The Joint International Conference on Logic Programming, sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, is a major forum for presentations of research, applications, and implementations in this important area of computer science. Logic programming is one of the most promising steps toward declarative programming and forms the theoretical basis of the programming language Prolog and its various extensions. Logic programming is also fundamental to work in artificial intelligence, where it has been used for (...) nonmonotonic and commonsense reasoning, expert systems implementation, deductive databases, and applications such as computer-aided manufacturing. Krzysztof R. Apt is project leader at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam and part-time Professor in Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam. Topics covered: Theory Foundations. Programming Languages. Implementation. Programming Methodologies and Tools. Applications. Deductive Databases. Artificial Intelligence. Parallelism. (shrink)

Algorithms for NLG NLG is typically broken down into stages of discourse planning (to select information and organize it into coherent paragraphs), sentence planning (to choose words and structures to fit information into sentence-sized units), and realization (to determine surface form of output, including word order, morphology and final formatting or intonation). The SPUD system combines the generation steps of sentence planning and surface realization by using a lexicalized grammar to construct the syntax and semantics of a sentence simultaneously.

Logic has acquired a reputation for difficulty, perhaps because many of the approaches adopted have been more suitable for mathematicians than computer scientists. This book shows that the subject is not inherently difficult and that the connections between logic and declarative language are straightforward. Many exercises have been included in the hope that these will lead to a much greater confidence in manual proofs, therefore leading to a greater confidence in automated proofs.

The International Logic Programming Symposium is one of two major international conferences sponsored by the Association of Logic Programming. Both conferences are held annually. The theme for the 1995 conference was "Declarative Systems", particularly the integration of the logic programming, functional programming, and object-oriented programming paradigms.

Answer-set programming (ASP) has emerged as a declarative programming paradigm where problems are encoded as logic programs, such that the so-called answer sets of theses programs represent the solutions of the encoded problem. The efficiency of the latest ASP solvers reached a state that makes them applicable for problems of practical importance. Consequently, problems from many different areas, including diagnosis, data integration, and graph theory, have been successfully tackled via ASP. In this work, we present such ASP-encodings (...) for problems associated to abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) and generalisations thereof. Our encodings are formulated as fixed queries, such that the input is the only part depending on the actual AF to process. We illustrate the functioning of this approach, which is underlying a new argumentation system called ASPARTIX in detail and show its adequacy in terms of computational complexity. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the frameworks of Head‐Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) as it developed from Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), and Lexical‐Functional Grammar (LFG). Declarative frameworks are not generative, as they do not ‘generate’ anything in the sense of the preceding paragraph. Pullum refers to that kind of approach as Generative‐Enumerative Syntax and differentiates it from Model‐Theoretic Syntax: GPSG, HPSG, and LFG essentially fall in the latter category. It describes some key aspects of declarative frameworks, and the (...) motivation for them. The chapter considers how declarative frameworks instantiate a view of Generative Grammar directly inspired by Noam Chomsky's early work, but without the procedural component. It presents some of the core design features which motivate declarative frameworks, and explores how syntactic phenomena are factorized and formalized in declarative frameworks, with a view to comparison with Minimalist Program analyses. (shrink)

Answer set programming (ASP) is a form of declarative programming oriented towards difficult search problems. As an outgrowth of research on the use of nonmonotonic reasoning in knowledge representation, it is particularly useful in knowledge-intensive applications. ASP programs consist of rules that look like Prolog rules, but the computational mechanisms used in ASP are different: they are based on the ideas that have led to the creation of fast satisfiability solvers for propositional logic.

This article begins by distinguishing force and mood. Then it lays out desiderata on a successful account. It sketches as background the program of truth-theoretic semantics. Next, it surveys assimilation approaches and argues that they are inadequate. Then it shows how the fulfillment-conditional approach can be applied to imperatives, interrogatives, molecular sentences containing them, and quantification into mood markers. Next, it considers briefly the recent set of propositions approach to the semantics of interrogatives and exclamatives. Finally, it shows how to (...) integrate exclamatives and optatives into a framework similar to the fulfillment approach. (shrink)

odel-L¨ ob computability logic. In order to make things relatively self-contained, I sketch the essential ideas of GL, and discuss the significance of its fixpoint theorem. Then I give the algorithm embodied in the program in a little more detail. It should be emphasized that nothing new is presented here — all the theory and methodology are due to others. The main interest is, in a sense, psychological. The approach taken here has been declared in the literature, more than once, (...) to be of theoretical interest only, being too unwieldly in practice. Experimentation shows this is not so provided formulas are not too complicated. A copy of the program can be obtained by ftp from venus.gc.cuny.edu. It is in the subdirectory “/pub/fitting,” under the name “glfixpt.pro.” Log on as “anonymous” and use your full e-mail address as password. If there are difficulties with ftp, send e-mail to the author at mlfl[email protected]. The Prolog code is standard, and should run under any implementation, though minor modifications may be necessary for some systems. These modifications are described in the last section, and also in the program itself. (shrink)

Provides a systematic introduction to the theory of logic programming and shows how this theory can be applied to reason about pure Prolog programs. The text includes an introduction to programming in Prolog and deals with such programming issues as determination, occur-check freedom and absence of errors. It covers both the natural interpretations of logic programming, as declarative specification and as procedure for computer execution.

Dilemma situations involving the choice of which human life to save in the case of unavoidable accidents are expected to arise only rarely in the context of autonomous vehicles. Nonetheless, the scientific community has devoted significant attention to finding appropriate and acceptable automated decisions in the event that AVs or drivers of AVs were indeed to face such situations. Awad and colleagues, in their now famous paper “The Moral Machine Experiment”, used a “multilingual online ‘serious game’ for collecting large-scale data (...) on how citizens would want AVs to solve moral dilemmas in the context of unavoidable accidents.” Awad and colleagues undoubtedly collected an impressive and philosophically useful data set of armchair intuitions. However, we argue that applying their findings to the development of “global, socially acceptable principles for machine learning” would violate basic tenets of human rights law and fundamental principles of human dignity. To make its arguments, our paper cites principles of tort law, relevant case law, provisions from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and rules from the German Ethics Code for Autonomous and Connected Driving. (shrink)

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR 2004, held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA in January 2004. The 24 revised full papers presented together with 8 system descriptions were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. Among the topics addressed are declarative logic programming, nonmonotonic reasoning, knowledge representation, combinatorial search, answer set programming, constraint programming, deduction in ontologies, and planning.

The now retired NIH Consensus Development Program has been used as a model for similar programs in other countries. However, the epistemic value of this kind of program has been disputed. This article provides an overview of the arguments levelled at Miriam Solomon by Laszlo Kosolosky and Jeroen Van Bouwel, who provide an opposing philosophical position on this issue. Here, I argue for a middle ground position that highlights the methodological interest of a retrospective analysis of the NIH consensus conferences (...) as a way to assess the impact of a public forum on guidelines ultimately relayed to healthcare professionals and citizens. (shrink)

In 1941, Zhou Jingwen launched a human rights movement in the magazine Shidai piping. Zhou was motivated both by concerns about the human rights violations committed by the Guomindang and by a belief that the protection of human rights would enable people to make greater contributions to the war effort. As Zhang Junmai would be, Zhou was inspired by H.G. Wells's work to draft a new human rights declaration that could serve as an inspiration during World War II and as (...) a manifesto for a future peaceful world. Zhou also attempted to relate the 1941 human rights movement to the May Fourth movement of 1919, in that he intended his human rights movement to awaken and liberate the Chinese. Positive reactions from readers prompted Zhou to publish a special issue on human rights, and some of the articles were also reprinted in book form. Zhou chose to remain on the mainland after 1949, and was severely criticized during the "three-anti" and "five-anti" campaigns in the early 1950s. He fled to Hong Kong in 1957 and there revived Shidai piping. (shrink)

Conflict of interests is a situation when someone is in need of other people’s trust on one the hand and has personal or general interests on the other hand, resulting in conflict with the given responsibility. In this research work, an attempt was made to find the relation between declarations of conflict of interests and reporting positive outcomes in the dental journals in Iran. In this analytical/cross-sectional study, first Health and Biomedical Information was searched and all the Persian and English (...) dental journals published in Iran were collected. Then, all the papers published in the journals from December 2000 to December 2016 were collected and categorized in terms of the year of publication, author or authors’ affiliations, Persian and English journal, type of the substance or the drug used, declarations of conflict of interests and the positive or negative conclusion of the report. Data were analyzed with the Fisher’s exact test and Chi squared test, using the program SPSS 18. In numerical analysis, the significance was set at P < 0.05. Seventeen dental journals in Persian and English were analyzed: 10 in English and 7 in Persian. Reviewing these studies showed that of 1021 articles in Persian, in 128 cases there was no mention of a declaration of conflict of interests and in 11 cases, the COI had been stated. In addition, from 1220 articles in English, in 825 cases there was no mention of declarations of conflict of interests and in 45 cases, the declarations of COI had been mentioned. There was no significant relation between the COI and ‘no’ COI and the reporting of positive outcomes in papers in Iranian dental journals in terms of the journal type, year of publication and the journals’ guarantee form. A total of 83% of studies with declarations of COI had one positive outcome, with a significant relationship in this field; however, in 73% of studies with no COI, there was one positive outcome, too. In general, the society expects that doctors would not consider any incentives except the health of the patients in the efforts made by them. The severity of the consequences of COI is of higher value when the patients’ health is endangered due to it. In addition, COI might change the attitude and approach of other doctors and peers. (shrink)

The general conditions of epistemic defeat are naturally represented through the interplay of two distinct kinds of entailment, deductive and defeasible. Many of the current approaches to modeling defeasible reasoning seek to define defeasible entailment via model-theoretic notions like truth and satisfiability, which, I argue, fails to capture this fundamental distinction between truthpreserving and justification-preserving entailments. I present an alternative account of defeasible entailment and show how logic programming offers a paradigm in which the distinction can be captured, allowing (...) for the modeling of a larger range of types of defeat. This is possible through a natural extension of the declarative and procedural semantics of Horn clauses. (shrink)

Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is widely considered to be the most influential statement on religious freedom in human history. Religious Freedom and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides a groundbreaking account of its origins and developments, examining the background, key players, and outcomes of Article 18, and setting it within the broader discourse around international religious freedom in the 1940s. Taking issue with standard accounts that see the text of the Universal Declaration as humanity's (...) joint response to the atrocities of World War II, it shows instead how central features of Article 18 were intimately connected to the political projects and visions of particular actors involved in the start-up of the UN Human Rights program. This will be essential reading for anyone grappling with the historical and contemporary meaning of human rights and religious freedom. (shrink)

In December 2014, Physicians for Human Rights released their analysis of the summary of the Committee Report of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. PHR focused on the involvement of health care professionals in the CIA torture program, concluding that the health professionals’ commissions and omissions violated the prescriptions of many fundamental bioethical documents, including international declarations of bioethics and medical research ethics. The medical doctors’ involvement evokes some thoughts concerning bioethical education. It seems that instead of developing (...) virtues through practicing morally good habits, the experience of clinical training undermines the moral ideals that medical students identified themselves with at the commencement of their medical education. The hostile response they sometimes get from their mentors when trying to question morally troubling situations may shape the habit of ