Heinrich Wansing

A prominent issue in mainstream epistemology is the controversy about doxastic obligations and doxastic voluntarism. In the present paper it is argued that this discussion can benefit from forging links with formal epistemology, namely the combined modal logic of belief, agency, and obligation. A stit-theory-based semantics for deontic doxastic logic is suggested, and it is claimed that this is helpful and illuminating in dealing with the mentioned intricate and important problems from mainstream epistemology. Moreover, it is argued that this linking is of mutual benefit. The discussion of doxastic voluntarism directs the attention of doxastic logicians to the notion of belief formation and thus to dynamic aspects of beliefs that have hitherto been neglected. The development of a formal language and semantics for ascriptions of belief formation may contribute to clarifying the contents and the implications of voluntaristic claims. A simple observation concerning other-agent nestings of stit-operators, for instance, may help illuminating the notions of making belief and responsibility for beliefs of others. In this way, stit-theory may serve as a bridge between mainstream and formal epistemology.

Although it is not younger than other areas of non-classical logic, paraconsistent logic has received full recognition only in recent years, largely due to the work of, among others, Newton da Costa, Graham Priest, Diderik Batens, and Jerzy Perzanowski. A logical system Λ is paraconsistent if there is a set of Λ-formulas Δ ∪ {A} such that in Λ one may derive from Δ both A and its negation, and the deductive closure of Δ with respect to Λ is different from the set of all formulas. If from Δ one may derive a formula and its negation, Δ is said to be syntactically inconsistent. But is every syntactically inconsistent set of formulas contradictory? In classical logic and many non-classical logics, every syntactically inconsistent set is unsatisfiable, that is, semantically inconsistent. If contradictoriness means semantical inconsistency, there is, up to logical equivalence, only one contradiction. In paraconsistent logics, there are usually many non-equivalent formulas representing the semantically unique contradiction in a non-paraconsistent logic. So when is a formula the contradiction of another formula, and, moreover, how does the notion of contradiction relate to the notions of contrariety and negation?

Various four- and three-valued modal propositional logics are studied. The basic systems are modal extensions BK and BS4 of Belnap and Dunn's four-valued logic of firstdegree entailment. Three-valued extensions of BK and BS4 are considered as well. These logics are introduced semantically by means of relational models with two distinct evaluation relations, one for verification and the other for falsification. Axiom systems are defined and shown to be sound and complete with respect to the relational semantics and with respect to twist structures over modal algebras. Sound and complete tableau calculi are presented as well. Moreover, a number of constructive non-modal logics with strong negation are faithfully embedded into BS4, into its three-valued extension B3S4, or into temporal BS4, BtS4. These logics include David Nelson's three-valued logic N3, the four-valued logic N4 bottom, the connexive logic C, and several extensions of bi-intuitionistic logic by strong negation.

Two new first-order paraconsistent logics with De Morgan-type negations and co-implication, called symmetric paraconsistent logic (SPL) and dual paraconsistent logic (DPL), are introduced as Gentzen-type sequent calculi. The logic SPL is symmetric in the sense that the rule of contraposition is admissible in cut-free SPL. By using this symmetry property, a simpler cut-free sequent calculus for SPL is obtained. The logic DPL is not symmetric, but it has the duality principle. Simple semantics for SPL and DPL are introduced, and the completeness theorems with respect to these semantics are proved. The cut-elimination theorems for SPL and DPL are proved in two ways: One is a syntactical way which is based on the embedding theorems of SPL and DPL into Gentzen’s LK, and the other is a semantical way which is based on the completeness theorems.

Many logical systems are such that the addition of Prior's binary connective tonk to them leads to triviality, see [1, 8]. Since tonk is given by some introduction and elimination rules in natural deduction or sequent rules in Gentzen's sequent calculus, the unwanted effects of adding tonk show that some kind of restriction has to be imposed on the acceptable operational inferences rules, in particular if these rules are regarded as definitions of the operations concerned. In this paper, a number of simple observations is made showing that the unwanted phenomenon exemplified by tonk in some logics also occurs in contexts in which tonk is acceptable. In fact, in any non-trivial context, the acceptance of arbitrary introduction rules for logical operations permits operations leading to triviality. Connectives that in all non-trivial contexts lead to triviality will be called non-trivially trivializing connectives

Imagination has recently attracted considerable attention from epistemologists and is recognized as a source of belief and even knowledge. One remarkable feature of imagination is that it is often and typically agentive: agents decide to imagine. In cases in which imagination results in a belief, the agentiveness of imagination may be taken to give rise to indirect doxastic control and epistemic responsibility. This observation calls for a proper understanding of agentive imagination. In particular, it calls for the development of a semantics of imagination ascriptions. In the present paper an earlier suggestion by Ilkka Niiniluoto for a logic of imagination is considered. This proposal does not capture the agentive nature of imagination, and an alternative semantics is suggested. The new semantics combines the modal logic of agency with the neighbourhood semantics from alethic modal logic

In this paper non-normal worlds semantics is presented as a basic, general, and unifying approach to epistemic logic. The semantical framework of non-normal worlds is compared to the model theories of several logics for knowledge and belief that were recently developed in Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is shown that every model for implicit and explicit belief (Levesque), for awareness, general awareness, and local reasoning (Fagin and Halpern), and for awareness and principles (van der Hoek and Meyer) induces a non-normal worlds model validating precisely the same formulas (of the language in question).

Since it is desirable to be able to talk about rational agents forming attitudes toward their concrete agency, we suggest an introduction of doxastic, volitional, and intentional modalities into the multi-agent logic of deliberatively seeing to it that, dstit logic. These modalities are borrowed from the well-known BDI (belief-desire-intention) logic. We change the semantics of the belief and desire operators from a relational one to a monotonic neighbourhood semantic in order to handle ascriptions of conflicting but not inconsistent beliefs and desires as being satisfiable. The proposed bdi-stit logic is defined with respect to branching time frames, and it is shown that this logic is a generalization of a bdi logic based on branching time possible worlds frames (but without temporal operators) and dstit logic. The new bdi-stit logic generalizes bdi and dstit logic in the sense that for any model of bdi or dstit logic, there is an equivalent bdi-stit model

Curry’s paradox is well known. The original version employed a conditional connective, and is not forthcoming if the conditional does not satisfy contraction. A newer version uses a validity predicate, instead of a conditional, and is not forthcoming if validity does not satisfy structural contraction. But there is a variation of the paradox which uses “external validity”. And since external validity contracts, one might expect the appropriate version of the Curry paradox to be inescapable. In this paper we show that this is not the case. We consider two ways of formalising the notion of external validity, and show that in both of these the paradox is not forthcoming without the appropriate forms of contraction