4,131 research outputs found
Reasoning About Knowledge of Unawareness
Awareness has been shown to be a useful addition to standard epistemic logic
for many applications. However, standard propositional logics for knowledge and
awareness cannot express the fact that an agent knows that there are facts of
which he is unaware without there being an explicit fact that the agent knows
he is unaware of. We propose a logic for reasoning about knowledge of
unawareness, by extending Fagin and Halpern's \emph{Logic of General
Awareness}. The logic allows quantification over variables, so that there is a
formula in the language that can express the fact that ``an agent explicitly
knows that there exists a fact of which he is unaware''. Moreover, that formula
can be true without the agent explicitly knowing that he is unaware of any
particular formula. We provide a sound and complete axiomatization of the
logic, using standard axioms from the literature to capture the quantification
operator. Finally, we show that the validity problem for the logic is
recursively enumerable, but not decidable.Comment: 32 page
Refinement Modal Logic
In this paper we present {\em refinement modal logic}. A refinement is like a
bisimulation, except that from the three relational requirements only `atoms'
and `back' need to be satisfied. Our logic contains a new operator 'all' in
addition to the standard modalities 'box' for each agent. The operator 'all'
acts as a quantifier over the set of all refinements of a given model. As a
variation on a bisimulation quantifier, this refinement operator or refinement
quantifier 'all' can be seen as quantifying over a variable not occurring in
the formula bound by it. The logic combines the simplicity of multi-agent modal
logic with some powers of monadic second-order quantification. We present a
sound and complete axiomatization of multi-agent refinement modal logic. We
also present an extension of the logic to the modal mu-calculus, and an
axiomatization for the single-agent version of this logic. Examples and
applications are also discussed: to software verification and design (the set
of agents can also be seen as a set of actions), and to dynamic epistemic
logic. We further give detailed results on the complexity of satisfiability,
and on succinctness
Matching Logic
This paper presents matching logic, a first-order logic (FOL) variant for
specifying and reasoning about structure by means of patterns and pattern
matching. Its sentences, the patterns, are constructed using variables,
symbols, connectives and quantifiers, but no difference is made between
function and predicate symbols. In models, a pattern evaluates into a power-set
domain (the set of values that match it), in contrast to FOL where functions
and predicates map into a regular domain. Matching logic uniformly generalizes
several logical frameworks important for program analysis, such as:
propositional logic, algebraic specification, FOL with equality, modal logic,
and separation logic. Patterns can specify separation requirements at any level
in any program configuration, not only in the heaps or stores, without any
special logical constructs for that: the very nature of pattern matching is
that if two structures are matched as part of a pattern, then they can only be
spatially separated. Like FOL, matching logic can also be translated into pure
predicate logic with equality, at the same time admitting its own sound and
complete proof system. A practical aspect of matching logic is that FOL
reasoning with equality remains sound, so off-the-shelf provers and SMT solvers
can be used for matching logic reasoning. Matching logic is particularly
well-suited for reasoning about programs in programming languages that have an
operational semantics, but it is not limited to this
Transparent quantification into hyperpropositional contexts de re
This paper is the twin of (Duží and Jespersen, in submission), which provides a logical rule for transparent quantification into hyperprop- ositional contexts de dicto, as in: Mary believes that the Evening Star is a planet; therefore, there is a concept c such that Mary be- lieves that what c conceptualizes is a planet. Here we provide two logical rules for transparent quantification into hyperpropositional contexts de re. (As a by-product, we also offer rules for possible- world propositional contexts.) One rule validates this inference: Mary believes of the Evening Star that it is a planet; therefore, there is an x such that Mary believes of x that it is a planet. The other rule validates this inference: the Evening Star is such that it is believed by Mary to be a planet; therefore, there is an x such that x is believed by Mary to be a planet. Issues unique to the de re variant include partiality and existential presupposition, sub- stitutivity of co-referential (as opposed to co-denoting or synony- mous) terms, anaphora, and active vs. passive voice. The validity of quantifying-in presupposes an extensional logic of hyperinten- sions preserving transparency and compositionality in hyperinten- sional contexts. This requires raising the bar for what qualifies as co-denotation or equivalence in extensional contexts. Our logic is Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic. The syntax of TIL is the typed lambda calculus; its highly expressive semantics is based on a procedural redefinition of, inter alia, functional abstraction and application. The two non-standard features we need are a hyper- intension (called Trivialization) that presents other hyperintensions and a four-place substitution function (called Sub) defined over hy- perintensions
Clauses as Semantic Predicates: Difficulties for Possible-Worlds Semantics
The standard view of clauses embedded under attitude verbs or modal predicates is that they act as terms standing for propositions, a view that faces a range of philosophical and linguistic difficulties. Recently an alternative has been explored according to which embedded clauses act semantically as predicates of content-bearing objects. This paper argues that this approach faces serious problems when it is based on possible worlds-semantics. It outlines a development of the approach in terms of truthmaker theory instea
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On the Logic of Belief and Propositional Quantification
We consider extending the modal logic KD45, commonly taken as the baseline system for belief, with propositional quantifiers that can be used to formalize natural language sentences such as “everything I believe is true” or “there is some-thing that I neither believe nor disbelieve.” Our main results are axiomatizations of the logics with propositional quantifiers of natural classes of complete Boolean algebras with an operator (BAOs) validating KD45. Among them is the class of complete, atomic, and completely multiplicative BAOs validating KD45. Hence, by duality, we also cover the usual method of adding propositional quantifiers to normal modal logics by considering their classes of Kripke frames. In addition, we obtain decidability for all the concrete logics we discuss
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