Department Of Philosophy

Feminist sociologists Sabine Hark and Paula-Irene Villa open Chapter 1 of The Future of Difference with an apt question that echoes across the rest of the book: “Can’t you see what’s before you?" Before long, they make the complexity of answering such a question quite clear. The topic of discussion is the discourse surrounding the events of New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, Germany, a night that “stands for a tectonic shift in Germany’s social fabric.” Over the course of several chapters, the authors carefully unpack the role that Cologne has played and continues to play in a “series of highly effective ideological operations—mainly objectifications of difference—which now serve to shore up social hierarchies in Germany." In their view, Cologne was used to organize and reinforce existing essentializations of “the other,” re-positioning Muslims as backward, uncivilized and (sexually) violent threats to national security, while elevating whiteness and the West as implicitly feminist, enlightened and tolerant (to a fault) in comparison. They see feminist resistance as particularly crucial in the wake of “femonationalist” arguments rooted in the dehumanization, homogenization, and domination over “the other,” pointing to the urgent need to extricate feminism from its complicities in nationalist projects of domination.

The Future of Difference is no doubt a sorely needed contribution to the polarizing discourse surrounding Cologne. The English translation will also challenge feminists outside of Germany to interrogate our complicities in racism, Western imperialism, Islamophobia, and various forms of racialized othering. Ultimately, The Future of Difference renders a little more visible a possible future that is more just, less hateful, less divided—though no less dynamic and heterogenous—on the other side of the current oppositional political landscapes within which many of us
unfortunately live.

Feminist City is a very readable and engaging text. It succeeds as a primer to the most important contributions of feminists to the discipline of geography and offers an intimate and compelling intersectional overview of women’s diverse struggles in urban environments. Although it is less effective at motivating us to imagine cities otherwise, Kern’s accessible prose could appeal to casual readers, those who are new to feminist geography and intersectional feminism, or those who are unfamiliar with the material reality of every-day misogyny in urban environments.

Information is often modelled as a set of relevant possibilities, treated as logically possible worlds. However, this has the unintuitive consequence that the logical consequences of an agent's information cannot be informative for that agent. There are many scenarios in which such consequences are clearly informative for the agent in question. Attempts to weaken the logic underlying each possible world are misguided. Instead, I provide a genuinely psychological notion of epistemic possibility and show how it can be used to model of static and dynamic information.

We defend the view that an indexical uttered by an actor works on the model of deferred reference. If it defers to a character which does not exist, it is an empty term, just as ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Ophelia’ are. The utterance in which it appears does not express a proposition and thus lacks a truth value. We advocate an ontologically parsimonious, anti-realist, position. We show how the notion of truth in our use and understanding of indexicals (and fictional names) as they appear within a fiction is not a central issue. We claim that our use and understanding of indexicals (and names) rests on the fact that their cognitive contribution is not exhausted by their semantic contribution.

Syntactic logics do not suffer from the problems of logical omniscience but are often thought to lack interesting properties relating to epistemic notions. By focusing on the case of rule based agents, I develop a framework for modelling resource-bounded agents and show that the resulting models have a number of interesting properties.

The AgentSpeak agent-oriented programming language has recently been extended with various new features, such as speech-act based communication, internal belief additions, and support for reasoning with ontological knowledge, which imply the need for belief revision within an AgentSpeak agent. In this paper, we show how a polynomial-time belief-revision algorithm can be incorporated into the Jason AgentSpeak interpreter by making use of Jason’s language constructs and customisation features. This is one of the first attempts to include automatic belief revision within an interpreter for a practical agent programming language.

Agents need to be able to change their beliefs; in particular, they should be able to contract or remove a certain belief in order to restore consistency to their set of beliefs, and revise their beliefs by incorporating a new belief which may be inconsistent with their previous beliefs. An influential theory of belief change proposed by Alchourron, Gardenfors and Makinson (AGM) describes postulates which a rational belief revision and contraction operations should satisfy. The AGM postulates have been perceived as characterising idealised rational reasoners, and the corresponding belief change operations are considered unsuitable for implementable agents due to their high computational cost. The main result of this paper is showing that an efficient (linear time) belief contraction operation nevertheless satisfies all but one of the AGM postulates for contraction. This contraction operation is defined for a realistic rule-based agent which can be seen as a reasoner in a very weak logic; although the agent’s beliefs are deductively closed with respect to this logic, checking consistency and tracing dependencies between beliefs is not computationally expensive. Finally, we give a non-standard definition of belief revision in terms of contraction for our agent.

