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  1. Using argumentation schemes to find motives and intentions of a rational agent.Douglas Walton - 2020 - Argument and Computation 10 (3):233-275.
    Because motives and intentions are internal, and not directly observable by another agent, it has always been a problem to find a pathway of reasoning linking them to externally observable evidence...
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  • Reasoning about manipulation in multi-agent systems.Christopher Leturc & Grégory Bonnet - 2022 - Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 32 (2):89-155.
    Selfish, dishonest or malicious agents may find an interest in manipulating others. While many works deal with designing robust systems or manipulative strategies, few works are interested in defining in a broad sense what is a manipulation and how we can reason with such a notion. In this article, based on a social science literature, we give a general definition of manipulation for multi-agent systems. A manipulation is a deliberate effect of an agent – called manipulator – to instrumentalize another (...)
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  • The Onus in 'Ought'.Mahrad Almotahari & Brian Rabern - 2023 - Analysis 83 (1):13-21.
    We present a puzzle about deontic modals. An adequate resolution requires abandoning the standard theory. What to replace it with isn’t clear. We consider two possibilities.
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  • Responsibility in Infinite Games.Xiulin Cui & Pavel Naumov - 2024 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic -1.
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  • Doing Without Action Types.Hein Duijf, Jan Broersen, Alexandra Kuncová & Aldo Iván Ramírez Abarca - 2021 - Review of Symbolic Logic 14 (2):380-410.
    This paper explores the analysis of ability, where ability is to be understood in the epistemic sense—in contrast to what might be called a causal sense. There are plenty of cases where an agent is able to perform an action that guarantees a given result even though she does not know which of her actions guarantees that result. Such an agent possesses the causal ability but lacks the epistemic ability. The standard analysis of such epistemic abilities relies on the notion (...)
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  • Agential Free Choice.Melissa Fusco - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (1):57-87.
    The Free Choice effect—whereby \\) seems to entail both \ and \—has traditionally been characterized as a phenomenon affecting the deontic modal ‘may’. This paper presents an extension of the semantic account of free choice defended by Fusco to the agentive modal ‘can’, the ‘can’ which, intuitively, describes an agent’s powers. On this account, free choice is a nonspecific de re phenomenon that—unlike typical cases—affects disjunction. I begin by sketching a model of inexact ability, which grounds a modal approach to (...)
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  • Karma Theory, Determinism, Fatalism and Freedom of Will.Ricardo Sousa Silvestre - 2017 - Logica Universalis 11 (1):35-60.
    The so-called theory of karma is one of the distinguishing aspects of Hinduism and other non-Hindu south-Asian traditions. At the same time that the theory can be seen as closely connected with the freedom of will and action that we humans supposedly have, it has many times been said to be determinist and fatalist. The purpose of this paper is to analyze in some deepness the relations that are between the theory of karma on one side and determinism, fatalism and (...)
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  • Agent-Relativity and the Foundations of Moral Theory.Matthew Hammerton - 2017 - Dissertation, Australian National University
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  • Ability, modality, and genericity.John Maier - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):411-428.
    Accounts of ability in the philosophical literature have tended to be modal ones: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she does in certain non-actual scenarios. In contrast, a prominent account of ability ascriptions in the recent semantics literature appeals to genericity: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she generally manages to do. The latter account resolves some long-standing problems for modal accounts, but encounters problems of its own. I propose a (...)
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  • Practical Language: Its Meaning and Use.Nathan A. Charlow - 2011 - Dissertation, University of Michigan
    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 (...)
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  • Logic and Semantics for Imperatives.Nate Charlow - 2014 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 43 (4):617-664.
    In this paper I will develop a view about the semantics of imperatives, which I term Modal Noncognitivism, on which imperatives might be said to have truth conditions (dispositionally, anyway), but on which it does not make sense to see them as expressing propositions (hence does not make sense to ascribe to them truth or falsity). This view stands against “Cognitivist” accounts of the semantics of imperatives, on which imperatives are claimed to express propositions, which are then enlisted in explanations (...)
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  • Is unsaying polite?Berislav Žarnić - 2011 - In Majda Trobok, Nenad Miščević & Berislav Žarnić (eds.), Between Logic and Reality: Modeling Inference, Action and Understanding. Dordrecht and New York: Springer. pp. 201--224.
