English

Principles and Examples of Plausible Reasoning and Propositional Plausible Logic

Artificial Intelligence 2017-04-05 v2 Logic in Computer Science

Abstract

Plausible reasoning concerns situations whose inherent lack of precision is not quantified; that is, there are no degrees or levels of precision, and hence no use of numbers like probabilities. A hopefully comprehensive set of principles that clarifies what it means for a formal logic to do plausible reasoning is presented. A new propositional logic, called Propositional Plausible Logic (PPL), is defined and applied to some important examples. PPL is the only non-numeric non-monotonic logic we know of that satisfies all the principles and correctly reasons with all the examples. Some important results about PPL are proved.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.01697,
  title  = {Principles and Examples of Plausible Reasoning and Propositional Plausible Logic},
  author = {David Billington},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.01697},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

58 pages. Updated n-die examples to n-lottery examples. Example 3.4 simplified. In Section 4 counter-example to the Or-rule changed and corrected, and a new logic (PTL) considered

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:36:18.453Z