Practical reasoners are resource-bounded—in particular they require time to derive consequences of their knowledge. Building on the Timed Reasoning Logics (TRL) framework introduced in ‘A complete and decidable logic for resource-bounded agents’, we show how to represent the time required by an agent to reach a given conclusion. TRL allows us to model the kinds of rule application and conflict resolution strategies commonly found in rule-based agents, and we show how the choice of strategy can influence the information an agent can take into account when making decisions at a particular point in time. We prove general completeness and decidability results for TRL, and analyse the impact of communication in an example system consisting of two agents which use different conflict resolution strategies.

Amongst those who feel the pull of the truthmaker principle (that truths require for their truth a truthmaker to exist), there is disagreement as to whether it applies to all truths or merely to some distinguished subset. Those in the latter camp, the non-maximalists, argue that <there are no ducks in my bath> is true not because of something’s existence, but because of the lack of ducks in my bath. Maximalists, by contrast, insist that truths are made true by something’s existence, and so appear to be committed to strange ‘negative’ entities in their ontology. As a consequence, non-maximalists appear to have a more common-sense ontology than maximalists. But things are not so straightforward. I will argue that if maximalism is committed to strange entities then so is non-maximalism; and if non-maximalism can do without strange entities, then so can maximalism. Either way, the non-maximalist has no ontological advantage over the maximalist.

For deductive reasoning to be justified, it must be guaranteed to preserve truth from premises to conclusion; and for it to be useful to us, it must be capable of informing us of something. How can we capture this notion of information content, whilst respecting the fact that the content of the premises, if true, already secures the truth of the conclusion? This is the problem I address here. I begin by considering and rejecting several accounts of informational content. I then develop an account on which informational contents are indeterminate in their membership. This allows there to be cases in which it is indeterminate whether a given deduction is informative. Nevertheless, on the picture I present, there are determinate cases of informative (and determinate cases of uninformative) inferences. I argue that the model I offer is the best way for an account of content to respect the meaning of the logical constants and the inference rules associated with them without collapsing into a classical picture of content, unable to account for informative deductive inferences.

You and I can differ in what we say, or believe, even though the things we say, or believe, are logically equivalent. Discussing what is said, or believed, requires notions of content which are finer-grained than sets of (metaphysically or logically) possible worlds. In this paper, I develop the approach to fine-grained content in terms of a space of possible and impossible worlds. I give a method for constructing ersatz worlds based on theory of substantial facts. I show how this theory overcomes an objection to actualist constructions of ersatz worlds and argue that it naturally gives rise to useful notions of fine-grained content.

Abstract The AgentSpeak agent-oriented programming language has recently been extended with a number of new features, such as speech-act based communication, internal belief additions, and support for ontological reasoning, which imply a need for belief revision within an AgentSpeak agent. In this paper, we show how a polynomial-time belief-revision algorithm can be incorporated into the Jason AgentSpeak interpreter.

Abstract. In this paper, we show how to establish correctness and time bounds (eg, quality of service guarantees) for multi-agent systems composed of communicating rule-based agents. The formal models of multi-agent systems we study are transition systems where each transition corresponds to either a rule firing or an act of communication by an agent. We present a complete and sound modal logic which formalises how the beliefs of communicating rule-based agents change over time.

Abstract. We propose a two-fold use of context in reasoning about agents. The first concerns the modelling of beliefs which are entertained only within the scope of some assumption. We illustrate this use by describing as logical model of an agent which reasons in a natural deduction style by making assumptions to derive new formulas. The second use of context we propose here concerns the modelling of reasoning as a step-by-step temporal process, allowing us to model agents whose resources are temporally bounded.

Abstract In this thesis, I criticise traditional epistemic logics based on possible worlds semantics, inspired by Hintikka, as a framework for representing the beliefs and knowledge of agents. The traditional approach suffers from the logical omniscience problem: agents are modelled as knowing all consequences of their knowledge, which is not an admissible assumption when modelling real-world reasoning agents.

Logical reasoning is vital to philosophy. Descartes for one recognized this in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628), where he writes: RULE 4: There is need of a method for investigating the truth about things. RULE 5:... we shall be observing this method exactly if we reduce complex and obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones, and then, by retracing our steps, try to rise from intuition of all of the simplest ones to knowledge of all the rest.

Hintikka's logic of knowledge and belief [8] has become a standard logical tool for dealing with intentional notions in artificial intelligence and computer science. One reason for this success is the adoption by many computer scientists of modal logics in general, as tools for reasoning about relational structures. Many areas of interest to computer scientists, from databases to the automata which underlie many programs, can be thought of as relational structures; such structures can be reasoned about using modal logics.

Abstract Since the influential work of Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson, accounts of belief revision have assumed that agents are ideal, in the sense that they know all consequences of their beliefs. However, in some cases, this assumption is not warranted. This note represents preliminary steps taken to find an account of belief revision suitable for resource bounded agents. We concentrate on the case of time-bounded reasoners and the operation of contraction.

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