Significant Inferences : Preliminary Report

We explore the possibility of a logic where a conclusion substantially improves over its premise(s): Specifically, we intend to rule out inference steps such that the premise conveys more information, in a simpler form, than the conclusion does. In fact, most reasoning formalisms, among them classical logic, come with means for generating disjunctive or conditional information in a fairly arbitrary way. The basic principle for drawing disjunctive information is disjunctive weakening, which allows for deriving from (for any ). Thus, given that "Nancy is married to Ron", disjunctive weakening makes us infer that "Nancy is married to Ron or Monica is married to Bill". Although the latter propositions may still be seemingly related, one should not forget (1) that any arbitrary proposition can serve as the additional disjunct, eg. "Nancy is married to Ron or the Queen of England is bald", and (2) that this can be iterated so that real information is buried...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: KR
• Authors: Philippe Besnard, Torsten Schaub
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, Disjunctive Information, Disjunctive Weakening, KR 2000, Relevance Logics