Logic, Convention, and Common Knowledge

Logic, Convention, and Common Knowledge PDF Author: Paul F. Syverson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description

Logic, Convention, and Common Knowledge

Logic, Convention, and Common Knowledge PDF Author: Paul F. Syverson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description


Logic, Convention, and Common Knowledge

Logic, Convention, and Common Knowledge PDF Author: Paul F. Syverson
Publisher: Stanford Univ Center for the Study
ISBN: 9781575863924
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
One of the fundamental theses of this book is that logical consequence and logical truth are not simply given, but arise as conventions among the users of logic. Thus Syverson explains convention within a game-theoretic framework, as a kind of equilibrium between the strategies of players in a game where they share common knowledge of events—a revisiting of Lewis's Convention that argues that convention can be reasonably treated as coordination equilibria. Most strikingly, a realistic solution is provided for Gray's classic coordination problem, wherein two generals can only communicate with each other through unreliable means.

Reasoning About Knowledge

Reasoning About Knowledge PDF Author: Ronald Fagin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262562003
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
Reasoning about knowledge—particularly the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each other's knowledge—was once the exclusive province of philosophers and puzzle solvers. More recently, this type of reasoning has been shown to play a key role in a surprising number of contexts, from understanding conversations to the analysis of distributed computer algorithms. Reasoning About Knowledge is the first book to provide a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory. It brings eight years of work by the authors into a cohesive framework for understanding and analyzing reasoning about knowledge that is intuitive, mathematically well founded, useful in practice, and widely applicable. The book is almost completely self-contained and should be accessible to readers in a variety of disciplines, including computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, and game theory. Each chapter includes exercises and bibliographic notes.

Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge PDF Author: W. Russell Neuman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616117X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media. For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience. At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it—Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.

Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge

Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge PDF Author: Ronald Fagin
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 1483214532
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge contains the proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge (TARK 1994) held in Pacific Grove, California, on March 13-16, 1994. The conference provided a forum for discussing the theoretical aspects of reasoning about knowledge and tackled topics ranging from the logic of iterated belief revision and backwards forward induction to information acquisition from multi-agent resources, infinitely epistemic logic, and coherent belief revision in games. Comprised of 23 chapters, this book begins with a review of situation calculus and a solution to the frame problem, along with the use of a regression method for reasoning about the effect of actions. A novel programming language for high-level robotic control is described, along with a knowledge-based framework for belief change. Subsequent chapters deal with consistent belief reasoning in the presence of inconsistency; an epistemic logic of situations; an axiomatic approach to the logical omniscience problem; and an epistemic proof system for parallel processes. Inductive learning, knowledge asymmetries, and convention are also examined. This monograph will be of interest to both students and practitioners in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer science.

Language in Action

Language in Action PDF Author: Johan van Benthem
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262720243
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Language in Action demonstrates the viability of mathematical research into the foundations of categorial grammar, a topic at the border between logic and linguistics. Since its initial publication it has become the classic work in the foundations of categorial grammar. A new introduction to this paperback edition updates the open research problems and records relevant results through pointers to the literature. Van Benthem presents the categorial processing of syntax and semantics as a central component in a more general dynamic logic of information flow, in tune with computational developments in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Using the paradigm of categorial grammar, he describes the substructural logics driving the dynamics of natural language syntax and semantics. This is a general type-theoretic approach that lends itself easily to proof-theoretic and semantic studies in tandem with standard logic. The emphasis is on a broad landscape of substructural categorial logics and their proof-theoretical and semantic peculiarities. This provides a systematic theory for natural language understanding, admitting of significant mathematical results. Moreover, the theory makes possible dynamic interpretations that view natural languages as programming formalisms for various cognitive activities.

Impossible?

