This paper presents a new modal logic for ceteris paribus preferences understood in the sense of "all other things being equal". This reading goes back to the seminal work of Von Wright in the early 1960's and has returned in computer science in the 1990' s and in more abstract "dependency logics" today. We show how it differs from ceteris paribus as "all other things being normal", which is used in contexts with preference defeaters. We provide a semantic analysis and (...) several completeness theorems. We show how our system links up with Von Wright's work, and how it applies to game-theoretic solution concepts, to agenda setting in investigation, and to preference change. We finally consider its relation with infinitary modal logics. (shrink)

We show how belief revision can be treated systematically in the format of dynamicepistemic logic, when operators of conditional belief are added. The core engine consists of definable update rules for changing plausibility relations between worlds, which have been proposed independently in the dynamic-epistemic literature on preference change. Our analysis yields two new types of modal result. First, we obtain complete logics for concrete mechanisms of belief revision, based on compositional reduction axioms. Next, we show how various abstract postulates for (...) belief revision can be analyzed by standard modal frame correspondences for model-changing operations. (shrink)

This book is a study in the logic of questions (sometimes called erotetic logic). The central topics in erotetic logic have been the structure of questions and the question-answer relationship. This book doesn't neglect these problems, but much of it is focussed on other issues. The main subject is the logical analysis of certain relations between questions and the contexts of their appearance. And our aim is to elaborate the conceptual apparatus of the inferential approach to the logic of questions. (...) Questions are asked for many reasons and for different purposes. Yet, before a question is asked or posed, a questioner must arrive at it. In many cases arriving at a question resembles coming to a conclusion: there are some premises involved and some inferential thought processes take place. If we agree that a conclusion need not be "conclusive", we may say that sometimes questions can play the role of conclusions. But questions can also perform the role of premises: we often pass from some "initial" question to another question. In other words, there are inferential thought processes - we shall call them erotetic inferences - in which questions play the roles of conclusions or conclusions and premises. The inferential approach to the logic of questions focusses its attention on the analysis of erotetic inferences. This book consists of eight chapters. (shrink)

Almost forty years ago Richard Montague proposed to analyse natural language with the same tools as formal languages. In particular, he gave formal semantic analyses of several interesting fragments of English in terms of typed logic. This led to the development of Montague grammar as a particular style of formal analysis of natural language.

Most current work in epistemology deals with the evaluation and justification of information already acquired. In this book, Jaakko Hintikka instead discusses the more important problem of how knowledge is acquired in the first place. His model of information-seeking is the old Socratic method of questioning, which has been generalized and brought up-to-date through the logical theory of questions and answers that he has developed. Hintikka also argues that philosophers' quest for a definition of knowledge is ill-conceived and that the (...) entire notion of knowledge should be replaced by the concept of information. He offers an analysis of the different meanings of the concept of information and of their interrelations. The result is a new and illuminating approach to the field of epistemology. (shrink)

We look at two fundamental logical processes, often intertwined in planning and problem solving: inference and update. Inference is an internal process with which we uncover what is implicit in the information we already have. Update, on the other hand, is produced by external communication, usually in the form of announcements and in general in the form of observations, giving us information that might not have been available (even implicitly) before. Both processes have received attention from the logic community, usually (...) separately. In this work, we develop a logical language that allows us to describe them together. We present syntax, semantics and a complete axiom system; we discuss similarities and differences with other approaches and mention how the work can be extended. (shrink)

This book develops a view of logic as a theory of information-driven agency and intelligent interaction between many agents - with conversation, argumentation and games as guiding examples. It provides one uniform account of dynamic logics for acts of inference, observation, questions and communication, that can handle both update of knowledge and revision of beliefs. It then extends the dynamic style of analysis to include changing preferences and goals, temporal processes, group action and strategic interaction in games. Throughout, the book (...) develops a mathematical theory unifying all these systems, and positioning them at the interface of logic, philosophy, computer science and game theory. A series of further chapters explores repercussions of the 'dynamic stance' for these areas, as well as cognitive science. (shrink)

The Interrogative Model of Inquiry and Dynamic Epistemic Logics are two central paradigms in formal epistemology. This paper is motivated by the observation of a significant complementarity between them: on the one hand, the IMI provides a framework for investigating inquiry represented as an idealized game between an Inquirer and Nature, along with an account of the interaction between questions and inferences in information-seeking processes, but is lacking a formulation in the multi-agent case; on the other hand, DELs model various (...) operations of information change in multi-agent systems, but the field is lacking a proper integration of question and inference dynamics, along with an application to the investigation of inquiry processes. The goal of this paper is to integrate the two paradigms in such a way as to combine their respective insights. To this end, we develop a formal system called DEL $$_\mathrm{IMI }$$ IMI which aims to represent the interaction between question and inference dynamics in inquiry—as described by the IMI—in a multi-agent setting, and this in such a way as to enable an investigation of inquiry games with multi-agent dimensions. The DEL $$_\mathrm{IMI }$$ IMI system is designed to represent the possible moves of such inquiry games through three types of epistemic actions: agents addressing questions to Nature, agents addressing questions to other agents, agents drawing logical inferences. We then show how the resulting framework can be used to formally define multi-agent inquiry games. We conclude by evaluating the interest of the DEL $$_\mathrm{IMI }$$ IMI system for the IMI and DELs paradigms. (shrink)

