Arguing Using Opponent Models

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08361 Abstracts Collection -- Programming Multi-Agent Systems

From 31th August to 5th September, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08361 ``Programming Multi-Agent Systems\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

How to Conquer the Liar and Enthrone the Logical Concept of Truth: an Informal Exposition

This article informally presents a solution to the paradoxes of truth and shows how the solution solves classical paradoxes (such as the original Liar) as well as the paradoxes that were invented as counterarguments for various proposed solutions (“the revenge of the Liar”). This solution complements the classical procedure of determining the truth values of sentences by its own failure and, when the procedure fails, through an appropriate semantic shift allows us to express the failure in a classical two-valued language. Formally speaking, the solution is a language with one meaning of symbols and two valuations of the truth values of sentences. The primary valuation is a classical valuation that is partial in the presence of the truth predicate. It enables us to determine the classical truth value of a sentence or leads to the failure of that determination. The language with the primary valuation is precisely the largest intrinsic fixed point of the strong Kleene three-valued semantics (LIFPSK3). The semantic shift that allows us to express the failure of the primary valuation is precisely the classical closure of LIFPSK3: it extends LIFPSK3 to a classical language in parts where LIFPSK3 is undetermined. Thus, this article provides an argumentation, which has not been present in contemporary debates so far, for the choice of LIFPSK3 and its classical closure as the right model for the truth predicate. In the end, an erroneous critique of Kripke-Feferman axiomatic theory of truth, which is present in contemporary literature, is pointed out

Testing Epistemic Injustice

This work builds on the trivial observation that everyone is not trusted equally. One’s gender, ethnic group, occupation etc. will affect how one’s information is believed and interpreted by others. We begin by reviewing past approaches to reliability and epistemic injustice, and the factors which affect how one’s reliability is evaluated by others in discourse. We then discuss recent experimental results which show that the linguistic manipulation of gender seems  to affect the strategies with which the source’s reliability is evaluated. We argue that masculine sources benefit from more charitable assumptions than feminine ones. To support this claim, we present the results of a fine-grained categorization task. The results of this task seem to support our claim about charity, i.e. that a masculine source can more easily claim competence about a topic categorized as feminine, whereas the converse appears less true

METHODOLOGIES FOR DESIGNING AND DEVELOPING HYPERMEDIA APPLICATIONS

Hypermedia design, as any other design activity, may be observed according to two points of view: methods which suggest milestones to guide the designer's work and process which concerns the actual detailed behavior of the designer at work. Cognitive studies assess that mental processes involved in any design process show widely shared human characteristics regardless to the used design method. Thereby, they provide general keys to help designers. Thus, a hypertext design environment should equally consider the two dimensions of a hypertext design activity, in particular it should support the natural design process specificities, mainly the incremental and opportunist aspects. The paper focuses on the hypertext design as a computer supported human activity. It examines what is general both in the design methods and in the design process of hypertexts in order to determine which general features are helpful to designers. This analysis has raised from the observation of the behavior of MacWeb users during design tasks. It is related to sound and well known results in cognitive science. The paper also describes how the proposed features are implemented in the MacWeb system.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Management as a Symbolizing Construction?

In this article, we outline the concept of management as a symbolizing construction. According to Niklas LUHMANN, organizations process by referring to decisions. But decisions are not simply "given" and in principle invisible. This is the reason why organizations institute formalities like protocols, signatures or other insignia of the official that symbolize the decision—without actually being a decision. These symbols allow for making decisions "process-able." And just like a protocol or a signature, management symbolizes decisions as well. Management provides an organizational practice with symbols of decision making without being the "unity" of the decisions, as decisions perpetually have to be reconstructed, redefined and rearranged in the communication of all organizational units. Therefore management symbolizes on the one hand more than it can achieve. On the other hand the importance of management as a symbolizing construction lies in allowing the reconstruction, redefining and rearrangement of decisions by making them visible and recognizable. Heroic managers, meetings, management tools and procedures are solutions to the paradox of decision making. By symbolizing decidedness they create credibilities that conceal the self-referential construction of organizational communication and the paradox of its decision praxis

Discourse Analysis: varieties and methods

This paper presents and analyses six key approaches to discourse analysis, including political discourse theory, rhetorical political analysis, the discourse historical approach in critical discourse analysis, interpretive policy analysis, discursive psychology and Q methodology. It highlights differences and similarities between the approaches along three distinctive dimensions, namely, ontology, focus and purpose. Our analysis reveals the difficulty of arriving at a fundamental matrix of dimensions which would satisfactorily allow one to organize all approaches in a coherent theoretical framework. However, it does not preclude various theoretical articulations between the different approaches, provided one takes a problem-driven approach to social science as one?s starting-point

Almost structural completeness; an algebraic approach

A deductive system is structurally complete if its admissible inference rules are derivable. For several important systems, like modal logic S5, failure of structural completeness is caused only by the underivability of passive rules, i.e. rules that can not be applied to theorems of the system. Neglecting passive rules leads to the notion of almost structural completeness, that means, derivablity of admissible non-passive rules. Almost structural completeness for quasivarieties and varieties of general algebras is investigated here by purely algebraic means. The results apply to all algebraizable deductive systems. Firstly, various characterizations of almost structurally complete quasivarieties are presented. Two of them are general: expressed with finitely presented algebras, and with subdirectly irreducible algebras. One is restricted to quasivarieties with finite model property and equationally definable principal relative congruences, where the condition is verifiable on finite subdirectly irreducible algebras. Secondly, examples of almost structurally complete varieties are provided Particular emphasis is put on varieties of closure algebras, that are known to constitute adequate semantics for normal extensions of S4 modal logic. A certain infinite family of such almost structurally complete, but not structurally complete, varieties is constructed. Every variety from this family has a finitely presented unifiable algebra which does not embed into any free algebra for this variety. Hence unification in it is not unitary. This shows that almost structural completeness is strictly weaker than projective unification for varieties of closure algebras