- ... formally.1.1
- Sometimes the term ``epistemic
logic'' is reserved for the logic of knowledge, and ``doxastic logic''
is used to denote that of belief. In the present thesis we shall use
the term ``epistemic logic'' in the wider sense.
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- ... attitudes.1.2
- See
[FG97] for a recent discussion of the agent
concept. McCarthy ([McC79]) discusses the problem of
ascribing human-like qualities to artificial entities.
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- ...
reasoning1.3
- Some authors use the term ``bounded rationality''
to express the idea that an agent cannot compute everything he could
if his resources were unlimited. That term is somewhat misleading, so
I shall use ``resource boundedness'' throughout the thesis.
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- ... formulae.1.4
- We avoid using the word ``intensional''
because epistemic concepts are not intensional in the sense of Carnap
[Car47]. Those concepts are -- as Cresswell pointed out
([Cre80] -- hyper-intensional.
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- ...''2.1
- The truth values of epistemic statements also
depend on other parameters such as time, location, context. However,
it is a common practice in epistemic logic to take only agents into
consideration and to assume certain standard values for the other
parameters, i.e., the sentences are interpreted relative to the
``current'' situation. If only one agent is considered then even the
reference to the agent is omitted.
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- ...
belief.2.2
- It should be noted, however, that in AI terminology,
no sharp distinction between knowledge and belief as in philosophy is
made: knowledge is not required to be true. Unless stated otherwise I
shall follow this terminology and use the term ``knowledge'' in the
wider sense.
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- ... validity2.3
- Some formulae
containing the knowledge operators are always valid, but they are not
genuine epistemic statements: a formula like
does not say anything about an agent's reasoning
capacities. Counterexamples to the commonly assumed epistemic closure
principles are presented in
[Len78], [Hal95], among others.
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- ... reasoning2.4
- If the possible-worlds semantics
is adapted for modeling motivational concepts such as goals, desires,
or intentions, then the resulting logics suffer from a similar
problem: if an agent intends to do something then he intends all
logical consequences of his intention. This is not a desirable
property: one might intends to go to the dentist without having an
intention of suffering pain, although the latter is a necessary
consequence of the former. This problem is known as the side-effect
problem (cf. [Bra90]).
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- ...
consequence3.1
- Normal modal logics are systems which are closed
under the (knowledge) necessitation rule (NEC), and monotonic
modal logics are closed under the monotony rule (MON). In the
context of modal logic, the term ``monotonic'' means that the rule
(MON) holds. This usage should not be confused with the
terminology of non-monotonic reasoning research. Consult appendix
A for a brief overview of modal systems weaker than the
minimal normal modal logic K.
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- ... knowledge3.2
- Strictly
speaking, Levesque's logic of ``explicit'' belief ([Lev84])
still describes a kind of implicit belief, because what is defined to
be explicit belief of an agent in that model is not immediately
available to the agent. The same criticism applies to other models
which intend to model explicit belief but still fall prey to some form
of logical omniscience, e.g., Konolige's deduction model
[Kon86], or the notion of algorithmic knowledge of Halpern
et. al. ([HMV94]).
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- ....4.1
- Instead of
we could also introduce a binary
operator
with the
interpretation ``in a state where the agent knows , after
the application of the rule he may know ''. However, the
former notation is closer to that of dynamic logic, whereas the latter
one does not offer any obvious advantage.
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- ... respectively.4.2
- In dynamic logic another form of
iteration is considered, viz. the one that allows for running a
program zero time, denoted by . But one can easily extend dynamic
logic to include non-zero iteration as well.
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- ...
actions4.3
- One may ask how seriously one can take introspection
as action. Well, it is true that introspection may differ from the
``genuine'' reasoning actions in some aspects. However, the
differences are not quite significant. It seems reasonable to treat
introspection as test of a certain kind, which is used by the agents
to reason about their own mental state.
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- ...
constraints5.1
- Among the relevant resources, time is the most
important one, so we shall focus on that factor and try to model time
constraints. The other resources can be modeled in a similar manner,
as I shall show later.
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- ...
units5.2
- The sentence ``agent needs time units to
compute '' does not imply that will know
at time , where is the current time. If the agent
is not asked to provide the information , then he has no
reason to waste his resources in order to find a useless answer. The
aspect of goal-directedness is implicit in our concept of knowledge.
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- ... knows5.3
- An agent
may in fact have some relevance criteria to narrow down the search
space, so he actually tries to infer from the relevant part of
his knowledge. However, it is typically not possible to restrict the
attention to the formula
, because
the knowledge that can be derived from the intermediate
results
can usually be obtained only after a
proof has been constructed.
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- ... class5.4
- The computation speed of an
agent depends on several factors, e.g., the number of inferences he
can perform per time unit, the quality of his algorithms, his ability
to classify problems and to select suitable algorithms to solve
certain problems, etc. One a time frame has been fixed (i.e., when
time units are defined,) the speed can be determined empirically.
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