'Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge.' (Boole, 1854) Information retrieval based on stored program electronic computers has been an active area of research since the time these machines were invented. It is therefore somewhat surprising that even now no formal computational model for IR exists. There is no well-defined logic to describe information retrieval, and there is no proof or model theory to talk about the truths of IR. This paper argues that much of the research work in the past has been steps in the direction of a logic for IR. These steps have been taken by developing formal models for information retrieval, but to date none of these are complete nor could any claim to be a computational model for IR. To appreciate this development I shall present a picture of IR, describing bits of a puzzle which may fit together to point to a new framework within which a computational model or logic could be described.

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	Bigelow, J.C., Semantics of probability, Syntheses, 36, pp. 459-472, 1977.
	2	Dretske, F., Knowledge and the flow of information, MIT, 1981.
	3	Harper, W.L., Stalnaker, R. and Pearce, C. (eds), Ifs, Reidel, 1981.
	4	Jackson, F., Conditionals, Basil Blackwell, 1987.
	5	Sober, E., Simplicity, Clarendon, 1975.
	6	C. J. Van Rijsbergen, Information Retrieval, Butterworth-Heinemann, Newton, MA, 1979
	7	C. J. van Rijsbergen, (invited paper) A new theoretical framework for information retrieval, Proceedings of the 9th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.194-200, September 1986, Palazzo dei Congressi, Pisa, Italy  [doi>10.1145/253168.253208]
	8	van Rijsbergen, C.J., A non-classical logic for information retrieval, The Computer Journal, 29, pp. 481- 485, 1986.

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  Volume 23 ,  Issue SI   June 1989