Circumscription: a form of non-monotonic reasoning

By John McCarthy. 1995

Subfields: Knowledge Graphs & Representation

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Knowledge Graphs & Representation

Citations in the corpus

Learning to Solve Arithmetic Word Problems with Verb Categorization (2014, methodology): “To handle this missing information, we use the circumscription assumption (McCarthy, 1980).”
NaturalLI: Natural Logic Inference for Common Sense Reasoning (2014, background): “Work by Reiter and McCarthy (Reiter, 1980; McCarthy, 1980) attempts to reason about the truth of a consequent in the absence of strict logical entailment.”
Adventure Games: A Challenge for Cognitive Robotics (2002, background): “However, it can use default rules (e.g., ( McCarthy 1980; Reiter 1980)) to record such hypotheses, absorb such information from the environment or hold such background knowledge.”
PDDL2.1: An Extension to PDDL for Expressing Temporal Planning Domains (2003, background): “The need to handle complex logical formulae makes the frame problem difficult to resolve, and an approach based on circumscription (McCarthy, 1980) and default reasoning (Reiter, 1980) is typical.”
Supporting ontological analysis of taxonomic relationships (2001, background): “…grew, and spread into other areas until, in the latter half of the final decade of the 20th century, the term " ontology " actually became a buzzword, as enterprise modeling , e-commerce, emerging XML meta-data standards, and knowledge management, among others, reached the top of many…”
A Framework for Theory Development in Design Science Research: Multiple Perspectives (2012, unknown): “Circumscription is a formal logical method (McCarthy, 1980) that assumes that every fragment of knowledge is valid only in certain situations, and validity can frequently not be predicted from theoretical considerations in advance.”
Logical models of argument (2000, background): “They also de(cid:12)ne several systems (such as Theorist [Poole 1988], circumscription [McCarthy 1980], logic programming, default logic [Reiter 1980] and auto-epistemic logic [Moore 1985]) in terms of an assumption-based frameworks.”
Thinking Like a Skeptic: Defeasible Inference in Natural Language (2020, background): “In circumscription (McCarthy, 1980), defaults are expressed in natural language (“a bird will ﬂy if it is not abnormal”).”
Understanding script-based stories using commonsense reasoning (2004, background): “(Happens(e, t) ∧ Initiates(e, f, t))⇒ HoldsAt(f, t+ 1).”
Abduction, experience, and goals: a model of everyday abductive explanation (1995, background): “This problem, known as the quali cation problem (McCarthy, 1980), is illustrated by McCarthy's famous observation that any rule stating that a car will start when the ignition is turned on must in principle depend on an in nite set of conditions such as \there isn't a potato in the tail pipe."”
Reasoning in Non-probabilistic Uncertainty: Logic Programming and Neural-Symbolic Computing as Examples (2017, unknown): “of conceptualising monotonic CL in contrast to nonmonotonic logics was introduced in the mid-1970s and 1980s—for instance, in the wake of Minsky’s frames [39] or McCarthy’s circumscription approach [38]—the underlying concern was not with characterising kinds of uncertainty, but with contrasting two”
Extending and implementing the stable model semantics (2000, background): “The stable model semantics is a form of nonmonotonic reasoning that is closely related to the default logic of Reiter [52, 35], circumscription of McCarthy [37, 38, 32], and the autoepistemic logic of Moore [39, 21].”