Representation theory for default logic

Default logic can be regarded as a mechanism to represent families of belief sets of a reasoning agent. As such, it is inherently second-order. In this paper, we study the problem of representability of a family of theories as the set of extensions of a default theory. We give a complete solution to the problem of representability by means of default theories with finite set of defaults, and by means of normal default theories. We obtain partial results on representability by arbitrary (infinite, non-normal) default theories. We construct examples of denumerable families of non-including theories that are not representable. We also study the concept of equivalence between default theories. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.