Conditioning on Disjunctive Knowledge: Defaults and Probabilities

TL;DR

This paper explores how default logics handle disjunctive knowledge and probabilistic reasoning, revealing issues like the lottery paradox and Simpson's paradox, and proposes solutions to improve reasoning about disjunctions.

Contribution

It demonstrates the limitations of existing default logics with disjunctive knowledge and introduces a probabilistic approach to resolve the multiple extension problem.

Findings

Default logics can lead to paradoxes with disjunctive knowledge.

Probabilistic accounts can eliminate the multiple extension problem.

Representation of disjunctive knowledge requires specifying how typical individuals are selected.

Abstract

Many writers have observed that default logics appear to contain the "lottery paradox" of probability theory. This arises when a default "proof by contradiction" lets us conclude that a typical X is not a Y where Y is an unusual subclass of X. We show that there is a similar problem with default "proof by cases" and construct a setting where we might draw a different conclusion knowing a disjunction than we would knowing any particular disjunct. Though Reiter's original formalism is capable of representing this distinction, other approaches are not. To represent and reason about this case, default logicians must specify how a "typical" individual is selected. The problem is closely related to Simpson's paradox of probability theory. If we accept a simple probabilistic account of defaults based on the notion that one proposition may favour or increase belief in another, the "multiple extension problem" for both conjunctive and disjunctive knowledge vanishes.