Domain circumscription: a reevaluation

Some time ago, McCarthy developed the domain circumscription formalism for closed‐world reasoning. Recently, attention has been directed towards other circumscriptive formalisms. The best known of these, predicate and formula circumscription, cannot be used to produce domain‐closure axioms; nor does it appear likely that the other forms can. Since these axioms are important in deductive database theory (and elsewhere), and since domain circumscription often can conjecture these axioms, there is reason to resurrect domain circumscription.