ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the inheritance controversy from the viewpoint of high-probability logics and shows how to extend high-probability logics so as to resolve the inheritance controversy. Even though classical logic is one of the great achievements of the human mind and is virtually indispensable for reasoning with complex mathematical expressions, when it is applied to imperfect rules, it leads to errors that a schoolchild wouldn't make. Outside of classical logic, there has been a broad study of reasoning as performed by people, ideal reasoners, and artificial intelligence programs. In logic, an enthymeme is an argument in which one of the premises is not explicitly stated, but is instead implicitly assumed. The chapter shows how High-Probability Logic can be extended by allowing premises to be of two different types: rules and statements of approximate conditional independence.
