Andreas Herzig

In this paper we investigate a logic for modelling individual and collective acceptances that is called acceptance logic. The logic has formulae of the form $A_{Gx} \phi $ reading 'if the agents in the set of agents G identify themselves with institution x then they together accept that φ'. We extend acceptance logic by two kinds of dynamic modal operators. The first kind are public announcements of the form x!ψ, meaning that the agents learn that ψ is the case in context x. Formulae of the form [x!ψ]φ mean that φ is the case after every possible occurrence of the event x!ψ. Semantically, public announcements diminish the space of possible worlds accepted by agents and sets of agents. The announcement of ψ in context x makes all ¬ψ-Worlds inaccessible to the agents in such context. In this logic, if the set of accessible worlds of G in context x is empty, then the agents in G are not functioning as members of x, they do not identify themselves with x. In such a situation the agents in G may have the possibility to join x. To model this we introduce here a second kind of dynamic modal operator of acceptance shifting of the form G:x↑ψ. The latter means that the agents in G shift (change) their acceptances in order to accept ψ in context x. Semantically, they make ψ-worlds accessible to G in the context x, which means that, after such operation, G is functioning as member of x (unless there are no ψ-worlds). We show that the resulting logic has a complete axiomatization in terms of reduction axioms for both dynamic operators. In the paper we also show how the logic of acceptance and its dynamic extension can be used to model some interesting aspects of judgement aggregation. In particular, we apply our logic of acceptance to a classical scenario in judgment aggregation, the so-called 'doctrinal paradox' or 'discursive dilemma' (Pettit, Philosophical Issues 11: 268-299, 2001; Kornhauser and Sager, Yale Law Journal 96: 82-117, 1986)

Near the end of 2015, Luis Fariñas del Cerro officially retired as directeur de recherche in the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and became an Emeritus researcher of the CNRS. The present special issue is a Festschrift in his honour to celebrate Luis’s achievements in science, both as an outstanding scholar as well as a remarkable and highly successful organiser, administrator and leader in science and technology policy and management, in particular as the founder of the Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics. The issue contains 13 scientific contributions by 32 authors, among them Luis’s colleagues, former students and friends. Preceding versions of these papers were presented at the international workshop ‘Logical Reasoning and Computation’ that was held at IRITInstitut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, on 3–4 March 2016. The present introduction contains a short scientific biography describing the many different areas of logic and computation where Luis contributed significant advances.

We investigate a series of logics that allow to reason about agents' actions, abilities, and their knowledge about actions and abilities. These logics include Pauly's Coalition Logic CL, Alternating-time Temporal Logic ATL, the logic of ‘seeing-to-it-that' (STIT), and epistemic extensions thereof. While complete axiomatizations of CL and ATL exist, only the fragment of the STIT language without temporal operators and without groups has been axiomatized by Xu (called Ldm). We start by recalling a simplification of the Ldm that has been proposed in previous work, together with an alternative semantics in terms of standard Kripke models. We extend that semantics to groups via a principle of superadditivity, and give a sound and complete axiomatization that we call Ldm G. We then add a temporal ‘next' operator to Ldm G, and again give a sound and complete axiomatization. We show that Ldm G subsumes coalition logic CL. Finally, we extend these logics with standard S5 knowledge operators. This enables us to express that agents see to something under uncertainty about the present state or uncertainty about which action is being taken. We focus on the epistemic extension of X-Ldm G, noted E-X-Ldm G. In accordance with established terminology in the planning community, we call this extension of X-Ldm G the conformant X-Ldm G. The conformant X-Ldm G enables us to express that agents are able to perform a uniform strategy. We conclude that in that respect, our epistemic extension of X-Ldm G is better suited than epistemic extensions of ATL.

