Work on reasoning about knowledge has been carried out by researchers in a number of different fieIds: philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, economics, and theoretical computer science, among others. This conference represents the first attempt to bring together researchers from all these areas to discuss issues of mutual interest. In order to maintain a small workshop-like atmosphere, we decided to hold the conference at the Asilomar Conference Center in Monterey, California, and limit the number of attendees to a few invited people and authors of accepted papers.
Interest in the conference far exceeded all my expectations. I was deluged by requests for further information from all parts of the world. Ninety-eight papers were submitted in response to a call for papers. The program committee members - Michael Fischer, Joe Halpern, Hector Levesque, Robert Moore, Rohit Parikh, Robert Stalnaker, Richmond Thomason, and Moshe Vardi - considered all the papers carefully. At least three and usually four members of the committee read each one. In the end only nineteen of these papers were selected. There were two reasons for choosing so few. One, of course, was to make sure that only papers of the highest quality appeared. But, just as important, we wanted to make sure that the available time at the conference was not completely taken up by presentations; we hoped to allow participants at the conference plenty of time to exchange ideas.
This volume consists of those nineteen papers together with a few invited papers intended to provide an overview of the state of the art of the field. None of the final submissions was formally refereed, and many of them represent preliminary reports on continuing research. It is anticipated that most of these papers will appear, in more polished and complete form, in scientific journals. Nevertheless, I believe that anyone interested in the field of reasoning about knowledge will find this to be a useful volume of extremely high-quality papers.
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Reasoning about knowledge: an overview
In this overview paper, I will attempt to identify and describe some of the common threads that tie together work in reasoning about knowledge in such diverse fields as philosophy, economics, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and theoretical ...
Varieties of self-reference
The significance of any system of explicit representation depends not only on the immediate properties of its representational structures, but also on two aspects of the attendant circumstances: implicit relations among, and processes defined over, ...
Pegs and alecs
A major problem in semantics is the question how identity statements can be informative. To answer this question we have to determine what the status is of the objects that language users talk about when they exchange information. It is argued that the ...
Reasoning about knowledge in philosophy: the paradigm of epistemic logic
Theories of knowledge representation and reasoning about knowledge in philosophy are considered from the vantage point of epistemic logic. This logic is primarily a logic of <u>knowing that</u>, and its semantics can be considered an explication of the ...
Reasoning about knowledge in artificial intelligence
This talk looks at work on reasoning about knowledge within what might be termed "classical" AI. That is, it is assumed that the information contained in an intelligent system is for the most part embodied in data structures that explicitly represent ...
The synthesis of digital machines with provable epistemic properties
Researchers using epistemic logic as a formal framework for studying knowledge properties of AI systems often interpret the knowledge formula <i>K(x, ϕ)</i> to mean that machine <i>x</i> encodes ϕ in its state as a syntactic formula or can derive it ...
A first order theory of planning, knowledge, and action
Most AI planners work on the assumption that they have complete knowledge of their problem domain and situation so that planning an action consists of searching for an action sequence that achieves some desired goal. In actual planning situations, we ...
The consistency of syntactical treatments of knowledge
The relative expressive power of a sentential operator α is compared to that of a syntactical predicate <i>L('α')</i> in the setting of first-order logics. Despite results by Montague and by Thomason that claim otherwise, any of the so-called "modal" ...
The knower's paradox and representational theories of attitudes
This paper is about a well-known problem concerning the treatment of propositional attitudes. Results obtained by Kaplan and Montague in the early sixties imply that certain propositional attitude theories are threatened with inconsistency. How large ...
Knowledge and common knowledge in a byzantine environment I: crash failures
By analyzing the states of knowledge that the processors attain in an unreliable system of a simple type, we capture some of the basic underlying structure of such systems. The analysis provides us with a better understanding of existing protocols for ...
Foundations of knowledge for distributed systems
We give a simple, yet very general definition for distributed protocols. We then define notions of knowledge and common knowledge appropriate for these protocols. We study how changes in the states of knowledge relate to more standard notions of ...
Knowledge and implicit knowledge in a distributed environment: preliminary report
We characterize the states of knowledge that are attainable in distributed systems, where communication is done by unreliable message exchange. The reason that certain states of knowledge are unattainable is a conservation principle which says that ...
