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Comments to ‘logics of public communications’

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Take your average publication on the dynamics of knowledge. In one of its first paragraphs you will probably encounter a phrase like “a logic of public announcements was first proposed by Plaza in 1989 (Plaza 1989).” Tracking down this publication seems easy, because googling its title ‘Logics of Public Communications’ takes you straight to Jan Plaza’s website where it is online available in the author’s own version, including, on that page, very helpful and full bibliographic references to the proceedings in which it originally appeared. Those proceedings are then somewhat harder to find. In fact, I have never seen them. Unfortunately, for the research community, Plaza’s work has never been followed up by a journal version. I am very grateful to the editor Wiebe van der Hoek of the journal ‘Knowledge, Rationality, and Action’ to correct this omission.

Plaza’s work is reprinted as such, without an update encompassing more than fifteen additional years of research in this area. This commentary aims to provide some background to bridge that gap.

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  1. University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Hans P. van Ditmarsch

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  1. Hans P. van Ditmarsch
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Correspondence to Hans P. van Ditmarsch.

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This is a commentary on Jan Plaza’s ‘Logics of Public Communications’, reprinted in this same issue.

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van Ditmarsch, H.P. Comments to ‘logics of public communications’. Synthese 158, 181–187 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-007-9167-8

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