Outline of a Logic of Knowledge of Acquaintance

The verb ‘to know’ can be used both in ascriptions of propositional knowledge and ascriptions of knowledge of acquaintance. In the formal epistemology literature, the former use of ‘know’ has attracted considerable attention, while the latter is typically regarded as derivative. This attitude may be unsatisfactory for those philosophers who, like Russell, are not willing to think of knowledge of acquaintance as a subsidiary or dependent kind of knowledge. In this paper we outline a logic of knowledge of acquaintance in which ascriptions like ‘Mary knows Smith’ are regarded as formally interesting in their own right, remaining neutral on their relation to ascriptions of propositional knowledge. The resulting logical framework, which is based on Hintikka’s modal approach to epistemic logic, provides a fresh perspective on various issues and notions at play in the philosophical debate on acquaintance

Non-elementary speed up for model checking synchronous perfect recall

We analyse the time complexity of the model checking problem for a logic of knowledge and past time in synchronous systems with perfect recall. Previously established bounds are k- exponential in the size of the system for specifications with k nested knowledge modalities.We show that the upper bound for positive (respectively, negative) specifications is polynomial (respectively, exponential) in the size of the system irrespective of the nesting depth

Fitch's Paradox and the Problem of Shared Content

According to the “paradox of knowability”, the moderate thesis that all truths are knowable – ... – implies the seemingly preposterous claim that all truths are actually known – ... –, i.e. that we are omniscient. If Fitch’s argument were successful, it would amount to a knockdown rebuttal of anti-realism by reductio. In the paper I defend the nowadays rather neglected strategy of intuitionistic revisionism. Employing only intuitionistically acceptable rules of inference, the conclusion of the argument is, firstly, not ..., but .... Secondly, even if there were an intuitionistically acceptable proof of ..., i.e. an argument based on a different set of premises, the conclusion would have to be interpreted in accordance with Heyting semantics, and read in this way, the apparently preposterous conclusion would be true on conceptual grounds and acceptable even from a realist point of view. Fitch’s argument, understood as an immanent critique of verificationism, fails because in a debate dealing with the justification of deduction there can be no interpreted formal language on which realists and anti-realists could agree. Thus, the underlying problem is that a satisfactory solution to the “problem of shared content” is not available. I conclude with some remarks on the proposals by J. Salerno and N. Tennant to reconstruct certain arguments in the debate on anti-realism by establishing aporias

The Use of Knowledge Preconditions in Language Processing

If an agent does not possess the knowledge needed to perform an action, it may privately plan to obtain the required information on its own, or it may involve another agent in the planning process by engaging it in a dialogue. In this paper, we show how the requirements of knowledge preconditions can be used to account for information-seeking subdialogues in discourse. We first present an axiomatization of knowledge preconditions for the SharedPlan model of collaborative activity (Grosz & Kraus, 1993), and then provide an analysis of information-seeking subdialogues within a general framework for discourse processing. In this framework, SharedPlans and relationships among them are used to model the intentional component of Grosz and Sidner's (1986) theory of discourse structure.Comment: 7 pages, LaTeX, uses ijcai95.sty, postscript figure

Implementing Default and Autoepistemic Logics via the Logic of GK

The logic of knowledge and justified assumptions, also known as logic of grounded knowledge (GK), was proposed by Lin and Shoham as a general logic for nonmonotonic reasoning. To date, it has been used to embed in it default logic (propositional case), autoepistemic logic, Turner's logic of universal causation, and general logic programming under stable model semantics. Besides showing the generality of GK as a logic for nonmonotonic reasoning, these embeddings shed light on the relationships among these other logics. In this paper, for the first time, we show how the logic of GK can be embedded into disjunctive logic programming in a polynomial but non-modular translation with new variables. The result can then be used to compute the extension/expansion semantics of default logic, autoepistemic logic and Turner's logic of universal causation by disjunctive ASP solvers such as claspD(-2), DLV, GNT and cmodels.Comment: Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR 2014

Reasoning about Knowledge and Strategies under Hierarchical Information

Two distinct semantics have been considered for knowledge in the context of strategic reasoning, depending on whether players know each other's strategy or not. The problem of distributed synthesis for epistemic temporal specifications is known to be undecidable for the latter semantics, already on systems with hierarchical information. However, for the other, uninformed semantics, the problem is decidable on such systems. In this work we generalise this result by introducing an epistemic extension of Strategy Logic with imperfect information. The semantics of knowledge operators is uninformed, and captures agents that can change observation power when they change strategies. We solve the model-checking problem on a class of "hierarchical instances", which provides a solution to a vast class of strategic problems with epistemic temporal specifications on hierarchical systems, such as distributed synthesis or rational synthesis