Impossible? PDF Author: Julian Havil
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400829674
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
In Nonplussed!, popular-math writer Julian Havil delighted readers with a mind-boggling array of implausible yet true mathematical paradoxes. Now Havil is back with Impossible?, another marvelous medley of the utterly confusing, profound, and unbelievable—and all of it mathematically irrefutable. Whenever Forty-second Street in New York is temporarily closed, traffic doesn't gridlock but flows more smoothly—why is that? Or consider that cities that build new roads can experience dramatic increases in traffic congestion—how is this possible? What does the game show Let's Make A Deal reveal about the unexpected hazards of decision-making? What can the game of cricket teach us about the surprising behavior of the law of averages? These are some of the counterintuitive mathematical occurrences that readers encounter in Impossible? Havil ventures further than ever into territory where intuition can lead one astray. He gathers entertaining problems from probability and statistics along with an eclectic variety of conundrums and puzzlers from other areas of mathematics, including classics of abstract math like the Banach-Tarski paradox. These problems range in difficulty from easy to highly challenging, yet they can be tackled by anyone with a background in calculus. And the fascinating history and personalities associated with many of the problems are included with their mathematical proofs. Impossible? will delight anyone who wants to have their reason thoroughly confounded in the most astonishing and unpredictable ways.

Epistemic Game Theory and Logic

Epistemic Game Theory and Logic PDF Author: Paul Weirich
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3038424226
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Epistemic Game Theory and Modal Logic" that was published in Games

Shadows of Syntax

Shadows of Syntax PDF Author: Jared Warren
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190086173
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
What is the source of logical and mathematical truth? This volume revitalizes conventionalism as an answer to this question. Conventionalism takes logical and mathematical truth to have their source in linguistic conventions. This was an extremely popular view in the early 20th century, but it was never worked out in detail and is now almost universally rejected in mainstream philosophical circles. In Shadows of Syntax, Jared Warren offers the first book-length treatment and defense of a combined conventionalist theory of logic and mathematics. He argues that our conventions, in the form of syntactic rules of language use, are perfectly suited to explain the truth, necessity, and a priority of logical and mathematical claims. In Part I, Warren explains exactly what conventionalism amounts to and what linguistic conventions are. Part II develops an unrestricted inferentialist theory of the meanings of logical constants that leads to logical conventionalism. This conventionalist theory is elaborated in discussions of logical pluralism, the epistemology of logic, and of the influential objections that led to the historical demise of conventionalism. Part III aims to extend conventionalism from logic to mathematics. Unlike logic, mathematics involves both ontological commitments and a rich notion of truth that cannot be generated by any algorithmic process. To address these issues Warren develops conventionalist-friendly but independently plausible theories of both metaontology and mathematical truth. Finally, Part IV steps back to address big picture worries and meta-worries about conventionalism. This book develops and defends a unified theory of logic and mathematics according to which logical and mathematical truths are reflections of our linguistic rules, mere shadows of syntax.

Second Philosophy

Second Philosophy PDF Author: Penelope Maddy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199273669
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
Many philosophers these days consider themselves naturalists, but it's doubtful any two of them intend the same position by the term. In this book, Penelope Maddy describes and practises a particularly austere form of naturalism called 'Second Philosophy'. Without a definitive criterion for what counts as 'science' and what doesn't, Second Philosophy can't be specified directly - 'trust only the methods of science!' or some such thing - so Maddy proceeds instead by illustratingthe behaviours of an idealized inquirer she calls the 'Second Philosopher'. This Second Philosopher begins from perceptual common sense and progresses from there to systematic observation, active experimentation, theory formation and testing, working all the while to assess, correct and improve hermethods as she goes. Second Philosophy is then the result of the Second Philosopher's investigations.Maddy delineates the Second Philosopher's approach by tracing her reactions to various familiar skeptical and transcendental views (Descartes, Kant, Carnap, late Putnam, van Fraassen), comparing her methods to those of other self-described naturalists (especially Quine), and examining a prominent contemporary debate (between disquotationalists and correspondence theorists in the theory of truth) to extract a properly second-philosophical line of thought. She then undertakes to practise SecondPhilosophy in her reflections on the ground of logical truth, the methodology, ontology and epistemology of mathematics, and the general prospects for metaphysics naturalized.