Underlying Semantics for the Assessment of Reiter's Solution to the Frame Problem

Tania Bedrax-Weiss, Leopoldo E. Bertossi

Abstract: This paper presents an application of Sandewall's methodology [16] for assessing nonmonotonic entailment criteria for reasoning about actions and change. We establish the correctness of Reiter's general solution to the frame problem [14] for a broad and well characterized class of problems. This is done by: (1) identifying a nonmonotonic entailment criterion corresponding to Reiter's solution: (2) discovering ontological and epistemological assumptions that we believe underly the domains of possible applicability of Reiter's approach: (3) defining an underlying semantics corresponding to these assumptions: and (4) providing a semantic correspondence between the models selected by the entailment criterion and the models obtained from the underlying semantics. We also compare our methodology to Kartha's evaluation [6] of Reiter's general solution with respect to action logic semantics [4].