We propose strategic games wherein the strategies consist of players asking each other questions and answering those questions. We study simplifications of such games wherein two players simultaneously ask each other a question that the opponent is then obliged to answer. The motivation for our research is to model conversation including the dynamics of questions and answers, to provide new links between game theory and dynamic logics of information, and to exploit the dynamic/strategic structure that, we think, lies implicitly inside (...) epistemic models for epistemic languages, and to make that structure an explicit subject of logical study. Our main contributions are: the notion of a two-person question-answer game with information goals, the existence and computation of equilibria for these games, the correspondence with Bayesian games and their equilibria, and a connection between logic and game theory namely the existence of equilibria for positive goal formulae. (shrink)

This paper presents a new modal logic for ceteris paribus preferences understood in the sense of “all other things being equal”. This reading goes back to the seminal work of Von Wright in the early 1960’s and has returned in computer science in the 1990’s and in more abstract “dependency logics” today. We show how it differs from ceteris paribus as “all other things being normal”, which is used in contexts with preference defeaters. We provide a semantic analysis and several (...) completeness theorems. We show how our system links up with Von Wright’s work, and how it applies to game-theoretic solution concepts, to agenda setting in investigation, and to preference change. We finally consider its relation with infinitary modal logics. (shrink)

A variety of logical frameworks have been developed to study rational agents interacting over time. This paper takes a closer look at one particular interface, between two systems that both address the dynamics of knowledge and information flow. The first is Epistemic Temporal Logic (ETL) which uses linear or branching time models with added epistemic structure induced by agents’ different capabilities for observing events. The second framework is Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) that describes interactive processes in terms of epistemic event (...) models which may occur inside modalities of the language. This paper systematically and rigorously relates the DEL framework with the ETL framework. The precise relationship between DEL and ETL is explored via a new representation theorem characterizing the largest class of ETL models corresponding to DEL protocols in terms of notions of Perfect Recall, No Miracles, and Bisimulation Invariance. We then focus on new issues of completeness. One contribution is an axiomatization for the dynamic logic of public announcements constrained by protocols, which has been an open problem for some years, as it does not fit the usual ‘reduction axiom’ format of DEL. Finally, we provide a number of examples that show how DEL suggests an interesting fine-structure inside ETL. (shrink)

Issues about information spring up wherever one scratches the surface of logic. Here is a case that raises delicate issues of 'factual' versus 'procedural' information, or 'statics' versus 'dynamics'. What does intuitionistic logic, perhaps the earliest source of informational and procedural thinking in contemporary logic, really tell us about information? How does its view relate to its 'cousin' epistemic logic? We discuss connections between intuitionistic models and recent protocol models for dynamic-epistemic logic, as well as more general issues that emerge.

This paper investigates a generalized version of inquisitive semantics. A complete axiomatization of the associated logic is established, the connection with intuitionistic logic and several intermediate logics is explored, and the generalized version of inquisitive semantics is argued to have certain advantages over the system that was originally proposed by Groenendijk (2009) and Mascarenhas (2009).

This paper adds evidence structure to standard models of belief, in the form of families of sets of worlds. We show how these more fine-grained models support natural actions of “evidence management”, ranging from update with external new information to internal rearrangement. We show how this perspective leads to new richer languages for existing neighborhood semantics for modal logic. Our main results are relative completeness theorems for the resulting dynamic logic of evidence.

Dynamic epistemic logic describes the possible information-changing actions available to individual agents, and their knowledge pre-and post conditions. For example, public announcement logic describes actions in the form of public, truthful announcements. However, little research so far has considered describing and analysing rational choice between such actions, i.e., predicting what rational self-interested agents actually will or should do. Since the outcome of information exchange ultimately depends on the actions chosen by all the agents in the system, and assuming that agents (...) have preferences over such outcomes, this is a game theoretic scenario. This is, in our opinion, an interesting general research direction, combining logic and game theory in the study of rational information exchange. In this article we take some first steps in this direction: we consider the case where available actions are public announcements, and where each agent has a (typically epistemic) goal formula that she would like to become true. What will each agent announce? The truth of the goal formula also depends on the announcements made by other agents. We analyse such public announcement games. (shrink)