    This paper is divided in five sections. Section 11.1 sketches the history of the distinction between speech act with negative content and negated speech act, and gives a general dynamic interpretation for negated speech act. “Downdate semantics” for AGM contraction is introduced in Section 11.2. Relying on semantically interpreted contraction, Section 11.3 develops the dynamic semantics for constative and directive speech acts, and their external negations. The expressive completeness for the formal variants of natural language utterances, none of which is (...)
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  • Actions as Events.Ming Xu - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (4):765 - 809.
    We present a theory of actions based on a theory of events in branching time, in which "particular" or "token" actions are taken to be sets of transitions from their initial states to the outcomes. We also present a simple theory of composition of events by which composite events can be formed out of other events. Various kinds of actions, including instantaneous group actions and sequential group actions, are introduced by way of composition, and an extended stit theory of agency (...)
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  • Events.Roberto Casati & Achille C. Varzi - 2020 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    A critical survey of the main philosophical theories about events and event talk, organized in three main sections: (i) Events and Other Categories (Events vs. Objects; Events vs. Facts; Events vs. Properties; Events vs. Times); (ii) Types of Events (Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, and States; Static and Dynamic Events; Actions and Bodily Movements; Mental and Physical Events; Negative Events); (iii) Existence, Identity, and Indeterminacy.
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  • Joint action and group action made precise.Gabriel Sandu & Raimo Tuomela - 1995 - Synthese 105 (3):319 - 345.
    The paper argues that there are two main kinds of joint action, direct joint bringing about (or performing) something (expressed in terms of a DO-operator) and jointly seeing to it that something is the case (expressed in terms of a Stit-operator). The former kind of joint action contains conjunctive, disjunctive and sequential action and its central subkinds. While joint seeing to it that something is the case is argued to be necessarily intentional, direct joint performance can also be nonintentional. Actions (...)
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  • Counterfactual and seeing-to-it responsibilities in strategic games.Pavel Naumov & Jia Tao - 2023 - Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 174 (10):103353.
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  • The Logic of Action and Control.Leona Mollica - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (5):1237-1268.
    In this paper I propose and motivate a logic of the interdefined concepts of making true and control, understood as intensional propositional operators to be indexed to an agent. While bearing a resemblance to earlier logics in the tradition, the motivations, semantics, and object language theory differ on crucial points. Applying this logic to widespread formal theories of agency, I use it as a framework to argue against the ubiquitous assumption that the strongest actions or options available to a given (...)
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  • Some Forms of Collectively Bringing About or ‘Seeing to it that’.Marek Sergot - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (2):249-283.
    One of the best known approaches to the logic of agency are the ‘stit’ logics. Often, it is not the actions of an individual agent that bring about a certain outcome but the joint actions of a set of agents, collectively. Collective agency has received comparatively little attention in ‘stit’. The paper maps out several different forms, several different senses in which a particular set of agents, collectively, can be said to bring about a certain outcome, and examines how these (...)
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  • Distinguishing agent-relativity from agent-neutrality.Matthew Hammerton - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2):239-250.
    The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction is one of the most important in contemporary moral theory. Yet, providing an adequate formal account of it has proven difficult. In this article I defend a new formal account of the distinction, one that avoids various problems faced by other accounts. My account is based on an influential account of the distinction developed by McNaughton and Rawling. I argue that their approach is on the right track but that it succumbs to two serious objections. I then (...)
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  • Deontic ‘cocktail’ according to E. Mally’s receipt.Lisanyuk Elena - 2013 - Logical Investigations 19:5-27.
    In 1926, Ernst Mally, an Austrian logician, has introduced a system of deontic logic in which he has proposed three fundamental distinctions which proved to be important in the context of the further development of the logic of norms. It is argued that in his philosophical considerations Mally has introduced a number of important distinctions concerning the very concept of norm, but by getting them confused in introducing the subsequent formalisms he failed to formally preserve them. In some of his (...)
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  • The logical form of negative action sentences.Jonathan D. Payton - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (6):855-876.
    It is typically assumed that actions are events, but there is a growing consensus that negative actions, like omissions and refrainments, are not events, but absences thereof. If so, then we must either deny the obvious, that we can exercise our agency by omitting and refrainment, or give up on event-based theories of agency. I trace the consensus to the assumption that negative action sentences are negative-existentials, and argue that this is false. The best analysis of negative action sentences treats (...)
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  • Towards a Theory of Limited Indeterminism in Branching Space-times.Thomas Müller - 2010 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 39 (4):395-423.