In public announcement logic it is assumed that all agents pay attention to the announcement. Weaker observational conditions can be modelled in action model logic. In this work, we propose a version of public announcement logic wherein it is encoded in the states of the epistemic model which agents pay attention to the announcement. This logic is called attention-based announcement logic. We give an axiomatization of the logic and prove that complexity of satisfiability is the same as that of public announcement logic, and therefore lower than that of action model logic. An attention-based announcement can also be described as an action model. We extend our logic by integrating attention change. Finally, we add the notion of common belief to the language, we exploit this to formalize the concept of joint attention, that has been widely discussed in the philosophical and cognitive science literature, and we provide a corresponding axiomatization. This axiomatization also employs the auxiliary notion of attention-based relativized common belief.

Important decisions are often based on a distributed process of information processing, from a knowledge base that is itself distributed among agents. The simplest such situation is that where a decision-maker seeks the recommendations of experts. Because experts may have vested interests in the consequences of their recommendations, decision-makers usually seek the advice of experts they trust. Trust, however, is a commodity that is usually built through repeated face time and social interaction and thus cannot easily be built in a global world where we have immediate internet access to a vast pool of experts. In this article, we integrate findings from experimental psychology and formal tools from Artificial Intelligence to offer a preliminary roadmap for solving the problem of trust in this computer-mediated environment. We conclude the article by considering a diverse array of extended applications of such a solution.

Public announcement logic is an extension of multiagent epistemic logic with dynamic operators to model the informational consequences of announcements to the entire group of agents. We propose an extension of public announcement logic with a dynamic modal operator that expresses what is true after any announcement: after which , does it hold that Kφ? We give various semantic results and show completeness for a Hilbert-style axiomatization of this logic. There is a natural generalization to a logic for arbitrary events

We propose two alternatives to Xu’s axiomatization of Chellas’s STIT. The first one simplifies its presentation, and also provides an alternative axiomatization of the deliberative STIT. The second one starts from the idea that the historic necessity operator can be defined as an abbreviation of operators of agency, and can thus be eliminated from the logic of Chellas’s STIT. The second axiomatization also allows us to establish that the problem of deciding the satisfiability of a STIT formula without temporal operators is NP-complete in the single-agent case, and is NEXPTIME-complete in the multiagent case, both for the deliberative and Chellas’s STIT.

In this paper, we provide a logical formalization of the emotion triggering process and of its relationship with mental attitudes, as described in Ortony, Clore, and Collins’s theory. We argue that modal logics are particularly adapted to represent agents’ mental attitudes and to reason about them, and use a specific modal logic that we call Logic of Emotions in order to provide logical definitions of all but two of their 22 emotions. While these definitions may be subject to debate, we show that they allow to reason about emotions and to draw interesting conclusions from the theory.

We study the extension of public announcement logic PAL by public assignments, which we call PALA. Just as in the case of PAL, the standard procedure for deciding PALA validity, i.e. the use of so-called reduction axioms to translate PALA formulae into formulae in epistemic logic EL, may lead to exponential growth. In this paper, we show that such a price is not mandatory, for we provide a polynomial translation of PALA into EL. This is based on abbreviations of subformulae by new propositional letters. Such optimal translation also enables us to show the computational complexity of the problem of deciding PALA validity, which turns out to be coNP-complete in the single-agent case and PSPACE-complete in the multiagent case.

In public announcement logic it is assumed that all agents pay attention to the announcement. Weaker observational conditions can be modelled in action model logic. In this work, we propose a version of public announcement logic wherein it is encoded in the states of the epistemic model which agents pay attention to the announcement. This logic is called attention-based announcement logic. We give an axiomatization of the logic and prove that complexity of satisfiability is the same as that of public announcement logic, and therefore lower than that of action model logic. An attention-based announcement can also be described as an action model. We extend our logic by integrating attention change. Finally, we add the notion of common belief to the language, we exploit this to formalize the concept of joint attention, that has been widely discussed in the philosophical and cognitive science literature, and we provide a corresponding axiomatization. This axiomatization also employs the auxiliary notion of attention-based relativized common belief.