Primal infon logic with conjunctions as sets

Primal infon logic was proposed by Gurevich and Neeman as an efficient yet expressive logic for policy and trust management. It is a propositional multimodal subintuitionistic logic decidable in linear time. However in that logic the principle of the replacement of equivalents fails. For example, (x ∧ y) → z does not entail (y ∧ x) → z, and similarly w → ((x ∧ y) ∧ z) does not entail w → (x ∧ (y ∧ z)). Imposing the full principle of the replacement of equivalents leads to an NP-hard logic according to a recent result of Beklemishev and Prokhorov. In this paper we suggest a way to regain the part of this principle restricted to conjunction: We introduce a version of propositional primal logic that treats conjunctions as sets, and show that the derivation problem for this logic can be decided in linear expected time and quadratic worst-case time. © 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing

Knowing-How and the Deduction Theorem

In his seminal address delivered in 1945 to the Royal Society Gilbert Ryle considers a special case of knowing-how, viz., knowing how to reason according to logical rules. He argues that knowing how to use logical rules cannot be reduced to a propositional knowledge. We evaluate this argument in the context of two different types of formal systems capable to represent knowledge and support logical reasoning: Hilbert-style systems, which mainly rely on axioms, and Gentzen-style systems, which mainly rely on rules. We build a canonical syntactic translation between appropriate classes of such systems and demonstrate the crucial role of Deduction Theorem in this construction. This analysis suggests that one's knowledge of axioms and one's knowledge of rules under appropriate conditions are also mutually translatable. However our further analysis shows that the epistemic status of logical knowing-how ultimately depends on one's conception of logical consequence: if one construes the logical consequence after Tarski in model-theoretic terms then the reduction of knowing-how to knowing-that is in a certain sense possible but if one thinks about the logical consequence after Prawitz in proof-theoretic terms then the logical knowledge-how gets an independent status. Finally we extend our analysis to the case of extra-logical knowledge-how representable with Gentzen-style formal systems, which admit constructive meaning explanations. For this end we build a typed sequential calculus and prove for it a ``constructive'' Deduction Theorem interpretable in extra-logical terms. We conclude with a number of open questions, which concern translations between knowledge-how and knowledge-that in this more general semantic setting

Propositional primal logic with disjunction

Abstract Gurevich and Neeman introduced Distributed Knowledge Authorization Language (DKAL). The world of DKAL consists of communicating principals computing their own knowledge in their own states. DKAL is based on a new logic of information, the so-called infon logic, and its efficient subsystem called primal logic. In this paper we simplify Kripkean semantics of primal logic and study various extensions of it in search to balance expressivity and efficiency. On the proof-theoretic side we develop cut-free Gentzen-style sequent calculi for the original primal logic and its extensions