I demonstrate that a "speech act" theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act-theoretic account of the meaning of an imperative !φ is characterized, broadly, by the following claims. -/- LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE !φ’s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it conventionally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF). -/- IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL !φ's CDF is to (...) express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent's preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs. -/- Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny that a sentence's linguistic meaning is a matter of what speech act it is used to perform, or its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of "static" properties of the sentence—e.g., how it depicts the world as being (or, more neutrally, the properties of a model-theoretic object with which the semantic value of the sentence co-varies). On one version of a static account, an imperative 'shut the window!' might, for instance, depict the world as being such that the window must be shut. -/- Static accounts are traditionally motivated against speech act-theoretic accounts by appeal to supposedly irremediable explanatory deficiencies in the latter. Whatever a static account loses in saying (prima facie counterintuitively) that an imperative conventionally represents, or expresses a picture of the world, is said to be offset by its ability to explain a variety of phenomena for which speech act-theoretic accounts are said to lack good explanations (even, in many cases, the bare ability to offer something that might meet basic criteria on what a good explanation should be like). -/- I aim to turn the tables on static accounts. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none. (shrink)

A structure is described that can serve as a foundation for a semantics for a modal agentive construction such as sees to it that Q ([ stit: Q]). The primitives are Tree,,Instant, Agent, choice. Eleven simple postulates governing this structure are set forth and motivated. Tree and encode a picture of branching time consisting of moments gathered into maximal chains called histories. Instant imposes a time-like ordering. Agent consists of agents, and choice assigns to each agent and each moment in (...) Tree a set of possible choices, where each possible choice is a set of histories. All of these ingredients are referred to in the semantics suggested for [ stit: Q]. The most complex part of the discussion is the motivation for the definition of what it means for a typically non-terminating chain of moments jointly to witness the truth of [ stit: Q] at a moment.The paper begins with an informal account of the Refref conjecture, which says that the only way to refrain from refraining from seeing to something is to see to it. The paper ends with a consideration of an argument of Prior's that in a certain sense contemplation and action are inconsistent. (shrink)

Two areas of importance for agents and multiagent systems are investigated: design of agent programming languages, and design of agent communication languages. The paper contributes in the above mentioned areas by demonstrating improved or novel applications for deontic logic and normative reasoning. Examples are taken from computer-supported cooperative work, and electronic commerce.

Stit theory (a logic of seeing-to-it-that) is applied to cases involving many agents. First treated are complex nestings of stits involving distinct agents. The discussion is driven by the logical impossibility of "a sees to it that b sees to it that Q" in the technical sense, even though that seems to make sense in everyday language, Of special utility are the concepts of "forced choice", of the creation of deontic states, and of probabilities, Second, joint agency, both plain and (...) strict (every participant is essential) is given a rigorous treatment. A central theorem is that strict joint agency is itself agentive. (shrink)

Branching space-time is a simple blend of relativity and indeterminism. Postulates and definitions rigorously describe the causal order relation between possible point events. The key postulate is a version of everything has a causal origin; key defined terms include history and choice point. Some elementary but helpful facts are proved. Application is made to the status of causal contemporaries of indeterministic events, to how splitting of histories happens, to indeterminism without choice, and to Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen distant correlations.

We present in this paper an axiomatization of Belnap and Perloff's stit theory (a logic of "seeing to it that") with a single agent. The idea of the proof is to apply the notion of companion sets--the same notion as used in another paper by the author that showed the decidability of stit theory with a single agent and Refref equivalence.

This paper presents a short survey of recent developments in stit theories, with an emphasis on combinations of stit and deontic logic, and those of stit and epistemic logic.

Based on a notion of "companions to stit formulas" applied in other papers dealing with astit logics, we introduce "choice formulas" and "nested choice formulas" to prove the completeness theorems for dstit logics in a language with the dstit operator as the only non-truth-functional operator. The main logic discussed in this paper is the basic logic of dstit with multiple agents, other logics discussed include the basic logic of dstit with a single agent and some logics of dstit with multiple (...) agents each of which corresponds to a semantic condition concerning the number of possible choices for agents. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to prove the decidability ofstit theory (a logic of seeing to it that) with a single agent andRefref Equivalence. This result is obtained through an axiomatization of the theory and a proof that it has thefinite model property. A notion ofcompanions to stit formulas is introduced and extensively used in the proof.

Recent theories of agency (sees to it that) of Nuel Belnap and Michael Perloff are examined, particularly in the context of an early proposal of the author.

This paper proposes a logical framework for studying the structure of moral responsibility for outcomes. The analysis incorporates two vital features: an agency condition and a negative condition of an alternative possibility. The logical language allows us to identify and disambiguate seven plausible criteria for moral responsibility. To accommodate interdependent decision contexts, the semantics are given in terms of so-called responsibility games. The logical framework enables us to classify the logical relations between these seven criteria for moral responsibility. Although all (...) seven criteria are logically distinct, I also identify circumstances where the seven criteria locally reduce to only three. (shrink)

We review the stit semantic framework and the main stit operators that have been proposed by Belnap, Perloff and Horty , a theory that has recently attracted the attention of the multiagent community. We discuss the problem of how to model the notion of collective agency, both in the sense of a joint action of a group of agents and as the agency of collective entities, like organisations. We show how we can define the direct and immediate effects of agents’ (...) actions, both in the achievement sense and in the deliberative sense, without any assumptions on the nature of time and considering the particular case of a discrete time. Finally, we also show how we can define a kind of dynamic logic operator that allows us to express what would obtain, if a direct “sees to it” action is performed, seeing it as a particular case of formulae of the form [a: φ]Ψ, that have the following informal meaning: “if agent a selects an action that leads to the truth of φ, after such action is performed, Ψ is the case”. (shrink)

