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On the Reconciliation of Logics of Agency and Logics of Event Types

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Krister Segerberg on Logic of Actions

Part of the book series: Outstanding Contributions to Logic ((OCTR,volume 1))

Abstract

This paper discusses Segerberg’s view on agency, a view that is heavily influenced by his thinking about dynamic logic. The main work that puts forward Segerberg’s ideas about agency is Outline of a logic of action. That article attempts to reconcile the stit view of agency with the dynamic logic view of event types. Here I discuss Segerberg’s proposal. I will argue that the theory lacks some detail and explanatory power. I will suggest an alternative theory based on an extension of the logic XSTIT. Recently, the subject discussed here has attracted renewed attention of several researchers working in computer science and philosophy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Actually, in the present set-up the difference between events an actions is vacuous, since all transitions in the frames are due to agents. And seeing ‘nature’ as just another agent is problematic, since it seems natural to demand that nature does not have genuine choices.

  2. 2.

    In the meta-language we use the same symbols both as constant names and as variable names, and we assume universal quantification of unbound meta-variables.

  3. 3.

    If we model knowledge using probabilities, as in [6], we might also say that an ability is the capacity to significantly higher the chance that an event occurs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, 3508 , UTRECHT, Netherlands

    Jan Broersen

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  1. Jan Broersen
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Correspondence to Jan Broersen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The John Paul II Catholic University of, Lublin, Poland

    Robert Trypuz

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Broersen, J. (2014). On the Reconciliation of Logics of Agency and Logics of Event Types. In: Trypuz, R. (eds) Krister Segerberg on Logic of Actions. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7046-1_3

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