The mid-1980s saw the discovery of logical tools that make it possible to model changes in belief and knowledge in entirely new ways. These logical tools turned out to be applicable to both human beliefs and to the contents of databases. Philosophers, logicians, and computer scientists have contributed to making this interdisciplinary field one of the most exciting in the cognitive scientists - and one that is expanding rapidly.
This, the first textbook in the new area, contains both discursive chapters with a minimum of formalism and formal chapters in which proofs and proof methods...

The mid-1980s saw the discovery of logical tools that make it possible to model changes in belief and knowledge in entirely new ways. These logical tools turned out to be applicable to both human beliefs and to the contents of databases. Philosophers, logicians, and computer scientists have contributed to making this interdisciplinary field one of the most exciting in the cognitive scientists - and one that is expanding rapidly.
This, the first textbook in the new area, contains both discursive chapters with a minimum of formalism and formal chapters in which proofs and proof methods...

Reasoning is an integral part of intelligent systems in fields like databases, logic programming, robotics, knowledge engineering, human/computer interfaces, programming environments, etc. In reality any such system has to cope with a changing world and its dynamics. Hence it is of great importance that reasoning must account for coping with change in order to be truly useful in practice.
The book comprises several contributions to current ways of approaching this problem. On the one hand it surveys and synthesizes recent research work, while on the other hand new research results are...

The notion of negation is one of the central logical notions. It has been studied since antiquity and has been subjected to thorough investigations in the development of philosophical logic, linguistics, artificial intelligence and logic programming. The properties of negation-in combination with those of other logical operations and structural features of the deducibility relation-serve as gateways among logical systems. Therefore negation plays an important role in selecting logical systems for particular applications. At the moment negation is a 'hot topic', and there is an urgent need for...

Fuzzy Sets, Logics and Reasoning about Knowledge reports recent results concerning the genuinely logical aspects of fuzzy sets in relation to algebraic considerations, knowledge representation and commonsense reasoning. It takes a state-of-the-art look at multiple-valued and fuzzy set-based logics, in an artificial intelligence perspective. The papers, all of which are written by leading contributors in their respective fields, are grouped into four sections.
The first section presents a panorama of many-valued logics in connection with fuzzy sets. The second explores algebraic...

Time is a fascinating subject and has long since captured mankind's imagination, from the ancients to modern man, both adult and child alike. It has been studied across a wide range of disciplines, from the natural sciences to philosophy and logic. Today, thirty plus years since Prior's work in laying out foundations for temporal logic, and two decades on from Pnueli's seminal work applying of temporal logic in specification and verification of computer programs, temporal logic has a strong and thriving international research community within the broad disciplines of computer science and...

Labelled deduction is an approach to providing frameworks for presenting and using different logics in a uniform and natural way by enriching the language of a logic with additional information of a semantic proof-theoretical nature.
Labelled deduction systems often possess attractive properties, such as modularity in the way that families of related logics are presented, parameterised proofs of metatheoretic properties, and ease of mechanisability. It is thus not surprising that labelled deduction has been applied to problems in computer science, AI, mathematical logic, cognitive...

From the very beginning of their investigation of human reasoning, philosophers have identified two other forms of reasoning, besides deduction, which we now call abduction and induction. Deduction is now fairly well understood, but abduction and induction have eluded a similar level of understanding. The papers collected here address the relationship between abduction and induction and their possible integration. The approach is sometimes philosophical, sometimes that of pure logic, and some papers adopt the more task-oriented approach of AI.
The book will command the attention of...

Intellectics' seeks to understand the functions, structure and operation of the human intellect and to test artificial systems to see the extent to which they can substitute or complement such functions. The word itself was introduced in the early 1980s by Wolfgang Bibel to describe the united fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.
The book collects papers by distinguished researchers, colleagues and former students of Bibel's, all of whom have worked together with him, and who present their work to him here to mark his 60th birthday. The papers discuss significant...

We welcome Volume 20, Formal Aspects of Context. Context has always been recognised as strongly relevant to models in language, philosophy, logic and artifi- cial intelligence. In recent years theoretical advances in these areas and especially in logic have accelerated the study of context in the international community. An annual conference is held and many researchers have come to realise that many of the old puzzles should be reconsidered with proper attention to context. The volume editors and contributors are from among the most active front-line researchers in the area and the contents...