Abstract
The theory of action conventionally distinguishes real actions and doxastic (or epistemic) actions. Real actions (or as we put it—praxeological actions) bring about changes in material objects of the environment external to the agent. Epistemic actions concern mental states of agents—they bring about changes of agents’ knowledge or beliefs about the environment as well as about other beliefs. Some logical issues concerning knowledge, action, truth, and the epistemic status of agents are discussed. In this context the frame and ramification problems are also analyzed. The key issue raised in this chapter is that of non-monotonicity of reasoning. A reasoning is non-monotonic if some conclusions are invalidated by adding more knowledge. In this chapter a semantic approach to non-monotonic forms of reasoning, combining them with action theory, is presented. It is based on the notions of a frame and of a (tree-like) rule of conduct for an action system.
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Notes
- 1.
The author is deeply indebted to Dr. Matthew Carmody for many insightful comments to this paragraph. Many of them have been taken into account.
- 2.
Van der Torre (1997) writes: “There does not seem to be an agreement in deontic logic literature on the definition of ‘defeasible deontic logic”’. It is generally accepted that a defeasible deontic logic has to formalize reasoning about the following two issues.
1. Resolving conflicts. Defeasibility becomes relevant when there is a (potential) conflict between two obligations. In a defeasible deontic logic a conflict can be resolved, because one of the obligations overrides, in some sense, the other one.
2. Diagnosing violations. Consider the obligation “normally, you should do p.” Now the problem is what to conclude about somebody who does not do p. Is this an exception to the normality claim, or is it a violation of the obligation to do p?”
- 3.
See Introduction in Trypuz (2014).
- 4.
Formally, in the developed form one would write: “a knows that the sentence ‘\(\phi \)’ is true.” Here ‘\(\phi \)’ is the name of \(\phi \) in the metalanguage and “a knows that ‘\(\phi \)’ is true” is shorthand for “a knows that the sentence bearing the name ‘\(\phi \)’ is true.” To simplify the notation, we shall assume that the particle ‘that’ plays the role of the quotation marks ‘and’. We therefore write “a knows that \(\phi \) is true”.
- 5.
One distinguishes between a sentence \(\phi \) and the metalanguage parlance about \(\phi \) using appropriate quotation marks. Thus the expressions “The sentence ‘a knows \(\phi \)’ is true” and “a knows that \(\phi \) is true” bear different meanings.
- 6.
These remarks are based on the entry ‘Damascus steel’ from the Wikipedia. The citations are taken from this entry.
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Czelakowski, J. (2015). Epistemic Aspects of Action Systems. In: Freedom and Enforcement in Action. Trends in Logic, vol 42. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9855-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9855-6_6
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