 Secondly, and more to the point, Israel argued that the concept of nonmonotonic logic evinces a confusion between the rules of logic and rules of inference. In other words, Israel accused defenders of nonmonotonic logic of confusing a theory of defeasible inference (a branch of epistemology) with a theory of genuine consequence relations (a branch of logic). Inference is nonmonotonic, but logic (according to Israel) is essentially monotonic.