Nonmonotonic inference operations

Abstract

A. Tarski proposed the study of infinitary consequence operations as the central topic of mathematical logic. He considered monotonicity to be a property of all such operations. In this paper, we weaken the monotonicity requirement and consider more general operations, inference operations. These operations describe the nonmonotonic logics both humans and machines seem to be using when infering defeasible information from incomplete knowledge. We single out a number of interesting families of inference operations. This study of infinitary inference operations is inspired by the results of Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor on finitary nonmonotonic operations, but this paper is self-contained.