoire d'Informatique Théorique et de Programmation, Université Paris 6.Presented byDov M. Gabbay