This thesis studies al-Ghazali's theory of knowledge, particularly his concept of knowledge of God in his three later works: "The book of Knowledge" of the Ih&dotbelow;ya', al-Munqidh, and Iljam al-`Awamm. From his conception of knowledge of God the first book…

The tools for fault impact analysis are important for the deployment of critical mission systems. These tools can be also used as a development phase aid. We introduce several concepts related to "business alarms". Business alarms are an approximation to…

The contemporary study in the philosophy of language concentrates extensively on a cluster of questions defining the problem of linguistic knowledge (Evans 1981, Davies 1989, Dummett 1991). What explains a speaker's language mastery? Is it knowledge that underwrites our linguistic…

It is commonly acknowledged that we need to accept and handle uncertainty when reasoning with real world data. The most profoundly studied measure of uncertainty is the probability. However, the general feeling is that probability cannot express all types of…

In this work, we discuss aspects of a framework to support the understanding and the improvement in hypermedia development processes. The framework is built taking into account two modeling approaches and four domain levels. The modeling approaches are called prescriptive…

This paper presents a new approach to reduce the space problem due to combinatorial explosion of CNM (Combinatorial Neural Model) method. First we show a description of CNM, proposed by Machado and Rocha [MAC 91], [MAC 92], [MAC 92a], [MAC…

Negative information can be represented in several classes of logic programs. These approaches were first motivated by the search for an appropriate declarative semantics for negation as failure. Recently, some formalizations of monotonic negation were also introduced in logic programming…

Belief Revision systems are logical frameworks to modeling the dynamics of knowledge. That is, how to modify our beliefs when we recieve new information. The main problem arises when the information is inconsistent with beliefs that represents our epistemic state.…

In a defeasible argumentation formalism, an argument is used as a defeasible reason for supporting conclusions. A conclusion q will be considered valid only when the argument that supports it become a justification. Building a justification involves the construction of…

Disjunctive logic programs have been studied in order to increase expressivity, especially in representing indefinite information. Even though there is no general consensus on any specific semantic for disjunctive logic programs with negation, most of well known semantics are minimal…