A boolean extension of KLM-Style conditional reasoning

Paterson-Jones G., Casini G., Meyer T.

Defeasible entailment  Non-monotonic reasoning 

Propositional KLM-style defeasible reasoning involves extending propositional logic with a new logical connective that can express defeasible (or conditional) implications, with semantics given by ordered structures known as ranked interpretations. KLM-style defeasible entailment is referred to as rational whenever the defeasible entailment relation under consideration generates a set of defeasible implications all satisfying a set of rationality postulates known as the KLM postulates. In a recent paper Booth et al. proposed PTL, a logic that is more expressive than the core KLM logic. They proved an impossibility result, showing that defeasible entailment for PTL fails to satisfy a set of rationality postulates similar in spirit to the KLM postulates. Their interpretation of the impossibility result is that defeasible entailment for PTL need not be unique. In this paper we continue the line of research in which the expressivity of the core KLM logic is extended. We present the logic Boolean KLM (BKLM) in which we allow for disjunctions, conjunctions, and negations, but not nesting, of defeasible implications. Our contribution is twofold. Firstly, we show (perhaps surprisingly) that BKLMis more expressive than PTL. Our proof is based on the fact that BKLM can characterise all single ranked interpretations, whereas PTL cannot. Secondly, given that the PTL impossibility result also applies to BKLM, we adapt the dierent forms of PTL entailment proposed by Booth et al. to apply to BKLM.

Source: SACAIR 2020 - First Southern African Conference for AI Research, pp. 236–252, Muldersdrift, South Africa, February 22-26, 2021

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