Abductive Framework for Nonmonotonic Theory Change

Katsumi Inoue, Chiaki Sakama

Abstract: This paper proposes a method of nonmonotonic theory change. We first introduce a new form of abduction that can account for observations in nonmonotonic situation. Then we provide a framework of autoepistemic update, which describes nonmonotonic theory change through the extended abductive framework. The proposed update semantics is fairly general and provides a unified framework for various update semantics such as first-order update, view update of databases, and contradiction removal of nonmonotonic theories.