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 knowledge and belief


Virtual Group Knowledge and Group Belief in Topological Evidence Models (Extended Version)

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We study notions of (virtual) group knowledge and group belief within multi-agent evidence models, obtained by extending the topological semantics of evidence-based belief and fallible knowledge from individuals to groups. We completely axiomatize and show the decidability of the logic of ("hard" and "soft") group evidence, and do the same for an especially interesting fragment of it: the logic of group knowledge and group belief. We also extend these languages with dynamic evidence-sharing operators, and completely axiomatize the corresponding logics, showing that they are co-expressive with their static bases.


What Generative AI Reveals About the Human Mind

TIME - Tech

Generative AI--think Dall.E, ChatGPT-4, and many more--is all the rage. It's remarkable successes, and occasional catastrophic failures, have kick-started important debates about both the scope and dangers of advanced forms of artificial intelligence. But what, if anything, does this work reveal about natural intelligences such as our own? I'm a philosopher and cognitive scientist who has spent their entire career trying to understand how the human mind works. Drawing on research spanning psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, my search has drawn me towards a picture of how natural minds work that is both interestingly similar to, yet also deeply different from, the core operating principles of the generative AIs.


Fang

AAAI Conferences

In a seminal paper, Lin and Reiter introduced the notion of progression for basic action theories in the situation calculus. Recently, Fang and Liu extended the situation calculus to account for multi-agent knowledge and belief change. In this paper, based on their framework, we investigate progression of both belief and knowledge in the single-agent propositional case. We first present a model-theoretic definition of progression of knowledge and belief. We show that for propositional actions, i.e., actions whose precondition axioms and successor state axioms are propositional formulas, progression of knowledge and belief reduces to forgetting in the logic of knowledge and belief, which we show is closed under forgetting. Consequently, we are able to show that for propositional actions, progression of knowledge and belief is always definable in the logic of knowledge and belief.


Knowledge from Probability

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We give a probabilistic analysis of inductive knowledge and belief and explore its predictions concerning knowledge about the future, about laws of nature, and about the values of inexactly measured quantities. The analysis combines a theory of knowledge and belief formulated in terms of relations of comparative normality with a probabilistic reduction of those relations. It predicts that only highly probable propositions are believed, and that many widely held principles of belief-revision fail. How can we have knowledge that goes beyond what we have observed - knowledge about the future, or about lawful regularities, or about the distal causes of the readings of our scientific instruments? Many philosophers think we can't. Nelson Goodman, for example, disparagingly writes that "obviously the genuine problem [of induction] cannot be one of attaining unattainable knowledge or of accounting for knowledge that we do not in fact have" [20, p. 62]. Such philosophers typically hold that the best we can do when it comes to inductive hypotheses is to assign them high probabilities. Here we argue that such pessimism is misplaced.


Moore's Paradox and the logic of belief

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Moores Paradox is a test case for any formal theory of belief. In Knowledge and Belief, Hintikka developed a multimodal logic for statements that express sentences containing the epistemic notions of knowledge and belief. His account purports to offer an explanation of the paradox. In this paper I argue that Hintikkas interpretation of one of the doxastic operators is philosophically problematic and leads to an unnecessarily strong logical system. I offer a weaker alternative that captures in a more accurate way our logical intuitions about the notion of belief without sacrificing the possibility of providing an explanation for problematic cases such as Moores Paradox.


An Action Language for Multi-Agent Domains: Foundations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In multi-agent domains (MADs), an agent's action may not just change the world and the agent's knowledge and beliefs about the world, but also may change other agents' knowledge and beliefs about the world and their knowledge and beliefs about other agents' knowledge and beliefs about the world. The goals of an agent in a multi-agent world may involve manipulating the knowledge and beliefs of other agents' and again, not just their knowledge/belief about the world, but also their knowledge about other agents' knowledge about the world. Our goal is to present an action language (mA+) that has the necessary features to address the above aspects in representing and RAC in MADs. mA+ allows the representation of and reasoning about different types of actions that an agent can perform in a domain where many other agents might be present -- such as world-altering actions, sensing actions, and announcement/communication actions. It also allows the specification of agents' dynamic awareness of action occurrences which has future implications on what agents' know about the world and other agents' knowledge about the world. mA+ considers three different types of awareness: full-, partial- awareness, and complete oblivion of an action occurrence and its effects. This keeps the language simple, yet powerful enough to address a large variety of knowledge manipulation scenarios in MADs. The semantics of mA+ relies on the notion of state, which is described by a pointed Kripke model and is used to encode the agent's knowledge and the real state of the world. It is defined by a transition function that maps pairs of actions and states into sets of states. We illustrate properties of the action theories, including properties that guarantee finiteness of the set of initial states and their practical implementability. Finally, we relate mA+ to other related formalisms that contribute to RAC in MADs.


On the Progression of Knowledge and Belief for Nondeterministic Actions in the Situation Calculus

AAAI Conferences

In a seminal paper, Lin and Reiter introduced the notion of progression for basic action theories in the situation calculus.ย Recently, Fang and Liu extended the situation calculus to account for multi-agent knowledge and belief change.ย In this paper, based on their framework, we investigate progression of both belief and knowledge in the single-agent propositional case.ย We first present a model-theoretic definition of progression of knowledge and belief. We show that for propositional actions, i.e., actions whose precondition axioms and successor state axioms are propositional formulas, progression of knowledge and belief reduces to forgetting in the logic of knowledge and belief, which we show is closed under forgetting.ย Consequently, we are able to show that for propositional actions, progression of knowledge and belief is always definable in the logic of knowledge and belief.


Exploring the KD45 Property of a Kripke Model After the Execution of an Action Sequence

AAAI Conferences

The paper proposes a condition for preserving the KD45 property of a Kripke model when a sequence of update models is applied to it. The paper defines the notions of a primitive update model and a semi-reflexive KD45 (or sr-KD45) Kripke model. It proves that updating a sr-KD45 Kripke model using a primitive update model results in a sr-KD45 Kripke model, i.e., a primitive update model preserves the properties of a sr-KD45 Kripke model. It shows that several update models for modeling well-known actions found in the literature are primitive. This result provides guarantees that can be useful in presence of multiple applications of actions in multi-agent system (e.g., multi-agent planning).


Multiagent Knowledge and Belief Change in the Situation Calculus

AAAI Conferences

Belief change is an important research topic in AI. It becomes more perplexing in multi-agent settings, since the action of an agent may be partially observable to other agents. In this paper, we present a general approach to reasoning about actions and belief change in multi-agent settings. Our approach is based on a multi-agent extension to the situation calculus, augmented by a plausibility relation over situations and another one over actions, which is used to represent agents' different perspectives on actions. When an action is performed, we update the agents' plausibility order on situations by giving priority to the plausibility order on actions, in line with the AGM approach of giving priority to new information. We show that our notion of belief satisfies KD45 properties. As to the special case of belief change of a single agent, we show that our framework satisfies most of the classical AGM, KM, and DP postulates. We also present properties concerning the change of common knowledge and belief of a group of agents.