"A Logic for Action, with Applications in Ethics"
"Some Aspects of Meaning in Non-Contingent Language."
PhD Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1986.
Abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International (June 1987),
47(12A):4411-A.
Abstract: "Frege's writings on meaning (sense) are often interpreted within the framework of
possible worlds semantics. The resulting theories rely on contingency to
account for a variety of linguistic phenomena, such as the behavior of
expressions in propositional attitude contexts, or the idea that a definition might
fix the reference of an expression without establishing its meaning. In this
thesis, I interpret Frege's ideas within a different framework, to provide a
semantic theory that is able to account for some of these same phenomena as
they occur in a certain non-contingent language (first-order arithmetic), where
the possible worlds approach breaks down. The first part of the thesis is a
detailed study of Frege's writings on sense identity, as well as some of the more
modern literature on synonymy. I argue that instead of searching for a single
relation of meaning equivalence among expressions, we should expect to find
several different relations of meaning congruence. I claim that Frege was
committed to this more flexible approach as well. To support my claim, I show
that his standards for sense identity were strongly psychological; and then,
relying on certain parallels between traditional ideas of definition and concept
formation, I describe a problem about the senses of expressions introduced into
a language through stipulative definitions. In the second part of the thesis, I
develop a simple model of senses as procedures. I then use this model to deal
with the problem about the senses of defined expressions set out earlier, and to
deal also with the clash between Frege's compositional idea that the sense of a
complete expression is assembled from the senses of its parts, and his
decompositional idea that we can understand certain incomplete expressions
only by first understanding complete expressions in which they occur."
(with Richmond H. Thomason, and David S. Touretzky.) "A Calculus for Inheritance in Monotonic Nets." In Zbigniew W. Ras, M. Zemankova, eds., Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, 2: Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems held October 14-17, 1987, in Charlotte, North Carolina, pp. 280-287. New York: North-Holland, 1987.
(with Richmond H. Thomason, and David S. Touretzky.) "A Clash of Intuitions: The Current State of Nonmonotonic Multiple Inheritance Systems." In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-87) , pp. 476-482. Palo Alto, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1988.
(with R. H. Thomason.) "Mixing Strict and Defeasible Inheritance." AAAI 88. Seventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Saint Paul, MN, USA, 21-26 Aug. 1988, Vol. 2, pp. 427-432. Palo Alto, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1988.
(with Richmond H. Thomason.) "Logics for Inheritance Theory." In In M. Reinfrank, J. de Kleer, M.L. Ginsberg, and E. Sandwall, eds. Non-Monotonic Reasoning: 2nd International Workshop, Grassau, FRG, June 1988: Proceedings, pp. 220-237. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 346. Berlin & New York: Springer, 1989.
(with Richmond H. Thomason.) "Boolean extensions of Inheritance networks." In In AAAI-90 Proceedings. Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Boston, MA, USA, 29 July-3 Aug. 1990, Vol. 2, pp. 633-639. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
(with Richmond H. Thomason, and David S. Touretzky.) "A Skeptical Theory of Inheritance in Nonmonotonic Semantic Networks." Artificial Intelligence (March 1990), 42(2-3):311-348.
"A Skeptical Theory of Mixed Inheritance." In J. Michael Dunn and Anil Gupta, eds., Truth or Consequences: Essays in Honor of Nuel Belnap, pp. 267-281. Dordrecht & Boston: Kluwer, 1990.
(with Richmond H. Thomason.) "Conditionals and Artificial Intelligence." Fundamenta Informaticae (November-December 1991), 15(3-4):301-323.
"A Credulous Theory of Mixed Inheritance." In Maurizio Lenzerini, and Daniele Nardi, eds., Inheritance Hierarchies in Knowledge Representation and Programming Languages, pp. 13-28. New York: Wiley, 1991.
"Reasoning about Ignorance: A Note on the Bush-Gorbachev Problem." Fundamenta Informaticae (1991), 15(3-4):325-332.
"A Skeptic's Menagerie: Conflictors, Preemptors, Reinstaters, and Zombies in Nonmonotonic Inheritance." In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJJCAI-91), pp. 478-483. Palo Alto, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1991.
"Deontic Logic as Founded on Nonmonotonic Logic."
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (1993), 9(1-2):69-91.
First International Workshop on Deontic Logic in Computer Science,
Amsterdam, Netherlands, 11-13 Dec. 1991.
Special Issue on Deontic Logic in Computer Science.
"Frege on the Psychological Significance of Definitions." Philosophical Studies (December 1993), 72(2-3):223-263.
"Nonmonotonic Techniques in the Formalization of Commonsense Normative Reasoning." In Vladimir Lifschitz, John McCarthy, L. Morgenstern, and Y. Shoham, eds., Proceedings of the Second Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning. American Association for Artifical Intelligence Press, 1993.
(with J. Grant, J. Lobo, and J. Minker.) "View Updates in Stratified Disjunctive Databases." Journal of Automated Reasoning (1993),11:249-267.
"Moral Dilemmas and Nonmonotonic Logic." Journal of Philosophical Logic (February 1994), 23(1):35-65.
"Some Direct Theories of Nonmonotonic Inheritance." In Dov M. Gabbay, C.J. Hogger, and J. A. Robinson, eds., Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, Volume 3: Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Uncertain Reasoning, pp. 111-187. Oxford Scientific Publications. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press 1994.
