Inheritance and specificity. II. Reference class selection

For pt.I see Proc. of 4th Internat. Conf. on Computing and Info. (1992). The author examines the problem of reference class selection within the context of Bacchus (1990) and Halpern´s (1989) combined probability logic. He introduces the idea of second order randomization where the independence properties of particular predicates are based on the independence properties of randomized predicates. This is a natural extension to first order randomization, where the degree of belief in a proposition about a particular individual is based on the statistical properties of randomized individuals. This approach solves problems involving conflicting sources of statistical knowledge that present difficulties for many other approaches