An approach to reasoning with default rules where the proportion of exceptions, or more generally the probability of encountering an exception, can be at least roughly assessed is presented. It is based on local uncertainty propagation rules which provide the best bracketing of a conditional probability of interest from the knowledge of the bracketing of some other conditional probabilities. A ...

We present an approach to variable-strength conditional preferences for matchmaking and ranking objects in description logics. In detail, we introduce conditional preference bases, which consist of a description logic knowledge base and a finite set of variable-strength conditional preferences, and which are associated with a formal semantics based on ranking functions. We then define the notio...

Young children spend a large portion of their time pretending about non-real situations. Why? We answer this question by using the framework of Bayesian causal models to argue that pretending and counterfactual reasoning engage the same component cognitive abilities: disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative representation of reality, and keeping this representati...

I present a logic programming approach based on the weak completions semantics to model human reasoning tasks, and apply the approach to model the suppression task, the selection task as well as the belief-bias e↵ect, to compute preferred mental models of spatial reasoning tasks and to evaluate indicative as well as counterfactual conditionals.

This article reports results from two studies of how people answer counterfactual questions about simple machines. Participants learned about devices that have a specific configuration of components, and they answered questions of the form "If component X had not operated [failed], would component Y have operated?" The data from these studies indicate that participants were sensitive to the way...

This short paper outlines some aspects of a method of axiomatizing actions and their effects in standard first-order logic. The method is closely related to other methods using nonmonotonic logics, but the use of first-order logic permits remarkable simplicity. In particular, there is a single, explicit, fixed, and intuitively meaningful frame axiom. Moreover, complex types of inference are pos...

The notion of minimality is widely used in three different areas of Artificial Intelligence: non-monotonic reasoning, belief revision, and conditional reasoning. However, it is difficult for the readers of the literature in these areas to perceive the similarities clearly, because each formalization in those areas uses its own language sometimes without referring to other for-malizations. We de...