An argumentation-theoretic foundation for logic programming

AbstractLogic programs are considered as abductive programs with negative literals as abductive hypotheses. A simple framework for semantics of logic programming is introduced based on the notion of acceptable hypotheses. We show that our framework captures, generalizes, and unifies different semantic concepts (e.g., well-founded models, stable models, stationary semantics, etc.) in logic programming. We demonstrate that our framework accommodates in a natural way both the minimalism and maximalism intuitions to semantics of logic programming. Further, we show that Eshghi and Kowalski's procedure is a proof procedure for the abductive semantics. We also give sufficient conditions for the coincidence between different semantics