The logic of distributed protocols: preliminary report
A propositional logic of distributed protocols is introduced which includes both the logic of knowledge and temporal logic. Phenomena in distributed computing systems such as asynchronous time, incomplete knowledge by the computing agents in the system, ...
Panel: objects of knowledge and belief: sentences vs. propositions?
It has been an object of much controversy in the literature whether knowledge should be taken to be a relation between agents and sentences (the <i>syntactic</i> or <i>sentential</i> approach) or a relation between agents and propositions (the <i>...
Paradoxes and semantic representation
Many researchers in Computer Science, Linguistics, Logic, and Philosophy have been discovering in various ways that analogues of the Liar paradox pose deep foundational problems for intensional semantics. In this survey paper I state my own view of what ...
What awareness isn't: a sentential view of implicit and explicit belief
In their attempt to model and reason about the beliefs of agents, artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have borrowed from two different philosophical traditions regarding the folk psychology of belief. In one tradition, belief is a relation between ...
Reasoning about knowledge in economics
Reasoning about other people's reasoning and knowledge about other people's knowledge lie at the heart of game theory and economic theory. Each person affects everybody else. You cannot decide what to do without some knowledge or belief about what ...
Summary of "on Aumann's notion of common knowledge": "an alternative approach"
We provide a bayesian model of knowledge which is based on the of infinite recursion of beliefs. The framework allows a direct formalisation of statements such as "everyone knows that (everyone knows)<sup>m</sup> that an event A has occurred" and "A is ...
On play by means of computing machines: preliminary version
This paper examines the 'bounded rationality" inherent in play by means of computing machines. The main example is the finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma game which is discussed under different models. The game is played by Turing machines with ...
A theory of higher order probabilities
We set up a general framework for higher order probabilities. A simple HOP (Higher Order Probability space) consists of a probability space and an operation <i>PR</i>, such that, for every event <i>A</i> and every real closed interval Δ, <i>PR(A, Δ)</i> ...
On epistemic logic and logical omniscience
We consider the logical omniscience problem of epistemic logic. We argue that the problem is due to the way in which knowledge and belief are captured in Hintikka's possible worlds semantics. We describe an alternative approach in which propositions are ...
Mental situation calculus
The situation calculus of (McCarthy and Hayes 1969) has mainly been used to reason about states of the physical world, taking into account the locations and physical properties of objects and admitting such events as moving them. Analogously we can ...
A resolution method for quantified modal logics of knowledge and belief
<i>B-resolution</i> is a sound and complete resolution rule for quantified modal logics of knowledge and belief with a standard Kripke semantics. It differs from ordinary first-order binary resolution in that it can have an arbitrary (but finite) number ...
Steps towards a first-order logic of explicit and implicit belief
Modelling the beliefs of an agent who lacks logical omniscience has been a major concern recently. While most of the work has concentrated on propositional logics of belief, this paper primarily addresses issues raised by adding quantifiers to such ...
Logicians who reason about themselves
By treating belief as a modality and combining this with problems about constant truth tellers and constant liars (knights and knaves) we obtain some curious epistemic counterparts of undecidability results in metamathematics. Gödel's second theorem ...
Knowledge and efficient computation
We informally discuss "knowledge complexity": a measure for the amount of knowledge that can be feasibly extracted from a communication. Our measure provides an answer to the following two questions:
1) How much knowledge should be communicated for ...
Realizability semantics for error-tolerant logics: preliminary version
Classical and constructive logics have shortcomings as foundations for sophisticated automated reasoning from large amounts of data because a single error in the data could produce a contradiction, logically implying all possible conclusions. Relevance ...
Theoretical foundations for belief revision
Belief revision systems are AI programs that deal with contradictions. They work with a knowledge base, performing reasoning from the propositions in the knowledge base, "filtering" those propositions so that only part of the knowledge base is perceived ...
A framework for intuitionistic modal logics: extended abstract
This abstract presents work on a Kripkean analysis of intuitionistic modal logic. As remarked in [BS] there ought to be such a subject, but in fact there is very little literature [B1, B2, F1, F2, V1, V2, V3]. One possible explanation is simply that it ...