Logic of Negation-Complete Interactive Proofs (Formal Theory of Epistemic Deciders)

We produce a decidable classical normal modal logic of internalised negation-complete and thus disjunctive non-monotonic interactive proofs (LDiiP) from an existing logical counterpart of non-monotonic or instant interactive proofs (LiiP). LDiiP internalises agent-centric proof theories that are negation-complete (maximal) and consistent (and hence strictly weaker than, for example, Peano Arithmetic) and enjoy the disjunction property (like Intuitionistic Logic). In other words, internalised proof theories are ultrafilters and all internalised proof goals are definite in the sense of being either provable or disprovable to an agent by means of disjunctive internalised proofs (thus also called epistemic deciders). Still, LDiiP itself is classical (monotonic, non-constructive), negation-incomplete, and does not have the disjunction property. The price to pay for the negation completeness of our interactive proofs is their non-monotonicity and non-communality (for singleton agent communities only). As a normal modal logic, LDiiP enjoys a standard Kripke-semantics, which we justify by invoking the Axiom of Choice on LiiP's and then construct in terms of a concrete oracle-computable function. LDiiP's agent-centric internalised notion of proof can also be viewed as a negation-complete disjunctive explicit refinement of standard KD45-belief, and yields a disjunctive but negation-incomplete explicit refinement of S4-provability.Comment: Expanded Introduction. Added Footnote 4. Corrected Corollary 3 and 4. Continuation of arXiv:1208.184

On Properties of Update Sequences Based on Causal Rejection

We consider an approach to update nonmonotonic knowledge bases represented as extended logic programs under answer set semantics. New information is incorporated into the current knowledge base subject to a causal rejection principle enforcing that, in case of conflicts, more recent rules are preferred and older rules are overridden. Such a rejection principle is also exploited in other approaches to update logic programs, e.g., in dynamic logic programming by Alferes et al. We give a thorough analysis of properties of our approach, to get a better understanding of the causal rejection principle. We review postulates for update and revision operators from the area of theory change and nonmonotonic reasoning, and some new properties are considered as well. We then consider refinements of our semantics which incorporate a notion of minimality of change. As well, we investigate the relationship to other approaches, showing that our approach is semantically equivalent to inheritance programs by Buccafurri et al. and that it coincides with certain classes of dynamic logic programs, for which we provide characterizations in terms of graph conditions. Therefore, most of our results about properties of causal rejection principle apply to these approaches as well. Finally, we deal with computational complexity of our approach, and outline how the update semantics and its refinements can be implemented on top of existing logic programming engines.Comment: 59 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables, to be published in "Theory and Practice of Logic Programming

Modeling Belief in Dynamic Systems, Part II: Revision and Update

The study of belief change has been an active area in philosophy and AI. In recent years two special cases of belief change, belief revision and belief update, have been studied in detail. In a companion paper (Friedman & Halpern, 1997), we introduce a new framework to model belief change. This framework combines temporal and epistemic modalities with a notion of plausibility, allowing us to examine the change of beliefs over time. In this paper, we show how belief revision and belief update can be captured in our framework. This allows us to compare the assumptions made by each method, and to better understand the principles underlying them. In particular, it shows that Katsuno and Mendelzon's notion of belief update (Katsuno & Mendelzon, 1991a) depends on several strong assumptions that may limit its applicability in artificial intelligence. Finally, our analysis allow us to identify a notion of minimal change that underlies a broad range of belief change operations including revision and update.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for other files accompanying this articl

Adaptive logic characterizations of input/output logic

We translate unconstrained and constrained input/output logics as introduced by Makinson and van der Torre to modal logics, using adaptive logics for the constrained case. The resulting reformulation has some additional benefits. First, we obtain a proof-theoretic (dynamic) characterization of input/output logics. Second, we demonstrate that our framework naturally gives rise to useful variants and allows to express important notions that go beyond the expressive means of input/output logics, such as violations and sanctions