[ont.events] SUNY Buffalo Cognitive Science: N. Asher

rapaport@cs.buffalo.EDU (William J. Rapaport) (12/01/87)

                STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO

                  GRADUATE GROUP IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE

                                PRESENTS

                             NICHOLAS ASHER

                        Department of Philosophy
                                  and
                      Center for Cognitive Science

                     University of Texas at Austin

   REASONING ABOUT BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE WITH SELF-REFERENCE AND TIME

This talk will consider some aspects of a  framework  for  investigating
the  logic  of attitudes whose objects involve an unlimited capacity for
self-reference.  The framework, worked out in  collaboration  with  Hans
Kamp,  is the daughter of two well-known parents--possible worlds seman-
tics for the attitudes and the  revisionist,  semi-inductive  theory  of
truth  developed  by Herzberger and Gupta.  Nevertheless, the offspring,
from our point of view, was not an entirely happy one.  We had argued in
earlier  papers that orthodox possible worlds semantics could never give
an acceptable semantics for the attitudes.  Yet the  connection  between
our  use  of possible worlds semantics and the sort of reporesentational
theories of the attitudes that we favor  remained  unclear.   This  talk
will  attempt  to  provide a better connection between the framework and
representational theories of attitudes by developing a notion of reason-
ing  about  knowledge  and  belief  suggested by the model theory.  This
notion of reasoning has a temporal or dynamic aspect that I  exploit  by
introducing temporal as well as attitudinal predicates.

                      Thursday, December 17, 1987
                               4:00 P.M.
                       Baldy 684, Amherst Campus

                            Co-sponsored by:

Graduate Studies and Research Initiative in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences
                        Buffalo Logic Colloquium

There will be  an  informal  discussion  at  a  time  and  place  to  be
announced.   Call  Bill Rapaport (Dept. of Computer Science, 636-3193 or
3180) or Gail Bruder (Dept. of Psychology, 636-3676) for further  infor-
mation.