Circumscription and Generic Mathematical Objects

We investigate the possibility of using circumscription for characterizing the concept of a generic object in the context of a formalized mathematical theory. We show that conventional circumscriptive policies do not give the intuitively expected results for elementary geometry, and that there is a common explanation for this failure and the failure of circumscription in some standard instances of commonsense reasoning. It turns out, however, that scoped circumscription does provide the right mechanism for this task.

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