This paper provides a logical analysis of the avoidance of wishful thinking based on conflict resolutions between informational and motivational attitudes such as beliefs and desires. Several desiderata for conflict resolutions are introduced, discussed and tested in a rule-based logic. The results suggest that Reiter’s default logic is too strong, in the sense that a weaker notion of maximalit...

This paper investigates a consistent version cwaS Reiter’s closed world assumption cwa. It proves (cf. theorem 4.11) that for purely relational languages cwaS is ∀-complete with respect to minimal semantics, i.e. for every ∀-sentence φ and for every ∀-theory Σ, φ ∈ cwaS(Σ) iff Σ `min φ. Moreover, it relates cwaS to other known syntactic characterization of minimal semantics: Minker’s GCWA.

This is a beautiful book, in conception and execution. What Ray Reiter has done has taken a set of ideas worked out by him and his collaborators over the last 11 years and recrystallized them into a sustained and consistent presentation.1 This is not a collection of those papers but a complete rewrite that avoids the usual repetition and notational inconsistency that one might expect. It makes ...

In a recent article published in this journal (van Deemter, Gatt, van der Sluis, & Power, 2012), the authors criticize the Incremental Algorithm (a well-known algorithm for the generation of referring expressions due to Dale & Reiter, 1995, also in this journal) because of its strong reliance on a pre-determined, domain-dependent Preference Order. The authors argue that there are potentially ma...

Using the situation calculus as underlying formalism for specifying database updates as proposed by Raymond Reiter, a semantical notion of relevance of entries in tables to other entries is introduced. Also a semantical notion of relevant action is provided. Some properties of these semantical notions are investigated. In particular, they are compared with syntactical deenitions of relevance th...