Combining Circumscription and Modal Logic

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 10

Volume

Representation and Reasoning

Representation and Reasoning: Belief

This paper discusses the logic LKM which extends circumscription into an epistemic domain. This extension will allow us to define circumscription of predicates that appear within the context of a modal operator. In fact, LKM can be seen as a method of extending any first-order nonmonotonic logic whose semantic definition is based on a partial-order among models, into a new nonmonotonic logic defined for a modal language, whose modal operator (K) follows an underlying S5 or weak-S5 semantics. One interesting use of this nonmonotonic logic is to model nonmonotonic aspects of the communication between agents.