Synonymous Logics

This paper discusses the general problem of translation functions between logics, given in axiomatic form, and in particular, the problem of determining when two such logics are synonymous or translationally equivalent. We discuss a proposed formal definition of translational equivalence, show why it is reasonable, and also discuss its relation to earlier definitions in the literature. We also give a simple criterion for showing that two modal logics are not translationally equivalent, and apply this to well-known examples. Some philosophical morals are drawn concerning the possibility of having two logical systems that are empirically distinct but are both translationally equivalent to a common logic.     

Game Logic is Strong Enough for Parity Games

We investigate the expressive power of Parikh's Game Logic interpreted in Kripke structures, and show that the syntactical alternation hierarchy of this logic is strict. This is done by encoding the winning condition for parity games of rank n. It follows that Game Logic is not captured by any finite level of the modal -calculus alternation hierarchy. Moreover, we can conclude that model checking for the -calculus is efficiently solvable iff this is possible for Game Logic     

``L'homme et la société embêtent la philosophie ...' Bocheński on the limits of `philosophy'

Following his retirement fromUniversity teaching in 1972 Bocheski focusedincreasingly on metaphilosophical issues. Someof these he considered in occasional papers,autobiographical essays, as well as interviews,often giving expression to views that are asrefreshing as they are – sometimes –surprising. Bocheski in his later years becamesomething of an iconoclast, sharply criticalof, indeed hostile to, much of what isparadigmatically taken to be `philosophy'. Inthis paper, I draw out and examine some aspectsof Bocheski's virtually anti-philosophicalattitudes and try my hand at an analysis ofwhat appears to have become the Bocheski'smain underlying motivation in this respect: theless than happy interplay of religious faith,Weltanschauungen, and philosophy caughtbetween two seemingly persistent butconflicting inclinations of the human spirit tosubmit to the authority of some `total' picture.     

Semantic interpretation as computation in nonmonotonic logic: the real meaning of the suppression task

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed-world reasoning of particular interest for human cognition. Byrne's "suppression" data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine-grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3-valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning.