Richmond H. Thomason

Formal Philosophy. Selected Papers of Richard Montague

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Combinations of Tense and Modality

Physics should have helped us to realise that a temporal theory of a phenomenon X is, in general, more than a simple combination of two components: the statics of X and the ordered set of temporal instants. The case in which all functions from times to world-states are allowed is uninteresting; there are too many such functions, and the theory has not begun until we have begun to restrict them. And often the principles that emerge from the interaction of time with the phenomena seem new and surprising. The most dramatic example of this, perhaps, is the interaction of space with time in relativistic space-time.

A skeptical theory of inheritance in nonmonotonic semantic networks

This paper describes a new approach to inheritance reasoning in semantic networks allowing for multiple inheritance with exceptions. The approach leads to a definition of inheritance that is both theoretically sound and intuitively attractive: it yields unambiguous results applied to any acyclic semantic net, and these results conform to our own intuitions in the cases in which the intuitions themselves are firm and unambiguous. Since, however, the definition provided here is based on an alternative, skeptical view of inheritance reasoning, it does not always agree with previous definitions when it is applied to nets about which our intuitions are unsettled, or in which different reasoning strategies could naturally be expected to yield distinct results.

Background to Qualitative Decision Theory

■ This article provides an overview of the field of qualitative decision theory: its motivating tasks and issues, its antecedents, and its prospects. Qualitative decision theory studies qualitative approaches to problems of decision making and their sound and effective reconciliation and integration with quantitative approaches. Although it inherits from a long tradition, the field offers a new focus on a number of important unanswered questions of common concern to AI, economics, law, psychology, and management.

Deontic Logic as Founded on Tense Logic

Most of the recent work in deontic logic has concentrated on problems concerning “conditional obligation”. I’ve felt for a long time that this has been a mistake. A proper theory of conditional obligation, like one of “conditional quantification”, will be the product of two separate components: a theory of the conditional, and a theory of obligation.

The agreement process

In this paper, we investigate the empirical correlates of the agreement process. Informally, the agreement process is the dialog process by which collaborators achieve joint commitment on a joint action. We propose a specific instantiation of the agreement process, derived from our theoretical model, that integrates the IRMA framework for rational problem solving (Bratman, Israel & Pollack, 1988) with Clarks (1992, 1996) work on language as a collaborative activity; and from the characteristics of our task, a simple design problem (furnishing a two-room apartment) in which knowledge is equally distributed among agents, and needs to be shared. The main contribution of our paper is an empirical study of some of the components of the agreement process. We first discuss why we believe the findings from our corpus of computer-mediated dialogs are applicable to human?human collaborative dialogs in general. We then present our theoretical model, and apply it to make predictions about the components of the agreement process. We focus on how information is exchanged in order to arrive at a proposal, and on what constitutes a proposal and its acceptance/rejection. Our corpus study makes use of features of both the dialog and the domain reasoning situation, and led us to discover that the notion of commitment is more useful to model the agreement process than that of acceptance/rejection, as it more closely relates to the unfolding of negotiation.

A Theory of Conditionals in the Context of Branching Time

In Stalnaker [9] and in Stalnaker and Thomason [10], a theory of conditionals is presented that involves a “selection function”. Intuitively, the value of the function at a world is the world as it would be if a certain formula (the antecedent of a conditional) were true.

SOME EXTENSIONS OF MONTAGUE GRAMMAR

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses some extensions of Montague grammar. This is an attempt to make intelligible some mechanisms that, when added to the grammatical framework created by Montague, permit the treatment of a variety of English constructions—especially those involving sentence embedding. It highlights an element such as the abstraction operator of type-theoretic logics into the syntactic analysis of several kinds of complements and presents the development of Montagues program by exploiting strategies of direct decomposition rather than along the transformational lines followed by Partee. The chapter presents the syntactic theory in an informal but readable way. Like that draft, this one sacrifices rigor for intelligibility and omits a presentation of the semantic component. The first thing in making a Montague grammar for a language is to determine the system of grammatical categories. This is done by designating certain indices to represent primitive categories and choosing a collection of complex indices having the form A/ n B, where A and B may be any category indices, primitive or complex, and n may be any natural number.

Deontic Logic and the Role of Freedom in Moral Deliberation

I want to present a model of deontic logic that relates oughts and choices to alternative possible futures, or scenarios. After presenting the model I’ll try to show how it can be related to some interesting twists that deliberative reasoning can take. What I will do is rough and very tentative, but maybe it suggests that deontic logic can be related to some interesting questions of moral philosophy.

Some Completeness Results for Modal Predicate Calculi

Two systems of first-order predicate calculus with identity, one of them with definite descriptions, will be formulated in this paper along with semantic interpretations, and then shown strongly complete by methods similar to those of Henkin [3]. These systems, Q1 and Q3,1 are generalizations of the systems presented in Kripke [6] and [8], respectively.2 An informal and philosophical account of Q1 and Q3 can be found in [11], together with a historical note concerning the development of the systems and their interpretation.