Policy-Directed Credulity: An Efficient Approach to Coupled Inheritance Reasoning

We present a new definition for calculating credulous extensions of simple nonmonotonic inheritance networks, which are "coupled", or coherent, in a sense characterized by Touretzky. Our definition allows for tractable inference and we argue that it provides more intuitive results about inheritance reasoning than the one originally proposed by Touretzky, which proved to be intractable.