Reasoning with Conditionals in Artificial Intelligence

Reasoning with conditionals has been the focus of much research in Cognitive Psychology, but has attracted comparatively less attention in Artificial Intelligence. However, if you scratch below the surface, it soon becomes apparent that conditionals, in one form or another, are arguably the most common form of knowledge representation in Artificial Intelligence. They are employed in such diverse paradigms as production systems, logic programming, and Baysian networks; and much theoretical and practical experience has been accumulated with their use. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that work on conditionals in Artificial Intelligence and in Cognitive Psychology is complementary and can be mutually beneficial to both areas. I will focus on the work in Artificial Intelligence and will argue in particular that abductive logic programming combines many of the diverse features of conditionals in other Artificial Intelligence paradigms. Classical logic It is tempting to identify conditionals with material implication in classical logic. However, i