Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Summary and plan of the book
- Introduction
- 1 Logic on the Underground
- 2 The psychology of logic
- 3 The fox and the crow
- 4 Search
- 5 Negation as failure
- 6 How to become a British Citizen
- 7 The louse and the Mars explorer
- 8 Maintenance goals as the driving force of life
- 9 The meaning of life
- 10 Abduction
- 11 The Prisoner’s Dilemma
- 12 Motivations matter
- 13 The changing world
- 14 Logic and objects
- 15 Biconditionals
- 16 Computational Logic and the selection task
- 17 Meta-logic
- Conclusions of the book
- A1 The syntax of logical form
- A2 Truth
- A3 Forward and backward reasoning
- A4 Minimal models and negation
- A5 The resolution rule
- A6 The logic of abductive logic programming
- References
- Index
A4 - Minimal models and negation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Summary and plan of the book
- Introduction
- 1 Logic on the Underground
- 2 The psychology of logic
- 3 The fox and the crow
- 4 Search
- 5 Negation as failure
- 6 How to become a British Citizen
- 7 The louse and the Mars explorer
- 8 Maintenance goals as the driving force of life
- 9 The meaning of life
- 10 Abduction
- 11 The Prisoner’s Dilemma
- 12 Motivations matter
- 13 The changing world
- 14 Logic and objects
- 15 Biconditionals
- 16 Computational Logic and the selection task
- 17 Meta-logic
- Conclusions of the book
- A1 The syntax of logical form
- A2 Truth
- A3 Forward and backward reasoning
- A4 Minimal models and negation
- A5 The resolution rule
- A6 The logic of abductive logic programming
- References
- Index
Summary
To a first approximation, the negation as failure rule of inference is straightforward. Its name says it all:
to show that the negation of a sentence holds
try to show the sentence holds, and
if the attempt fails, then the negation holds.
But what does it mean to fail? Does it include infinite or only finite failure? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the semantics.
Consider, for example, the English sentence:
bob will go if no one goes
Ignore the fact that, if Bob were more normal, it would be more likely that bob will go if no one else goes. Focus instead on the problem of representing the sentence more formally as a logical conditional.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Computational Logic and Human ThinkingHow to Be Artificially Intelligent, pp. 263 - 268Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011