27,998 research outputs found
A formal analysis of the notion of preference between deductive arguments
In the last two decades, justification logic has addressed the problem of
including justifications into the field of epistemic logic. Nevertheless,
there is something that has not received enough attention yet: how
epistemic agents might prefer certain justifications to others, in order to
have better pieces of evidence to support a particular belief. In this
work, we study the notion of preference between a particular kind of
justifications: deductive arguments. For doing so, we have built a logic
using tools from epistemic logic, justification logic and logics for belief
dependence. According to our solution, the preferences of an epistemic
agent between different deductive arguments can be reduced to other notions
The Doxastic Interpretation of Team Semantics
We advance a doxastic interpretation for many of the logical connectives
considered in Dependence Logic and in its extensions, and we argue that Team
Semantics is a natural framework for reasoning about beliefs and belief
updates
Belief Revision in Expressive Knowledge Representation Formalisms
We live in an era of data and information, where an immeasurable amount of discoveries, findings, events, news, and transactions are generated every second. Governments, companies, or individuals have to employ and process all that data for knowledge-based decision-making (i.e. a decision-making process that uses predetermined criteria to measure and ensure the optimal outcome for a specific topic), which then prompt them to view the knowledge as valuable resource. In this knowledge-based view, the capability to create and utilize knowledge is the key source of an organization or individual’s competitive advantage. This dynamic nature of knowledge leads us to the study of belief revision (or belief change), an area which emerged from work in philosophy and then impacted further developments in computer science and artificial intelligence.
In belief revision area, the AGM postulates by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson continue to represent a cornerstone in research related to belief change. Katsuno and Mendelzon (K&M) adopted the AGM postulates for changing belief bases and characterized AGM belief base revision in propositional logic over finite signatures. In this thesis, two research directions are considered. In the first, by considering the semantic point of view, we generalize K&M’s approach to the setting of (multiple) base revision in arbitrary Tarskian logics, covering all logics with a classical model-theoretic semantics and hence a wide variety of logics used in knowledge representation and beyond. Our generic formulation applies to various notions of “base”, such as belief sets, arbitrary or finite sets of sentences, or single sentences.
The core result is a representation theorem showing a two-way correspondence between AGM base revision operators and certain “assignments”: functions mapping belief bases to total — yet not transitive — “preference” relations between interpretations. Alongside, we present a companion result for the case when the AGM postulate of syntax-independence is abandoned. We also provide a characterization of all logics for which our result can be strengthened to assignments producing transitive preference relations (as in K&M’s original work), giving rise to two more representation theorems for such logics, according to syntax dependence vs. independence. The second research direction in this thesis explores two approaches for revising description logic knowledge bases under fixed-domain semantics, namely model-based approach and individual-based approach. In this logical setting, models of the knowledge bases can be enumerated and can be computed to produce the revision result, semantically. We show a characterization of the AGM revision operator for this logic and present a concrete model-based revision approach via distance between interpretations. In addition, by weakening the KB based on certain domain elements, a novel individual-based revision operator is provided as an alternative approach
Counterfactuals 2.0 Logic, Truth Conditions, and Probability
The present thesis focuses on counterfactuals. Specifically, we will address new questions and open problems that arise for the standard semantic accounts of counterfactual conditionals. The first four chapters deal with the Lewisian semantic account of counterfactuals. On a technical level, we contribute by providing an equivalent algebraic semantics for Lewis' variably strict conditional logics, which is notably absent in the literature. We introduce a new kind of algebra and differentiate between local and global versions of each of Lewis' variably strict conditional logics. We study the algebraic properties of Lewis' logics and the structure theory of our newly introduced algebras. Additionally, we employ a new algebraic construction, based on the framework of Boolean algebras of conditionals, to provide an alternative semantics for Lewisian counterfactual conditionals. This semantic account allows us to establish new truth conditions for Lewisian counterfactuals, implying that Lewisian counterfactuals are definable conditionals, and each counterfactual can be characterized as a modality of a corresponding probabilistic conditional. We further extend these results by demonstrating that each Lewisian counterfactual can also be characterized as a modality of the corresponding Stalnaker conditional. The resulting formal semantic framework is much more expressive than the standard one and, in addition to providing new truth conditions for counterfactuals, it also allows us to define a new class of conditional logics falling into the broader framework of weak logics. On the philosophical side, we argue that our results shed new light on the understanding of Lewisian counterfactuals and prompt a conceptual shift in this field: Lewisian counterfactual dependence can be understood as a modality of probabilistic conditional dependence or Stalnakerian conditional dependence. In other words, whether a counterfactual connection occurs between A and B depends on whether it is "necessary" for a Stalnakerian/probabilistic dependence to occur between A and B. We also propose some ways to interpret the kind of necessity involved in this interpretation.
