Logics for Rational Agency
Lecturer: Fenrong Liu
(Tsinghua University, China)
Rational agency is an important topic in philosophy, computer science and game theory. This course will introduce basic ideas from these areas, focusing on the following themes from recent research:
- Information update and dynamic epistemic logic.
We introduce dynamic epistemic logic as a basic paradigm and show how it successfully models varieties of information update. - Norm change and preference change.
Next, we explain how the same dynamic approach works for preference change and norm change including priority structure. - Logics for communities.
Moving up a level in social complexity, a community consists of agents that have individual knowledge but also interact with others via social relations. We will show how logical models help us see surprising features in the functioning of communities. - Reasoning about agent types.
Agents, whether individual or in communities, can be quite diverse. Knowing what type of agents one is interacting is clearly important. Going beyond the approach in our earlier topics, we will introduce languages for reasoning about agent types. In particular, we show how to use these to solve well-known (logic) puzzles in the literature.
Course slides: Lec 1 Lec 2 Lec 3 Lec 4 Lec 5
For basics of modal logic, see Blackburn, de Rijke and Venema, Modal Logic, Cambridge University Press, 2001
Suggested reading
- (for Lec 1) Jan A. Plaza 1989. Logics of public communications
- (for Lec 2) Fenrong Liu: Reasoning about Preference Dynamics, Springer-Verlag, 2011. Series: Synthese Library, Vol. 354.
- (for Lec 3) Johan van Benthem, Davide Grossi, and Fenrong Liu: Priority Structures in Deontic Logic, under submission, 2012.
- (for Lec 3) Johan van Benthem, Davide Grossi, and Fenrong Liu: Deontics = Betterness + Priority, in Guido Governatori and Giovanni Sartor eds. Deontic Logic in Computer Science, 10th International Conference, DEON 2010, Fiesole, Italy, July 7-9, 2010. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 6181, Springer. pp.50-65.
- (for Lec 4) Jeremy Seligman, Fenrong Liu and Patrick Girard: Logic in the Community, in M. Banerjee and A. Seth, editors, Proceedings of the 4th Indian Conference on Logic and its Applications,Volume 6521 of LNCS, pp. 178-188. Springer, 2011.
- (for Lec 4) J. Seligman, P. Girard, and F. Liu : Logical Dynamics of Belief Change in the Community, under submission, 2012.
- (for Lec 5) Fenrong Liu and Yanjing Wang: Reasoning about Agent Types and the hardest logic puzzle ever. To appear in Minds and Machines.