Expertise, authority, and testimony refer to aspects of one of the most important elements of communication and cognition. Argumentation theory recognises various forms of what we call the argumentum ad alia pattern, in which speakers appeal to what others have said, including Position to Know scheme, Witness Testimony scheme, Expert Opinion scheme and the classical ad verecundiam. In this paper we show that ad alia involves more than merely an inferential step from what others (a person in position to know, (...) a witness, an expert) have said, and that studying this type of argumentation requires going beyond the argument structure of propositional contents to account for different speech activities. We also demonstrate that using the words of others, attacking what has been said, and reasoning from how others reason constitute a rich repertoire of communication strategies which we need to model in order to be able to analyse them manually and to process them computationally. (shrink)

This volume seeks to further the use of formal methods in clarifying one of the central problems of philosophy: that of our free human agency and its place in our indeterministic world. It celebrates the important contributions made in this area by Nuel Belnap, American logician and philosopher. Philosophically, indeterminism and free action can seem far apart, but in Belnap’s work, they are intimately linked. This book explores their philosophical interconnectedness through a selection of original research papers that build forth (...) on Belnap’s logical and philosophical work. Some contributions take the form of critical discussions of Belnap's published work, some develop points made in his publications in new directions, and others provide additional insights on the topics of indeterminism and free action. In Nuel Belnap’s work on indeterminism and free action, three formal frameworks figure prominently: the simple branching histories framework known as "branching time;" its relativistic spatio-temporal extension, branching space-times; and the “seeing to it that” logic of agency. As those frameworks provide the formal background for the contributed papers, the volume introduction gives an overview of the current state of their development. It also introduces case-intensional first order logic, a general intensional logic offering resources for a first-order extension of the mentioned frameworks and a recent research focus of Belnap’s. The volume also contains an extended biographical interview with Nuel Belnap. (shrink)

We introduce the logic LRC, designed to describe and reason about agents’ abilities and capabilities in using resources. The proposed framework bridges two—up to now—mutually independent strands of literature: the one on logics of abilities and capabilities, developed within the theory of agency, and the one on logics of resources, motivated by program semantics. The logic LRC is suitable to describe and reason about key aspects of social behaviour in organizations. We prove a number of properties enjoyed by LRC and (...) its associated analytic calculus. These results lay at the intersection of the algebraic theory of unified correspondence and the theory of multitype calculi in structural proof theory. Case studies are discussed which showcase several ways in which this framework can be extended and enriched while retaining its basic properties, so as to model an array of issues, both practically and theoretically relevant, spanning from planning problems to the logical foundations of the theory of organizations. (shrink)

We show that actuality entailments arise with goal-oriented modality only and endorse Belnap’s view of that goal-oriented modals use historical accessibility with a fixed past and an open future. This modal-theoretic assumption allows us to spell out the precise modal-temporal configuration in which the actuality entailment arises and our predictions are borne out by the data, cross-linguistically. We also show that, when any assumption about the identity of worlds at branching point is leveled - which appears to be the case (...) with generic deontic and opportunity modals, the actuality entailments disappear. We also predict that the entailment disappears with prospectivity. Finally, we argue that modal sentences giving rise to actuality entailments are informative, insofar as the contribution of the modality survives as a presupposition that the modal base is non-homogeneous. (shrink)

The conditional,if an agent did something, then the agent could have done otherwise, is analyzed usingstit theory, which is a logic of seeing to it that based on agents making choices in the context of branching time. The truth of the conditional is found to be a subtle matter that depends on how it is interpreted (e.g., on what otherwise refers to, and on the difference between could and might) and also on whether or not there are busy choosers that (...) can make infinitely many choices in a finite span of time. (shrink)

In this paper we prove the uncompactness of every stit logic that contains a generalized refref conditional and is a sublogic of the stit logic with refref equivalence, a syntactical condition of uncompactness that covers infinitely many stit logics. This result is established through the uncompactness of every stit logic whose semantic structures contain no chain of busy choice sequences with cardinality , where is any natural number . The basic idea in the proof is to apply the notion of (...) companions to stit sentences in finding busy choice sequences in structures, and to make use of a relation between chains of busy choice sequences and generalized refref conditionals in connecting the two conditions of uncompactness mentioned above. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to prove that in every stit semantic structure that contains a busy choice sequence, neither does doing imply refraining from refraining from doing, nor does refraining from refraining from doing imply doing.

The purpose of this paper is to present some results instit theory, a theory of agency proposed by N. Belnap and M. Perloff. We will establish a correspondence between the numbers ofstit modalities and the complexity degrees ofbusy choice sequences in semantic structures, and consequently, a correspondence between the number of modes of actions/inactions instit theory and the complexity degrees ofbusy choice sequences in semantic structures.

Topic of the paper is Q-logic - a logic of agency in its temporal and modal context. Q-logic may be considered as a basal logic of agency since the most important stitoperators discussed in the literature can be defined or axiomatized easily within its semantical and syntactical framework. Its basic agent dependent operator, the Q-operator (also known as Δ- or cstit-operator), which has been discussed independently by E v. Kutschera and B. E Chellas, is investigated here in respect of its (...) relation to other temporal and modal operators. The main result of the paper, then, is a completeness result for a calculus of Q-logic with respect to a semantics defined on the tree-approach to agency as introduced and developed by, among others, E v. Kutschera and N. D. Belnap. (shrink)

This paper presents two general results of decidability concerning logics based on an indeterministic metric tense logic, which can be applied to, among others, logics combining knowledge, time and agency. We provide a general Kripke semantics based on a variation of the notion of synchronized Ockhamist frames. Our proof of the decidability is by way of the finite frame property, applying subframe transformations and a variant of the filtration technique.