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

Relation-changing modal operators

We study dynamic modal operators that can change the accessibility relation of a model during the evaluation of a formula. In particular, we extend the basic modal language with modalities that are able to delete, add or swap an edge between pairs of elements of the domain. We define a generic framework to characterize this kind of operations. First, we investigate relation-changing modal logics as fragments of classical logics. Then, we use the new framework to get a suitable notion of bisimulation for the logics introduced, and we investigate their expressive power. Finally, we show that the complexity of the model checking problem for the particular operators introduced is PSpace-complete, and we study two subproblems of model checking: formula complexity and program complexity.Fil: Areces, Carlos Eduardo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Fervari, Raul Alberto. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Hoffmann, Guillaume Emmanuel. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Evidence-Based Beliefs in Many-Valued Modal Logics

Rational agents, humans or otherwise, build their beliefs from evidence – a process which we call consolidation. But how should this process be carried out? In this thesis, we study a multi-agent logic of evidence and the question how agents should form beliefs in this logic. The main contributions of this thesis are twofold. First, we present and study a many-valued modal logic, and show how it can be suitable for modelling multi-agent scenarios where each agent has access to some evidence, which in turn can be processed into beliefs. This is a technical and practical contribution to many-valued modal logics. Second, we open new paths for research in the field of evidence logics: we show a new approach based on many-valued logics, we highlight the concept of consolidations and the importance of looking at their dynamic nature, and build a methodology based on rationality postulates to evaluate them

Arrow update logic

We present Arrow Update Logic, a theory of epistemic access elimination that can be used to reason about multi-agent belief change. While the belief-changing "arrow updates" of Arrow Update Logic can be transformed into equivalent belief-changing "action models" from the popular Dynamic Epistemic Logic approach, we prove that arrow updates are sometimes exponentially more succinct than action models. Further, since many examples of belief change are naturally thought of from Arrow Update Logic's perspective of eliminating access to epistemic possibilities, Arrow Update Logic is a valuable addition to the repertoire of logics of information change. In addition to proving basic results about Arrow Update Logic, we introduce a new notion of common knowledge that generalizes both ordinary common knowledge and the "relativized" common knowledge familiar from the Dynamic Epistemic Logic literature

Arguments to believe and beliefs to argue. Epistemic logics for argumentation and its dynamics

Arguing and believing are two skills that have typically played a crucial role in the analysis of human cognition. Both notions have received notable attention from a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and computer science. The main goal of this dissertation consists in studying from a logical perspective (that is, focused on reasoning) some of the existing relations between beliefs and argumentation. From a methodological point of view, we propose to combine two well-known families of formalisms for knowledge representation that have been relatively disconnected (with some salient exceptions): epistemic logic (Fagin et al., 2004; Meyer and van der Hoek, 1995) together with its dynamic extensions (van Ditmarsch et al., 2007; van Benthem, 2011), on the one hand, and formal argumentation (Baroni et al., 2018; Gabbay et al., 2021), on the other hand. This choice is arguably natural. Epistemic logic provides well-known tools for qualitatively representing epistemic attitudes (belief, among them). Formal argumentation, on its side, is the broad research field where mathematical representations of argumentative phenomena are investigated. Moreover, the notion of awareness, as treated in the epistemic logic tradition since Fagin and Halpern (1987), can be used as a theoretical bridge among both areas. This dissertation is presented as a collection of papers [compendio de publicaciones], meaning that its main contributions are contained in the reprint of six works that have been previously published, placed in Chapter 4. In chapter 1, we pursue a general introduction to the research problem. Chapter 2 is devoted to the presentation of the technical tools employed through the thesis. Chapter 3 explains how the contributions approach the research problem. Chapter 5 provides a general discussion of results, by analysing closely related work. We conclude in Chapter 6 with some remarks and open paths for future research

Dynamic-Epistemic reasoning on distributed systems

We propose a new logic designed for modelling and reasoning about information flow and information exchange between spatially located (but potentially mobile), interconnected agents witnessing a distributed computation. This is a major problem in the field of distributed systems, covering many different issues, with potential applications from Computer Science and Economy to Chemistry and Systems Biology. Underpinning on the dual algebraical-coalgebraical characteristics of process calculi, we design a decidable and completely axiomatizad logic that combines the processalgebraical/ equational and the modal/coequational features and is developed for process-algebraical semantics. The construction is done by mixing operators from dynamic and epistemic logics with operators from spatial logics for distributed and mobile systems. This is the preliminary version of a paper that will appear in Proceedings of the second Conference on Algebra and Coalgebra in Computer Science (CALCO2007), LNCS 4624, Springer, 2007. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.co

Planning while Believing to Know

Over the last few years, the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become essential in our daily life and in several working scenarios. Among the various branches of AI, automated planning and the study of multi-agent systems are central research fields. This thesis focuses on a combination of these two areas: that is, a specialized kind of planning known as Multi-agent Epistemic Planning. This field of research is concentrated on all those scenarios where agents, reasoning in the space of knowledge/beliefs, try to find a plan to reach a desirable state from a starting one. This requires agents able to reason about her/his and others’ knowledge/beliefs and, therefore, capable of performing epistemic reasoning. Being aware of the information flows and the others’ states of mind is, in fact, a key aspect in several planning situations. That is why developing autonomous agents, that can reason considering the perspectives of their peers, is paramount to model a variety of real-world domains. The objective of our work is to formalize an environment where a complete characterization of the agents’ knowledge/beliefs interactions and updates are possible. In particular, we achieved such a goal by defining a new action-based language for Multi-agent Epistemic Planning and implementing epistemic planners based on it. These solvers, flexible enough to reason about various domains and different nuances of knowledge/belief update, can provide a solid base for further research on epistemic reasoning or real-base applications. This dissertation also proposes the design of a more general epistemic planning architecture. This architecture, following famous cognitive theories, tries to emulate some characteristics of the human decision-making process. In particular, we envisioned a system composed of several solving processes, each one with its own trade-off between efficiency and correctness, which are arbitrated by a meta-cognitive module