[FOM] Possible worlds

[Sara L. Uckelman]

Harvey Friedman wrote:

 > I think that the computer science literature, rather than the philosophy
 > literature, is what is most relevant. In the computer science literature,
 > the non monotonic case is also treated, where things that were 
"known" are
 > retracted. This makes especially good sense in database theory.
 >
 > In any case, there are quite a number of people on the FOM who could 
comment
 > on this diverse and extensive literature from computer science far far
 > better than I can.


There is the computer science literature, with which I am less familiar, 
and then there is the dynamic epistemic logic literature, much of which 
has taken its inspiration from the computer science literature.  Good 
resources for the latter include the following:

_Dynamic Epistemic Logic_ by Hans van Ditmarsch, Wiebe van der Hoek, and 
Barteld Kooi, which will be published sometime in spring (I believe 
March); an outline of the book and its table of contents can be found on 
van Ditmarsch's web page, http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/hans/del.html

_Bisimulations on Planet Kripke_, Ph.D. thesis of Jelle Gerbrandy, 
http://www.illc.uva.nl/Publications/Dissertations/DS-1999-01.text.pdf

"The Logic of Public Announcements, Common Knowledge and Private 
Suspicions", technical report by Alexandru Baltag, Lawrence S. Moss and 
Slawomir Solecki, 
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/techreports/TRNNN.cgi?trnum=TR534

The paradigm presented in the last reference is the one being referred 
to in the references if you google for "BMS knowledge revision".

-Sara Uckelman



-- 
Sara L. Uckelman
Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation
Universiteit van Amsterdam

http://staff.science.uva.nl/~suckelma