    Branching space-times (BST; Belnap, Synthese 92:385–434, 1992 ) is the most advanced formal framework for representing indeterminism. BST is however based on continuous partial orderings, while our natural way of describing indeterministic scenarios may be called discrete. This paper establishes a theorem providing a discrete data format for BST: it is proved that a discrete representation of indeterministic scenarios leading to BST models is possible in an important subclass of cases. This result enables the representation of limited indeterminism in BST (...)
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  • Temporal logic.Temporal Logic - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • From BDI and stit to bdi-stit logic.Caroline Semmling & Heinrich Wansing - 2008 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 17 (1-2):185-207.
    Since it is desirable to be able to talk about rational agents forming attitudes toward their concrete agency, we suggest an introduction of doxastic, volitional, and intentional modalities into the multi-agent logic of deliberatively seeing to it that, dstit logic. These modalities are borrowed from the well-known BDI (belief-desire-intention) logic. We change the semantics of the belief and desire operators from a relational one to a monotonic neighbourhood semantic in order to handle ascriptions of conflicting but not inconsistent beliefs and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Deontic logic.Paul McNamara - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Stit and the language of agency.Michael Perloff - 1991 - Synthese 86 (3):379 - 408.
    Stit, a sentence form first introduced in Belnap and Perloff (1988), encourages a modal approach to agency. Von Wright, Chisholm, Kenny, and Castañeda have all attempted modal treatments of agency, while Davidson has rejected such treatments. After a brief explanation of the syntax and semantics of stit and a restatement of several of the important claims of the earlier paper, I discuss the virtues of stit against the background of proposals made by these philososphers.
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  • Before refraining: Concepts for agency. [REVIEW]Nuel Belnap - 1991 - Erkenntnis 34 (2):137 - 169.
    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 (...)
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  • Axioms for deliberative stit.Ming Xu - 1998 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 27 (5):505-552.
    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 (...)
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  • Anselm’s Logic of Agency.Sara L. Uckelman - 2009 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 12 (1):248-268.
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  • Johan van Benthem on Logic and Information Dynamics.Alexandru Baltag & Sonja Smets (eds.) - 2014 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
    This book illustrates the program of Logical-Informational Dynamics. Rational agents exploit the information available in the world in delicate ways, adopt a wide range of epistemic attitudes, and in that process, constantly change the world itself. Logical-Informational Dynamics is about logical systems putting such activities at center stage, focusing on the events by which we acquire information and change attitudes. Its contributions show many current logics of information and change at work, often in multi-agent settings where social behavior is essential, (...)
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  • A Formal Characterisation of Hamblin’s Action-State Semantics.Chris Reed & Timothy J. Norman - 2007 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 36 (4):415-448.
    Hamblin’s Action-State Semantics provides a sound philosophical foundation for understanding the character of the imperative. Taking this as our inspiration, in this paper we present a logic of action, which we call ST, that captures the clear ontological distinction between being responsible for the achievement of a state of affairs and being responsible for the performance of an action. We argue that a relativised modal logic of type RT founded upon a ternary relation over possible worlds integrated with a basic (...)
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  • A Gabbay-Rule Free Axiomatization of T x W Validity.Maria Concetta Di Maio & Alberto Zanardo - 1998 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 27 (5):435 - 487.
    The semantical structures called T x W frames were introduced in (Thomason, 1984) for the Ockhamist temporal-modal language, $[Unrepresented Character]_{o}$ , which consists of the usual propositional language augmented with the Priorean operators P and F and with a possibility operator ◇. However, these structures are also suitable for interpreting an extended language, $[Unrepresented Character]_{so}$ , containing a further possibility operator $\lozenge^{s}$ which expresses synchronism among possibly incompatible histories and which can thus be thought of as a cross-history 'simultaneity' operator. (...)
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  • Changing minds about climate change: Belief revision, coherence, and emotion.Paul Thagard & Scott Findlay - 2011 - In Erik J. Olson Sebastian Enqvist (ed.), Belief Revision meets Philosophy of Science. Springer. pp. 329--345.
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  • Causation in branching time (I): Transitions, events and causes.Ming Xu - 1997 - Synthese 112 (2):137-192.
    We propose a theory of events and causes against the background of branching time. Notions discussed include possibility based on reality, transitions, events, determinacy, contingency, causes and effects. The main idea in defining causal relations is to introduce a certain preconditioning circumstance under which one event follows another. We also briefly compare this theory with some other theories.
