The iterated fixed point construction allows us to single out the canonical
model M
p
from among the minimal models of P; by
itself,
the minimality
condition is not sufficient for defining the canonical model.
The purpose of this paper is to show that the situation becomes quite
dif-
ferent if we take into account some recent work in the theory of circumscrip-
tion (McCarthy [1986], Lifschitz [1986]). Applications of the idea of logical
minimization to formalizing nonmonotonic aspects of commonsense reasoning
have led to introducing some forms of minimization more general than the
simple minimality condition used above. We will emplo ...
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