Conceptual reasoning : belief, multiple agents and preference / by Krzysztof Zbigniew Nowak.

Abstract

One of the central issues in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is common sense reasoning. This includes logics of knowledge and belief, non-monotonic reasoning, truth-maintenance and belief revision. Within these fields the notion of a consistent belief state is the crucial one. The issues of inconsistency and partiality of information are central to this thesis which proposes a logical knowledge representation formalism employing partial objects and partial worlds on its semantic side. The syntax includes a language, formulae, and partial theories. Partial worlds and theories are consistent, and contradictory information is assumed to arise in multiple agent situations. Relevant mathematical structures are discussed, in particular partial theories are related to partial worlds. A multiple agent case is considered. Partial theories can be partially ordered by an information ordering and the obtained lattice structure facilitates the theory selection process based on information value and truthness of theories.