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.