A Tutorial on Nonmonotonic Reasoning

Nonmonotonic reasoning, in its broadest sense, is reasoning to conclusions on the basis of incomplete information. Given more information, we are prepared to retract previously drawn inferences. To exhibit the classic example: if all we know about Tweety is that he is bird, then we plausibly conclude that he can fly; on learning that Tweety is a penguin, we withdraw that conclusion. We call this reasoning nonmonotonic because the set of plausible conclusions does not grow monotonically with increasing information.