General Patterns for Nonmonotonic Reasoning: From Basic Entailments to Plausible Relations

This paper has two goals. First, we develop frameworks for logical systems which are able to reflect not only nonmonotonic patterns of reasoning, but also paraconsistent reasoning. Our second goal is to have a better understanding of the conditions that a useful relation for nonmonotonic reasoning should satisfy. For this we consider a sequence of generalizations of the pioneering works of Gabbay, Kraus, Lehmann, Magidor and Makinson. These generalizations allow the use of monotonic nonclassical logics as the underlying logic upon which nonmonotonic reasoning may be based. Our sequence of frameworks culminates in what we call (following Lehmann) plausible, nonmonotonic, multiple-conclusion consequence relations (which are based on a given monotonic one). Our study yields intuitive justifications for conditions that have been proposed in previous frameworks and also clarifies the connections among some of these systems. In addition, we present a general method for constructing plausible nonmonotonic relations. This method is based on a multiple-valued semantics, and on Shoham’s idea of preferential models. 1