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  • Branching space-time.Nuel Belnap - 1992 - Synthese 92 (3):385 - 434.
    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.
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  • On the basic logic of STIT with a single agent.Ming Xu - 1995 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 60 (2):459-483.
    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.
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  • Getting started: Beginnings in the logic of action.Krister Segerberg - 1992 - Studia Logica 51 (3-4):347 - 378.
    A history of the logic of action is outlined, beginning with St Anselm. Five modern authors are discussed in some detail: von Wright, Fitch, Kanger, Chellas and Pratt.
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  • Branching in the landscape of possibilities.Thomas Müller - 2012 - Synthese 188 (1):41-65.
    The metaphor of a branching tree of future possibilities has a number of important philosophical and logical uses. In this paper we trace this metaphor through some of its uses and argue that the metaphor works the same way in physics as in philosophy. We then give an overview of formal systems for branching possibilities, viz., branching time and (briefly) branching space-times. In a next step we describe a number of different notions of possibility, thereby sketching a landscape of possibilities. (...)
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  • In the realm of agents.Nuel Belnap & Michael Perloff - unknown
    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 (...)
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  • The way of the agent.Nuel Belnap & Michael Perloff - 1992 - Studia Logica 51 (3-4):463 - 484.
    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 (...)
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  • Ought and agency.Daniel Skibra - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-40.
    A thorny question surrounding the meaning of ought concerns a felt distinction between deontic uses of ought that seem to evaluate a state of affairs versus those that seem to describe a requirement or obligation to perform an action, as in and, respectively. There ought not be childhood death and disease. You ought to keep that promise. Various accounts have been offered to explain the contrast between “agentive” and “non-agentive” ought sentences. One such account is the Agency-in-the-Prejacent theory, which traces (...)
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  • A Computational Learning Semantics for Inductive Empirical Knowledge.Kevin T. Kelly - 2014 - In Alexandru Baltag & Sonja Smets (eds.), Johan van Benthem on Logic and Information Dynamics. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. pp. 289-337.
    This chapter presents a new semantics for inductive empirical knowledge. The epistemic agent is represented concretely as a learner who processes new inputs through time and who forms new beliefs from those inputs by means of a concrete, computable learning program. The agent’s belief state is represented hyper-intensionally as a set of time-indexed sentences. Knowledge is interpreted as avoidance of error in the limit and as having converged to true belief from the present time onward. Familiar topics are re-examined within (...)
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  • A reduction of doxastic logic to action logic.Heinrich Wansing - 2000 - Erkenntnis 53 (1-2):267-283.
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  • Agency and obligation.John F. Horty - 1996 - Synthese 108 (2):269 - 307.
    The purpose of this paper is to explore a new deontic operator for representing what an agent ought to do; the operator is cast against the background of a modal treatment of action developed by Nuel Belnap and Michael Perloff, which itself relies on Arthur Prior's indeterministic tense logic. The analysis developed here of what an agent ought to do is based on a dominance ordering adapted from the decision theoretic study of choice under uncertainty to the present account of (...)
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  • Nuel Belnap on Indeterminism and Free Action.Thomas Müller (ed.) - 2014 - Wien, Austria: Springer.
    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 (...)
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  • Resolving distributed knowledge.Thomas Ågotnes & Yì N. Wáng - 2017 - Artificial Intelligence 252 (C):1-21.
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  • The modal logic of agency.Dag Elgesem - 1997 - Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic 2:1-46.
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  • What groups do, can do, and know they can do: an analysis in normal modal logics.Jan Broersen, Andreas Herzig & Nicolas Troquard - 2009 - Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 19 (3):261-289.
    We investigate a series of logics that allow to reason about agents' actions, abilities, and their knowledge about actions and abilities. These logics include Pauly's Coalition Logic CL, Alternating-time Temporal Logic ATL, the logic of ‘seeing-to-it-that' (STIT), and epistemic extensions thereof. While complete axiomatizations of CL and ATL exist, only the fragment of the STIT language without temporal operators and without groups has been axiomatized by Xu (called Ldm). We start by recalling a simplification of the Ldm that has been (...)
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  • Approximate verification of strategic abilities under imperfect information.Wojciech Jamroga, Michał Knapik, Damian Kurpiewski & Łukasz Mikulski - 2019 - Artificial Intelligence 277 (C):103172.
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  • Agent-oriented programming.Yoav Shoham - 1993 - Artificial Intelligence 60 (1):51-92.
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