The remaining two chapters deal with the probability of counterfactuals. We provide an answer to the question of how we can characterize the probability that a Lewisian counterfactual is true, which is an open problem in the literature. We show that the probability of a Lewisian counterfactual can be characterized in terms of belief functions from Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence, which are a super-additive generalization of standard probability. We define an updating procedure for belief functions based on the imaging procedure and show that the probability of a counterfactual A > B amounts to the belief function of B imaged on A. This characterization strongly relies on the logical results we proved in the previous chapters. Moreover, we also solve an open problem concerning the procedure to assign a probability to complex counterfactuals in the framework of causal modelling semantics. A limitation of causal modelling semantics is that it cannot account for the probability of counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents. Drawing on the same previous works, we define a new procedure to assign a probability to counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents in the framework of causal modelling semantics. We also argue that our procedure is satisfactory in that it yields meaningful results and adheres to some conceptually intuitive constraints one may want to impose when computing the probability of counterfactuals
Betting on Quantum Objects
Dutch book arguments have been applied to beliefs about the outcomes of
measurements of quantum systems, but not to beliefs about quantum objects prior
to measurement. In this paper, we prove a quantum version of the probabilists'
Dutch book theorem that applies to both sorts of beliefs: roughly, if ideal
beliefs are given by vector states, all and only Born-rule probabilities avoid
Dutch books. This theorem and associated results have implications for
operational and realist interpretations of the logic of a Hilbert lattice. In
the latter case, we show that the defenders of the eigenstate-value orthodoxy
face a trilemma. Those who favor vague properties avoid the trilemma, admitting
all and only those beliefs about quantum objects that avoid Dutch books.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; improved operational semantics, results
unchange
Dependence in Propositional Logic: Formula-Formula Dependence and Formula Forgetting -- Application to Belief Update and Conservative Extension
Dependence is an important concept for many tasks in artificial intelligence.
A task can be executed more efficiently by discarding something independent
from the task. In this paper, we propose two novel notions of dependence in
propositional logic: formula-formula dependence and formula forgetting. The
first is a relation between formulas capturing whether a formula depends on
another one, while the second is an operation that returns the strongest
consequence independent of a formula. We also apply these two notions in two
well-known issues: belief update and conservative extension. Firstly, we define
a new update operator based on formula-formula dependence. Furthermore, we
reduce conservative extension to formula forgetting.Comment: We find a mistake in this version and we need a period of time to fix
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Ontology Merging as Social Choice
The problem of merging several ontologies has important applications in the Semantic Web, medical ontology engineering
and other domains where information from several distinct sources needs to be integrated in a coherent manner.We propose
to view ontology merging as a problem of social choice, i.e. as a problem of aggregating the input of a set of individuals
into an adequate collective decision. That is, we propose to view ontology merging as ontology aggregation. As a first step in
this direction, we formulate several desirable properties for ontology aggregators, we identify the incompatibility of some of
these properties, and we define and analyse several simple aggregation procedures. Our approach is closely related to work
in judgment aggregation, but with the crucial difference that we adopt an open world assumption, by distinguishing between
facts not included in an agent’s ontology and facts explicitly negated in an agent’s ontology
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