  Minsky apparently intended to provide general arguments against logical methods in AI, but  McDermott &amp; Doyle 1980  and  McCarthy 1980  interpret  Minsky 1974  as a challenge that can be met by developing logics that lack the monotonicity property. Perhaps unintentionally, the paper seems to have provided some incentive to the nonmonotonic logicians by stressing monotonicity as a source of the alleged shortcomings of logic. In fact, the term ‘monotonicity’ apparently makes its first appearance in print in Minsky’s 1974 paper.