Reasoning with Actual and Potential Contradictions

This volume deals with approaches to handling contradictory information. These include approaches for actual contradiction - both A and not-A can be proven from the information - and approaches for potential contradiction - where the information may contain arguments for A and arguments for not-A, but the system suppresses the contradiction by, for example, preferring some arguments over others. Approaches covered include paraconsistent logics, modal logics, default logics, conditional logics, defeasible logics and paraconsistent semantics for logic programming. The volume is of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in artificial intelligence, software engineering, logic, language and philosophy. This volume is the first handbook to give a comprehensive coverage of handling contradictory information.