On Probability Distribution Over Possible Worlds

Abstract

In Probabilistic logic Nilsson used the device of a probability distribution over the set of possible worlds to assign probabilities to the sentences of a logical language. In his paper Nilsson concentrated on inference and associated computational issues. This paper, on the other hand, examines the probabilistic semantics in more detail, particularly for the case of first order languages, and attempts to explain some of the features and limitation of this form of probability logic. It is pointed out that the device of assigning probabilities to logical sentences has certain expressive limitations. In particular, statistical assertions are not easily expressed by such a device. This leads to certain difficulties with attempts to give probabilistic semantics to default reasoning using probabilities assigned to logical sentences.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 08, 1988
Accession Number
ADA250617

Entities

People

  • Fahiem Bacchus

Organizations

  • University of Rochester

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Boolean Algebra
  • Computer Science
  • Data Fusion
  • Language
  • Logic
  • Mathematics
  • Models
  • New York
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Random Variables
  • Semantic Models
  • Semantics
  • Set Theory

Fields of Study

  • Philosophy

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Bayesian Inference
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation