Analogy, Decision, and Theory-Formation as Defeasible Reasoning
Ronald Prescott Loui · Open Scholarship Institutional Repository (Washington University in St. Louis) · 1993
. The development of computationally informed formalisms for reasoning with defeasible rules affords new accounts of familiar forms of reasoning. This paper points to recent accounts of defeasible reasoning and portrays analogy, decision, and theory-formation as essentially defeasible, in the same way that statistical reasoning has been portrayed. Each portrayal depends largely on the idea of partial computation, which is inherent in actual reasoning, largely ignored by past formalizers, and formalizable now. 1. INTRODUCTION. 1a. DEFEASIBLE REASONING Defeasible reasoning refers to non-demonstrative reasoning where the reasoning makes explicit use of rules that admit of defeasance (other authors have used the words exception, preemption, preclusion, interference, rebutment, and defeat). Defeasible reasoning dates to antiquity but formalism has appeared only in recent decades, especially beginning with Pollock, who follows Chisholm; and Kyburg, who responds to Reichenbach; Nute, Glymour-...