David Makinson on Classical Methods for Non-Classical Problems [Paperback]

The volume analyses and develops David Makinsons efforts to make classical logic useful outside its most obvious application areas. The book contains chapters that analyse, appraise, or reshape Makinsons work and chapters that develop themes emerging from his contributions. These are grouped into major areas to which Makinsons has made highly influential contributions and the volume in its entirety is divided into four sections, each devoted to a particular area of logic: belief change, uncertain reasoning, normative systems and the resources of classical logic.

Among the contributions included in the volume, one chapter focuses on the inferential preferential method, i.e. the combined use of classical logic and mechanisms of preference and choice and provides examples from Makinsons work in non-monotonic and defeasible reasoning and belief revision. One chapter offers a short autobiography by Makinson which details his discovery of modern logic, his travels across continents and reveals his intellectual encounters and inspirations. The chapter also contains an unusually explicit statement on his views on the (limited but important) role of logic in philosophy.

Preface.- Contributors.- Introductory.- Chapter 1. Sven Ove Hansson: Preview.- Chapter 2. Sven Ove Hansson and Peter G?rdenfors: David Makinson and the extension of classical logic.- Chapter 3. David Makinson: A tale of five cities.- I. Logic of Belief Change.- Chapter 4. Hans Rott and Sven Ove Hansson: Safe contraction revisited.- Chapter 5. Pavlos Peppas: A panorama of iterated revision.- Chapter 6. Wolfgang Spohn: AGM, ranking theory and the many ways to cope with examples.- Chapter 7. Edwin Mares: Liars, lotteries and prefaces: two paraconsistent theories of belief revision.- Chapter 8. Rohit Parikh: Epistemic reasoning in life and literature.- II. Uncertain Reasoning.- Chapter 9. James Hawthorne: New Horn rules for probabilistic consequence: Is O+ enough?l#