Circumscribing with sets

✍ Scribed by Donald Perlis

• Book ID: 102989304
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1987
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 557 KB
• Volume: 31
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0004-3702
• DOI: 10.1016/0004-3702(87)90020-8

✦ Synopsis

Sets can play an important role in circumscription's ability to deal in a general way with certain aspects of commonsense reasoning. A result of Kueker indicates that sentences that intuitively one would want circumscription to prove are nonetheless not so provable in a formal setting devoid of sets. Furthermore, when sets are introduced, first-order circumscription handles these cases very easily, obviating the need for second-order circumscription. The " Aussonderungs" axiom of ZF set theory plays an intuitive role in this shift back to a first-order language