An approach to the problem of propositional inductive learning of if-then-else rules, diierent from the commonly used ones, is presented in the paper. Main diierences are: literal selection process that searches for the smallest set of literals so that the completely correct rule for all learning examples can be constructed and the nonnormal form of the generated rules built by the search for n...

The paper starts from the claim that every assertion of belief may be analyzed into an assertion about a counterfactual surprise of the believer in front of a dissonant knowledge. The notion of a counterfactual surprise can be usefully related to the well studied notion of Shackle’s potential surprise. In §2 the author stresses the difference between explanation and abduction on one side and in...

Some interesting investigations by Hempel concerning the concept of ~on­ firming evidence are here discussed. Hempel shows correctly that two wIdespread conceptions are too narrow: Nicod's criterion (the law fall swans are white' is confirmed by observations of white swans and only by these) and th.e prediction-criterion (a hypothesis is confirmed by given evidenc~ if and only If one part of th...

The capability to store data about business processes execution in so-called Event Logs has brought to the diffusion of tools for the analysis of process executions and for the assessment of the goodness of a process model. Nonetheless, these tools are often very rigid in dealing with with Event Logs that include incomplete information about the process execution. Thus, while the ability of han...

In 1959 Carnap published a probability model that was meant to allow for reasoning by analogy involving two independent properties. Maher (2000) derived a generalized version of this model axiomatically and defended the model’s adequacy. It is thus natural to now consider how the model might be extended to the case of more than two properties. A simple extension was published by Hesse (1964); t...

Conditionals are basic for human reasoning. In our paper, we present two experiments, which for the first time systematically compare how people reason about indicative conditionals (Experiment 1) and counterfactual conditionals (Experiment 2) in causal and non-causal task settings (N = 80). The main result of both experiments is that conditional probability is the dominant response pattern and...

In this paper we make a detailed comparison of the Situation Calculus and the Event Calculus, two logic-based temporal reasoning formalisms. We concentrate on diierences between the calculi, considering the similarities suuciently indicated in the recent literature. We illustrate the inability of Event Calculus to handle counterfactual reasoning problems, and that of Situation Calculus to deal ...

There has been relatively much work on practical reasoning in philosophy and artificial intelligence. Typically, such reasoning includes premises regarding means-end relations, but the semantics of such relations is not clear. In this paper, we provide a formal semantics for means-end relations, in particular for necessary and sufficient means-end relations. Our semantics includes a non-monoton...

We explore the notions of permission and obligation and their role in knowledge representation, especially as guides to action for planning systems. We first present a simple conditional deontic logic (or more accurately a preference logic) of the type common in the literature and demonstrate its equivalence to a number of modal and conditional systems for default reasoning. We show how the tec...

Knowledge about complex events is usually incomplete in practice. Zeros can be utilized to capture such events within probability models. In this article, Geiger and Pearl’s conditional probabilistic independence statements are investigated in the presence of zeros. Random variables can be specified to be zero-free, i.e., to disallow zeros in their domains. Zero-free random variables provide an...