Conditionals From Philosophy to Computer Science [Hardcover]

This book looks at the ways in which conditionals, an integral part of philosophy and logic, can be of practical use in computer programming. It analyzes the different types of conditionals, including their applications and potential problems. Other topics include defeasible logics, the Ramsey test, and a unified view of consequence relation and belief revision. Its implications will be of interest to researchers in logic, philosophy, and computer science, particularly artificial intelligence.

1. Introduction
2. The emperor's new clothes: some recurring problems in the formal analysis of counterfactuals
3. A unified view of consequence relation, belief revision, and conditional logic
4. Defeasible logics: demarcation and affinities
5. Commonsense entailment: a conditional logic for some generics
6. The Ramsey test revisited
7. Epistemic conditionals, snakes and stars
8. Conditional action
9. Of the revision of conditional belief sets
10. Conditional objects, possibility theory and default roles
11. Conditional implications and non-monotonic consequence

Each paper is self-contained, includes new material, and has a vigor often missing in summary pieces. We particularly enjoyed and recommend the papers by Arl? Costa and by Boutilier and Goldszmidt, but all of the papers are of high quality, as is the editors'Introduction, which contains a useful historical survey. Anyone interested in conditional logic, belief revision, or non-monotonic logic should give this volume a close look. --Journal of Symbolic Logic