Notes on “a clash of intuitions”

摘要

“A clash of intuitions” [5] discusses, among other things, ambiguity in a well-known example from reasoning about inheritance hierarchies with exceptions.We argue here that there are two kinds of ambiguity to reckon with. One kind is caused by lack of a formal semantics; the other is inherent in the domain of reasoning under uncertainty. Eliminating the semantic ambiguity gives us a standpoint from which to explore the nature of the other. Here we do this by giving a strict probabilistic semantics to links (a link a → b means p(b|a) > p(b)) and to the topology of the inheritance hierarchy.As some new theorems show, the domain ambiguity is surprisingly sensitive to slight variations in the representation, namely the addition of strict (logical) links.While we don't argue that our probabilistic semantics for inheritance hierarchies is the only semantics for such hierarchies, we argue that similarly rigorous definitions will clarify not only the solutions, but the problems we are studying.