Many logical systems today describe intelligent interacting agents over time. Frameworks include Interpreted Systems (IS, Fagin et al. [8]), Epistemic-Temporal Logic (ETL, Parikh & Ramanujam [22]), STIT (Belnap et al. [5]), Process Algebra and Game Semantics (Abramsky [1]). This variety is an asset, as different modeling tools can be fine-tuned to specific applications. But it may also be an obstacle, when barriers between paradigms and schools go up. This paper takes a closer look at one particular interface, between two systems (...) that both address the dynamics of knowledge and information flow in multi-agent systems. One is IS/ETL (IS and ETL are, from a technical point of view, the same up to model transformations, cf. [20]), which uses linear or branching time models with added epistemic structure induced by agents’ different capabilities for observing events. These models provide a Grand Stage where histories of some process unfold constrained by a protocol, and a matching epistemic-temporal language describes what happens. The other framework is Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL, [10, 4, 34]) that describes interactive processes in terms of epistemic event models which may occur inside modalities of the language. Temporal evolution is then computed from some initial epistemic model through a process of successive ‘product updates’. It has long been unclear how to best compare IS/ETL and DEL. Various aspects have been investigated in [10, 30, 32], but in this paper, we study the interface in a more systematic way. Often, DEL and ETL are presented as alternative ways of adding dynamics to multi-agent epistemic models. In this paper, we rather focus on how merging the two different modeling choices leads to interesting new questions. Our leading interest here will be a view of informational processes as evolving over time. To see what we mean, consider the simplest version of DEL, viz. the logic of public announcements PAL ([23]) which adds a very specific type of communicative 1 action to epistemic models: a public announcement.. (shrink)

Statements not only update our current knowledge, but also have other dynamic effects. In particular, suggestions or commands ?upgrade' our preferences by changing the current order among worlds. We present a complete logic of knowledge update plus preference upgrade that works with dynamic-epistemic-style reduction axioms. This system can model changing obligations, conflicting commands, or ?regret'. We then show how to derive reduction axioms from arbitrary definable relation changes. This style of analysis also has a product update version with preferences between (...) actions, as well as worlds. Some illustrations are presented involving defaults and obligations. We conclude that our dynamic framework is viable, while admitting a further extension to more numerical ?utility update'. (shrink)

Classical epistemic logic describes implicit knowledge of agents about facts and knowledge of other agents, based on semantic information. The latter is produced by acts of observation or communication, that are described well by dynamic epistemic logics. What these logics do not describe, however, is how significant information is also produced by acts of inference – and key axioms of the system merely postulate “deductive closure”. In this paper, we take the view that all information is produced by acts, and (...) hence we also need a dynamic logic of inference steps showing what effort on the part of the agent makes a conclusion explicit knowledge. Strong omniscience properties of agents should be seen not as static idealizations, but as the result of dynamic processes that agents engage in. This raises two questions: (a) how to define suitable information states of agents and matching notions of explicit knowledge, (b) how to define natural processes over these states that generate new explicit knowledge. To this end, we extend earlier epistemic “awareness models” into a dynamic system that includes acts of public observation, but also adding and dropping formulas from the currently ‘entertained’ set, we give a completeness theorem, and we show how this dynamics updates explicit knowledge. Similar ideas have been proposed before, but they were restricted to update with factual propositions; our new dynamic system applies to arbitrary formulas. We also extend our approach to multi-agent scenarios where awareness changes may happen privately. Finally, we mention further directions and related approaches. (shrink)

A variety of logical frameworks have been developed to study rational agents interacting over time. This paper takes a closer look at one particular interface, between two systems that both address the dynamics of knowledge and information flow. The first is Epistemic Temporal Logic (ETL) which uses linear or branching time models with added epistemic structure induced by agents’ different capabilities for observing events. The second framework is Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) that describes interactive processes in terms of epistemic event (...) models which may occur inside modalities of the language. This paper systematically and rigorously relates the DEL framework with the ETL framework. The precise relationship between DEL and ETL is explored via a new representation theorem characterizing the largest class of ETL models corresponding to DEL protocols in terms of notions of Perfect Recall , No Miracles , and Bisimulation Invariance . We then focus on new issues of completeness . One contribution is an axiomatization for the dynamic logic of public announcements constrained by protocols, which has been an open problem for some years, as it does not fit the usual ‘reduction axiom’ format of DEL. Finally, we provide a number of examples that show how DEL suggests an interesting fine-structure inside ETL. (shrink)

Why do we ask questions? Because we want tohave some information. But why this particular kind ofinformation? Because only information of this particularkind is helpful to resolve the decision problemthat the agent faces. In this paper I argue thatquestions are asked because their answers help toresolve the questioner's decision problem, and that thisassumption helps us to interpret interrogativesentences. Interrogative sentences are claimed to have asemantically underspecified meaning and thisunderspecification is resolved by means of the decisionproblem.

This book is devoted to a different proposal--that the logical structure of the scientist's method should guarantee eventual arrival at the truth given the scientist's background assumptions.