Artificial Intelligence
What does a conditional knowledge base entail?
Proceedings of the first international conference on Principles of knowledge representation and reasoning
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Philosophers have been puzzling about conditional sentences, and conditional reasoning, at least since the time of the ancient Stoics. In this century, the problem was first raised by logicians trying to give a plausible account of the logic of conditionals, and by philosophers of science in the empiricist tradition trying to understand the relation between counterfactual conditionals and scientific laws, and the role of such conditionals in the formation of dispositional and theoretical concepts. Conditional sentences are problematic, first from an abstract point of view: they are, or at least seem to be, non-truth-functional, and so are not analyzable with the resources of extensional semantics, the only kind of semantics that is and unproblematic. One can, of course, define a truth-functional connective that has some of the properties of the conditional-the so-called material conditional - but it neither gives an intuitively plausible account of the logic and semantics of the conditional sentences of natural language that we find ourselves using, nor does it have the promise to do the conceptual work that we would like to use conditionals to do.