Decentralized reasoning is receiving increasing attention due to the distributed nature of knowledge on the Web. We ad-dress the problem of answering queries to distributed propo-sitional reasoners which may be mutually inconsistent. This paper provides a formal characterization of a prioritized peer-to-peer query answering framework that exploits a preference ordering over the peers as well as a distributed entailment relation. We develop decentralized algorithms for comput-ing answers to a restricted class of queries according to dis-tributed entailment and prove their soundness and complete-ness. A heuristic exploiting the peers ’ preference ordering for a more efficient computation of query answers from priori-tized, inconsistent systems is also provided and its effective-ness empirically verified. We furthermore investigate global closed-world reasoning in our framework and show how our techniques can be used to achieve global generalized closed-world query answering from local closed-world reasoners in a restricted class of distributed peer-to-peer query answering systems. 1