Over the past decade, rational agency has come to be recognised as a central theme in artificial intelligence. Drawing upon research on rational action and agency in philosophy, logic, game theory, decision theory, and the philosophy of language, this volume represents an advanced, comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of the field of rational agency as it stands today. It covers the philosophical foundations of rational agency, logical and decision-theoretic approaches to rational agency, multi-agent aspects of rational agency (including speech acts, joint plans, and cooperation protocols),...

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...

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...

Goal Directed Proof Theory presents a uniform and coherent methodology for automated deduction in non-classical logics, the relevance of which to computer science is now widely acknowledged. The methodology is based on goal-directed provability. It is a generalization of the logic programming style of deduction, and it is particularly favourable for proof search. The methodology is applied for the first time in a uniform way to a wide range of non-classical systems, covering intuitionistic, intermediate, modal and substructural logics. The book can also be used as an...

Free logic - i.e., logic free of existential presuppositions in general and with respect to singular terms in particular- began to come into its own as a field of research in the 1950s. As is the case with so many developments in Western philosophy, its roots can be traced back to ancient Greek philo- sophy. It is only during the last fifty years, however, that it has become well established as a branch of modern logic. The name of Karel Lambert is most closely connected with this development: he gave it its name and its profile as a well defined field of research. After a development of...

This is a monograph about logic. Specifically, it presents the mathe- matical theory of the logic of bunched implications, BI: I consider Bl's proof theory, model theory and computation theory. However, the mono- graph is also about informatics in a sense which I explain. Specifically, it is about mathematical models of resources and logics for reasoning about resources. I begin with an introduction which presents my (background) view of logic from the point of view of informatics, paying particular attention to three logical topics which have arisen from the development of logic within...