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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Epistemic Aspects of Action Systems

subject

description

The theory of action conventionally distinguishes real actions and doxastic (or epistemic) actions. Real actions (or as we put it—praxeological actions) bring about changes in material objects of the environment external to the agent. Epistemic actions concern mental states of agents—they bring about changes of agents’ knowledge or beliefs about the environment as well as about other beliefs. Some logical issues concerning knowledge, action, truth, and the epistemic status of agents are discussed. In this context the frame and ramification problems are also analyzed. The key issue raised in this chapter is that of non-monotonicity of reasoning. A reasoning is non-monotonic if some conclusions are invalidated by adding more knowledge. In this chapter a semantic approach to non-monotonic forms of reasoning, combining them with action theory, is presented. It is based on the notions of a frame and of a (tree-like) rule of conduct for an action system.