A Semantic Decomposition of Defeasible Logics

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Knowledge Representation

We investigate defeasible logics using a technique which decomposes the semantics of such logics into two parts: a specification of the structure of defeasible reasoning and a semantics for the meta-language in which the specification is written. We show that Nute’s Defeasible Logic corresponds to Kunen’s semantics, and develop a defeasible logic from the well-founded semantics of Van Gelder, Ross and Schlipf. We also obtain a new defeasible logic which extends an existing language by modifying the specification of Defeasible Logic. Thus our approach is productive in analysing, comparing and designing defeasible logics.