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Applications of Circumscription to Formalizing Common Sense Knowledge

This paper was published in Artificial Intelligence in 1986. It gives a better formulation of circumscription and emphasizes making certain functions and predicates variable.

Applications of Circumscription to Formalizing Common Sense Knowledge was first published in Artificial Intelligence in 1986. A preliminary version was given at the 1984 Mohonk conference on nonmonotonic reasoning.

The formalism of this paper mainly supersedes that of Circumscription - A Form of Nonmonotonic Reasoning. In particular this paper properly treats variables that are not minimized.

The paper presents a new and more symmetric version of the circumscription method of nonmonotonic reasoning first described in (McCarthy 1980) and some applications to formalizing common sense knowledge. The applications in this paper are mostly based on minimizing the abnormality of different aspects of various entities. Included are nonmonotonic treatments of is-a hierarchies, the unique names hypothesis, and the frame problem. The new circumscription may be called formula circumscription to distinguish it from the previously defined domain circumscription and predicate circumscription. A still more general formalism called prioritized circumscription is briefly explored.

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Citation for this paper

@article{McC86,
	author = "John McCarthy",
	title = "Applications of Circumscription to Formalizing Common Sense
	Knowledge",
	note = {Reprinted in \cite{McC90}},
	journal = {Artificial Intelligence},
	year = 1986,
	volume = 28,
	pages = "89--116"
}