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Open Access Publications from the University of California

An Alternative to Deduction

Abstract

Deductive representaticais are well defmed, easily inspected, and precise. However, they are also brittle, inflexible and difficult to debug. W e propose a plausible representation whose inference mechanism is weaker than its deductive counterpart. This will allow it to reason with knowledge which is less precise, and replaces the notion of global consistency, with the weaker constraint of local consistency in its explanations ^