Modal logics, originally conceived in philosophy, have recently found many applications in computer science, artificial intelligence, the foundations of mathematics, linguistics and other disciplines. Celebrated for their good computational behaviour, modal logics are used as effective formalisms for talking about time, space, knowledge, beliefs, actions, obligations, provability, etc. However, the nice computational properties can drastically change if we combine some of these formalisms into a many-dimensional system, say, to reason about knowledge bases developing in time or moving...

We are happy to present the second volume of the Handbook of Defeasible Reasoning and Uncertainty Management Systems. Uncertainty pervades the real world and must therefore be addressed by every system that attempts to represent reality. The representation of un- certainty is a major concern of philosophers, logicians, artificial intelligence researchers and computer sciencists, psychologists, statisticians, economists and engineers. The present Handbook volumes provide frontline coverage of this area. This Handbook was produced in the style of previous handbook series like the Handbook of...

Belief change is an emerging field of artificial intelligence and information science dedicated to the dynamics of information and the present book provides a state-of-the-art picture of its formal foundations. It deals with the addition, deletion and combination of pieces of information and, more generally, with the revision, updating and fusion of knowledge bases. The book offers an extensive coverage of, and seeks to reconcile, two traditions in the kinematics of belief that often ignore each other - the symbolic and the numerical (often probabilistic) approaches. Moreover, the work...

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...

Recent years have been blessed with an abundance of logical systems, arising from a multitude of applications. A logic can be characterised in many different ways. Traditionally, a logic is presented via the following three components: 1. an intuitive non-formal motivation, perhaps tie it in to some application area 2. a semantical interpretation 3. a proof theoretical formulation. There are several types of proof theoretical methodologies, Hilbert style, Gentzen style, goal directed style, labelled deductive system style, and so on. The tableau methodology, invented in the 1950s by Beth and...

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...

This book contains leading survey papers on the various aspects of Abduction, both logical and numerical approaches. Abduction is central to all areas of applied reasoning, including artificial intelligence, philosophy of science, machine learning, data mining and decision theory, as well as logic itself.

Reasoning under uncertainty is always based on a specified language or for- malism, including its particular syntax and semantics, but also on its associated inference mechanism. In the present volume of the handbook the last aspect, the algorithmic aspects of uncertainty calculi are presented. Theory has suffi- ciently advanced to unfold some generally applicable fundamental structures and methods. On the other hand, particular features of specific formalisms and ap- proaches to uncertainty of course still influence strongly the computational meth- ods to be used. Both general as well as...

It is with great pleasure that we are presenting to the community the second edition of this extraordinary handbook. It has been over 15 years since the publication of the first edition and there have been great changes in the landscape of philosophical logic since then. The first edition has proved invaluable to generations of students and researchers in formal philosophy and language, as well as to consumers of logic in many applied areas. The main logic article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1999 has described the first edition as 'the best starting point for exploring any of the topics...

It is with great pleasure that we are presenting to the community the second edition of this extraordinary handbook. It has been over 15 years since the publication of the first edition and there have been great changes in the landscape of philosophical logic since then. The first edition has proved invaluable to generations of students and researchers in formal philosophy and language, as weIl as to consumers of logic in many applied areas. The main logic artiele in the Encyelopaedia Britannica 1999 has described the first edition as 'the best starting point for exploring any of the topics...