Designing Normative Theories for Ethical and Legal Reasoning: LogiKEy Framework, Methodology, and Tool Support

A framework and methodology---termed LogiKEy---for the design and engineering of ethical reasoners, normative theories and deontic logics is presented. The overall motivation is the development of suitable means for the control and governance of intelligent autonomous systems. LogiKEy's unifying formal framework is based on semantical embeddings of deontic logics, logic combinations and ethico-legal domain theories in expressive classic higher-order logic (HOL). This meta-logical approach enables the provision of powerful tool support in LogiKEy: off-the-shelf theorem provers and model finders for HOL are assisting the LogiKEy designer of ethical intelligent agents to flexibly experiment with underlying logics and their combinations, with ethico-legal domain theories, and with concrete examples---all at the same time. Continuous improvements of these off-the-shelf provers, without further ado, leverage the reasoning performance in LogiKEy. Case studies, in which the LogiKEy framework and methodology has been applied and tested, give evidence that HOL's undecidability often does not hinder efficient experimentation.Comment: 50 pages; 10 figure

Embedding Non-Ground Logic Programs into Autoepistemic Logic for Knowledge Base Combination

In the context of the Semantic Web, several approaches to the combination of ontologies, given in terms of theories of classical first-order logic and rule bases, have been proposed. They either cast rules into classical logic or limit the interaction between rules and ontologies. Autoepistemic logic (AEL) is an attractive formalism which allows to overcome these limitations, by serving as a uniform host language to embed ontologies and nonmonotonic logic programs into it. For the latter, so far only the propositional setting has been considered. In this paper, we present three embeddings of normal and three embeddings of disjunctive non-ground logic programs under the stable model semantics into first-order AEL. While the embeddings all correspond with respect to objective ground atoms, differences arise when considering non-atomic formulas and combinations with first-order theories. We compare the embeddings with respect to stable expansions and autoepistemic consequences, considering the embeddings by themselves, as well as combinations with classical theories. Our results reveal differences and correspondences of the embeddings and provide useful guidance in the choice of a particular embedding for knowledge combination.Comment: 52 pages, submitte

Nonrestrictive Relatives and Growth of Logical Form

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Topos Semantics for Higher-Order Modal Logic

We define the notion of a model of higher-order modal logic in an arbitrary elementary topos $\mathcal{E}$. In contrast to the well-known interpretation of (non-modal) higher-order logic, the type of propositions is not interpreted by the subobject classifier $\Omega_{\mathcal{E}}$, but rather by a suitable complete Heyting algebra $H$. The canonical map relating $H$ and $\Omega_{\mathcal{E}}$ both serves to interpret equality and provides a modal operator on $H$ in the form of a comonad. Examples of such structures arise from surjective geometric morphisms $f : \mathcal{F} \to \mathcal{E}$, where $H = f_\ast \Omega_{\mathcal{F}}$. The logic differs from non-modal higher-order logic in that the principles of functional and propositional extensionality are no longer valid but may be replaced by modalized versions. The usual Kripke, neighborhood, and sheaf semantics for propositional and first-order modal logic are subsumed by this notion