Yanjing Wang

This paper shows how propositional dynamic logic can be interpreted as a logic for multi-agent belief revision. For that we revise and extend the logic of communication and change of [9]. Like LCC, our logic uses PDL as a base epistemic language. Unlike LCC, we start out from agent plausibilities, add their converses, and build knowledge and belief operators from these with the PDL constructs. We extend the update mechanism of LCC to an update mechanism that handles belief change as relation substitution, and we show that the update part of this logic is more expressive than either that of LCC or that of doxastic/epistemic PDL with a belief change modality. It is shown that the properties of knowledge and belief are preserved under any update, and that the logic is complete. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Security properties naturally combine temporal aspects of protocols with aspects of knowledge of the agents. Since BAN-logic, there have been several initiatives and attempts to incorpórate epistemics into the analysis of security protocols. In this paper, we give an overview of work in the field and present it in a unified perspective, with comparisons on technical subtleties that have been employed in different approaches. Also, we study to which degree the use of epistemics is essential for the analysis of security protocols. We look for formal conditions under which knowledge modalities can bring extra expressive power to pure temporal languages. On the other hand, we discuss the cost of the epistemic operators in terms of model checking complexity

In the literature, different axiomatizations of Public Announcement Logic (PAL) have been proposed. Most of these axiomatizations share a “core set” of the so-called “reduction axioms”. In this paper, by designing non-standard Kripke semantics for the language of PAL, we show that the proof system based on this core set of axioms does not completely axiomatize PAL without additional axioms and rules. In fact, many of the intuitive axioms and rules we took for granted could not be derived from the core set. Moreover, we also propose and advocate an alternative yet meaningful axiomatization of PAL without the reduction axioms. The completeness is proved directly by a detour method using the canonical model where announcements are treated as merely labels for modalities as in normal modal logics. This new axiomatization and its completeness proof may sharpen our understanding of PAL and can be adapted to other dynamic epistemic logics

In this article, we present an attempt to reconcile intellectualism and the anti-intellectualist ability account of knowledge-how by reducing “S knows how to F” to, roughly speaking, “S knows that she has the ability to F demonstrated by a concrete way w.” More precisely, “S has a certain ability” is further formalized as the proposition that S can guarantee a certain goal by a concrete way w of some method under some precondition. Having the knowledge of our own ability, we can plan our future actions accordingly, which would not be possible by merely having the ability without knowing it, and this pinpoints the crucial difference between knowledge-how and ability. Our semi-formal account avoids most of the objections to both intellectualism and the anti-intellectualist ability account, and provides a multistage learning process of knowledge-how, which reveals various subtleties.

In this paper, we propose a decidable single-agent modal logic for reasoning about goal-directed “knowing how”, based on ideas from linguistics, philosophy, modal logic, and automated planning in AI. We first define a modal language to express “I know how to guarantee \ given \” with a semantics based not on standard epistemic models but on labeled transition systems that represent the agent’s knowledge of his own abilities. The semantics is inspired by conformant planning in AI. A sound and complete proof system is given to capture valid reasoning patterns, which highlights the compositional nature of “knowing how”. The logical language is further extended to handle knowing how to achieve a goal while maintaining other conditions.