Computing circumscription
Vladimir Lifschitz · International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 1985
Circumscription is a transformation of predicate formulas proposed by John McCarthy for the purpose of formalizing non-monotonic aspects of commonsense reasoning. Circumscription is difficult to implement because its definition involves a second-order quantifier. This paper presents metamathematical results that allow us in some cases to replace circumscription by an equivalent first-order formula.