From Assumptions to Meaning 1 Veronica

In human communication, assumptions play a central role. Linguists and logicians have uncovered their many facets. For instance, the assumption of a looking glass' existence and unicity in "The looking glass is turning into a mist now" is called a presupposition; the assumption that a polite request, rather than a literal question, will be "heard" in "Can you open the door?" is an implicature. Much of AI work is also concerned with the study of assumptions in one form or another: abductive reasoning "infers" (assumes) p from q given that p ) q; uncertain information with high probability is used (assumed) in some frameworks, and so on. Recently, systems for hypothetical reasoning that extend the capabilities of deductive databases have been studied e.g [4] and in the area of logic programming, assumptions have also been widely used, most notably for default reasoning (e.g. negation as failure). Independently, work on intuitionistic logic and, more recently, linear logic [12] has provided formally characterized embodiments of assumptions which have been in uential on logic programming and logic grammars [15, 16, 14]. The result is not only a better understanding