The Logic of Persistence

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 5

Volume

Science

Knowledge Representation

A recent paper [Hanks1985] examines temporal reasoning as an example of default reasoning. They conclude that all current systems of default reasoning, including non-monotonic logic, default logic, and circumscription, are inadequate for reasoning about persistence. I present a way of representing persistence in a framework based on a generalization of circumscription, which captures Hanks and McDermott’s procedural representation.