(with Nuel Belnap.) "The Deliberative Stit: A Study of Action, Omission, Ability, and Obligation." Journal of Philosophical Logic (December 1995) 24(6):583-644.
"Intentions as Filters." In M. Fehling, D. Perlis, M. Pollack, and J. Pollock, eds., Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Rational Agency, pp. 86-91. Menlo Park, CA: American Association for Artificial Intelligence Press, 1995.
"Agency and Obligation."
Synthese (August 1996), 108(2):269-307.
"The purpose of this paper is to explore a new deontic operator for
representing what an
agent ought to do; the operator is cast against the background of a modal treatment of action
developed by Nuel Belnap and Michael Perloff, which itself relies on Arthur Prior's
indeterministic tense logic. The analysis developed here of what an agent ought to do is based
on a dominance ordering adapted from the decision theoretic study of choice under uncertainty
to the present account of action. It is shown that this analysis gives rise to a normal
deontic operator and that the result is superior to an analysis that identifies what an agent
ought to do with what it ought to be that the agent does."
"Combining Agency and Obligation (Preliminary Version)" In Mark A. Brown, and Jose Carmo eds., Deontic Logic, Agency and Normative Systems: [Delta symbol]EON '96: Third International Workshop on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, Sesimbra, Portugal, 11-13 January 1996, pp. 98-112. Workshops in Computing. Berlin & New York: Springer, 1996.
(with Richmond H. Thomason.) "Nondeterminism and Dominance: Foundations of Planning and Qualitative Decision Theory." In Y. Shoham, ed., Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge (TARK-96), pp. 229-250. Palo Alto, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1996.
(with Nuel Belnap.) "The Deliberative Stit: A Study of Action, Omission, Ability, and Obligation." In P. Grim, P. Ludlow, G. Mar, and P. Williams, eds., The Philosopher's Annual (1995), 18: 205-266. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview, 1997.
"Nonmonotonic Foundations for Deontic Logic." In Donald Nute, ed., Defeasible Deontic Logic, pp. 17-44. Synthese Library, 263. Dordrecht & Boston: Kluwer, 1997.
(with Martha E. Pollack.) "Evaluating Options in a Context." In Itzhak Gilboa, ed., Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge: Proceedings of the Seventh Conference (TARK 1998): July 22-24, 1998, Evanston, Illinois, USA, pp. 249-262. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.
"Formal Theories of Commonsense Reasoning." In Edward Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, pp. 451-453. London & New York: Routledge, 1998.
(with Martha E. Pollack.) "Plan Management Issues for Cognitive Robotics: Project Overview." In Cognitive Robotics. Papers from the 1998 AAAI Fall Symposium, Proceedings of Cognitive Robotics, Orlando, FL, USA, 23-25 Oct.1998, pp. 76-83. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 1998.
(with N. Onder and Martha E. Pollack.) "A Unifying Algorithm for Conditional and Probabilistic Planning." In A. Kott, ed., Proceedings of thr AIPS '98 Workshop on Integrating Planing, Scheduling and Execution in Dynamic and Uncertain Environments, pp. 106-112. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 1998.
(with M.E. Pollack, and I. Tsamardinos.) "Adjustable Autonomy for a Plan Management Agent." Agents with Adjustable Autonomy. Papers from the 1999 AAAI Symposium, Agents with Adjustable Autonomy. Papers from the 1999 AAAI Symposium, Proceedings of 1999 Spring Symposium Series. Agents with Adjustable Autonomy, Stanford, CA, USA, 22-24 March 1999, pp. 101-105. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 1999.
(with I. Tsamardinos, and M.E. Pollack.) "Merging Plans with Quantitative Temporal Constraints, Temporally Extended Actions and Conditional Branches." In S. Chien, S. Kambhampati, and C.A. Knoblock, eds. Proceedings of Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling. AIPS 2000, Breckenridge, CO, USA, 14-17 April 2000, pp. 264-272. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2000.
"Precedent, Deontic Logic, and Inheritance." In Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, Oslo, Norway, 14-18 June 1999, pp. 63-72. New York: ACM, 1999.
(with Martha E. Pollack.) "There's More to Life than Making Plans: Plan management in Dynamic, Multiagent Environments." AI Magazine (Winter 1999), 20(4):71-83.
Agency and Deontic Logic. Oxford & New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
BC145 H67 2001
"Argument Construction and Reinstatement in Logics for Defeasible Reasoning." Artificial Intelligence and Law (March 2001), 9(1):1-28.
(with Martha E. Pollack.) "Evaluating New Options in the Context of Existing Plans."
Artificial Intelligence (April 2001), 127(2):199-220.
"This paper contributes to the foundations of a theory of rational choice for artificial agents in dynamic
environments. Our work is developed within a theoretical framework, originally due to Bratman, that models
resource-bounded agents as operating against the background of some current set of intentions, which helps
to frame their subsequent reasoning. In contrast to the standard theory of rational choice, where options are
evaluated in isolation, we therefore provide an analysis of situations in which the options presented to an
agent are evaluated against a background context provided by the agent's current plans-commitments to
future activities, which may themselves be only partially specified. The interactions between the new options
and the background context can complicate the task of evaluating the option, rendering it either more or less
desirable in context than it would have been in isolation."
"Nonmonotonic Logic." In Lou Goble, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic, pp. 336-361. Blackwell Philosophy Guides. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001.
"Reasoning with Moral Conflicts."
"Skepticism and Floating Conclusions." Artificial Intelligence.
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