Pluralistic evaluation of belief plausibility and its application to nonmonotonic reasoning (Q913785)

An evaluation of belief plausibility is introduced by extending the notion of Rescher's plausibility index in a nonmonotonic manner. Properties of the extended plausibility index are analyzed and compared with those of probability theoretic indexing and Rescher's indexing of beliefs. The comparison of the corresponding preference logics is given. It is shown that the new indexing method can be effectively utilized in truth maintenance of beliefs in complex and dynamically changing situations. Its high flexibility is due to the nonmonotonicity of the index, and the high efficiency is mainly due to the tree-like structure of belief organization. An application of the indexing method to assumption-based maintenance systems and to default reasoning is presented.