Bridges from Classical to Nonmonotonic Logic

Author: David Makinson
Publisher: College Publications
ISBN: 9781904987000
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Imagine a robot trying to size up a difficult situation, to find a way of responding. Its sensors receive streams of information from which it tries to reach judgements. If it relies on deduction alone, it will not get far, no matter how fast its inference engines; for even the most massive information is still typically incomplete: there are relevant issues that it does not resolve one way or the other. The robot, or human agent for that matter, needs to go beyond these limits. It needs to `go supraclassical', inferring more than is authorised by classical logic alone. But such inferences are inherently uncertain. They are also nonmonotonic, in the sense that the acquisition of further information, even when consistent with the existing stock, may lead us to abondon as well as add conclusions. Nonmonotonic logic is the study of such reasoning and has been the subject of intensive research for more than two decades. But for the newcomer it is still a disconcerting affair, lacking unity with many systems going in different directions. The purpose of this book is to take the mystery out of the subject, giving a clear overall picture of what is going on. It makes the essential ideas and main approaches to nonmonotonic logic accessible, and meaningful, to anyone with a few basic tools of discrete mathematics and a minimal background in classical propositional logic. It is written as a textbook, with detailed explanations, examples, comments, exercises and answers. Students and instructors alike will find it an invaluable guide.

David Makinson on Classical Methods for Non-Classical Problems

Author: Sven Ove Hansson
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400777590
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
The volume analyses and develops David Makinson’s efforts to make classical logic useful outside its most obvious application areas. The book contains chapters that analyse, appraise, or reshape Makinson’s work and chapters that develop themes emerging from his contributions. These are grouped into major areas to which Makinsons has made highly influential contributions and the volume in its entirety is divided into four sections, each devoted to a particular area of logic: belief change, uncertain reasoning, normative systems and the resources of classical logic. Among the contributions included in the volume, one chapter focuses on the “inferential preferential method”, i.e. the combined use of classical logic and mechanisms of preference and choice and provides examples from Makinson’s work in non-monotonic and defeasible reasoning and belief revision. One chapter offers a short autobiography by Makinson which details his discovery of modern logic, his travels across continents and reveals his intellectual encounters and inspirations. The chapter also contains an unusually explicit statement on his views on the (limited but important) role of logic in philosophy.

Handbook of Philosophical Logic

Author: D.M. Gabbay
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402030924
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
The first edition of the Handbook of Philosophical Logic (four volumes) was published in the period 1983-1989 and has proven to be an invaluable reference work to both students and researchers in formal philosophy, language and logic. The second edition of the Handbook is intended to comprise some 18 volumes and will provide a very up-to-date authoritative, in-depth coverage of all major topics in philosophical logic and its applications in many cutting-edge fields relating to computer science, language, argumentation, etc. The volumes will no longer be as topic-oriented as with the first edition because of the way the subject has evolved over the last 15 years or so. However the volumes will follow some natural groupings of chapters. Audience: Students and researchers whose work or interests involve philosophical logic and its applications

Logic in the Theory and Practice of Lawmaking

Author: Michał Araszkiewicz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319195751
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 567

Book Description
This book presents the current state of the art regarding the application of logical tools to the problems of theory and practice of lawmaking. It shows how contemporary logic may be useful in the analysis of legislation, legislative drafting and legal reasoning concerning different contexts of law making. Elaborations of the process of law making have variously emphasised its political, social or economic aspects. Yet despite strong interest in logical analyses of law, questions remains about the role of logical tools in law making. This volume attempts to bridge that gap, or at least to narrow it, drawing together some important research problems—and some possible solutions—as seen through the work of leading contemporary academics. The volume encompasses 20 chapters written by authors from 16 countries and it presents diversified views on the understanding of logic (from strict mathematical approaches to the informal, argumentative ones) and differentiated choices concerning the aspects of law making taken into account. The book presents a broad set of perspectives, insights and results into the emerging field of research devoted to the logical analysis of the area of creation of law. How does logic inform lawmaking? Are legal systems consistent and complete? How can legal rules be represented by means of formal calculi and visualization techniques? Does the structure of statutes or of legal systems resemble the structure of deductive systems? What are the logical relations between the basic concepts of jurisprudence that constitute the system of law? How are theories of legal interpretation relevant to the process of legislation? How might the statutory text be analysed by means of contemporary computer programs? These and other questions, ranging from the theoretical to the immediately practical, are addressed in this definitive collection.

Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty

Author: Gabriele Kern-Isberner
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030297659
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2019, held in Belgrade, Serbia, in September 2019. The 41 full papers presented together with 3 abstracts of invited talks inn this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: Argumentation; Belief Functions; Conditional, Default and Analogical Reasoning; Learning and Decision Making; Precise and Imprecise Probabilities; and Uncertain Reasoning for Applications.

Adaptive Logics for Defeasible Reasoning

Author: Christian Straßer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3319007920
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 443

Book Description
This book presents adaptive logics as an intuitive and powerful framework for modeling defeasible reasoning. It examines various contexts in which defeasible reasoning is useful and offers a compact introduction into adaptive logics. The author first familiarizes readers with defeasible reasoning, the adaptive logics framework, combinations of adaptive logics, and a range of useful meta-theoretic properties. He then offers a systematic study of adaptive logics based on various applications. The book presents formal models for defeasible reasoning stemming from different contexts, such as default reasoning, argumentation, and normative reasoning. It highlights various meta-theoretic advantages of adaptive logics over other logics or logical frameworks that model defeasible reasoning. In this way the book substantiates the status of adaptive logics as a generic formal framework for defeasible reasoning.

Special Sciences and the Unity of Science

Author: Olga Pombo
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400720297
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Science is a dynamic process in which the assimilation of new phenomena, perspectives, and hypotheses into the scientific corpus takes place slowly. The apparent disunity of the sciences is the unavoidable consequence of this gradual integration process. Some thinkers label this dynamical circumstance a ‘crisis’. However, a retrospective view of the practical results of the scientific enterprise and of science itself, grants us a clear view of the unity of the human knowledge seeking enterprise. This book provides many arguments, case studies and examples in favor of the unity of science. These contributions touch upon various scientific perspectives and disciplines such as: Physics, Computer Science, Biology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, and Economics.

Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications

Author: Koji Tanaka
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400744382
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
A logic is called 'paraconsistent' if it rejects the rule called 'ex contradictione quodlibet', according to which any conclusion follows from inconsistent premises. While logicians have proposed many technically developed paraconsistent logical systems and contemporary philosophers like Graham Priest have advanced the view that some contradictions can be true, and advocated a paraconsistent logic to deal with them, until recent times these systems have been little understood by philosophers. This book presents a comprehensive overview on paraconsistent logical systems to change this situation. The book includes almost every major author currently working in the field. The papers are on the cutting edge of the literature some of which discuss current debates and others present important new ideas. The editors have avoided papers about technical details of paraconsistent logic, but instead concentrated upon works that discuss more "big picture" ideas. Different treatments of paradoxes takes centre stage in many of the papers, but also there are several papers on how to interpret paraconistent logic and some on how it can be applied to philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and metaphysics.

The Tapestry of Reason

Author: Amalia Amaya
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1782255176
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 601

Book Description
In recent years coherence theories of law and adjudication have been extremely influential in legal scholarship. These theories significantly advance the case for coherentism in law. Nonetheless, there remain a number of problems in the coherence theory in law. This ambitious new work makes the first concerted attempt to develop a coherence-based theory of legal reasoning, and in so doing addresses, or at least mitigates these problems. The book is organized in three parts. The first part provides a critical analysis of the main coherentist approaches to both normative and factual reasoning in law. The second part investigates the coherence theory in a number of fields that are relevant to law: coherence theories of epistemic justification, coherentist approaches to belief revision and theory-choice in science, coherence theories of practical and moral reasoning and coherence-based approaches to discourse interpretation. Taking this interdisciplinary analysis as a starting point, the third part develops a coherence-based model of legal reasoning. While this model builds upon the standard theory of legal reasoning, it also leads to rethinking some of the basic assumptions that characterize this theory, and suggests some lines along which it may be further developed. Thus, ultimately, the book not only improves upon the current state of coherence theory in law, but also contributes to the larger debate about how to articulate a theory of legal reasoning that results in better decision-making.

Deontic Logic in Computer Science

Author: Guido Governatori
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 364214182X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
This volume presents the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, DEON 2010, held in Fiesole, Italy, in July 2010. The 18 revised papers included in the volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. Topics covered include connections preferences, deontic logic and contrary-to-duties, the use of input/output logic, the study of norm dynamics, models of agents and institutions, argumentation, compliance, and various alternative analyses of deontic notions.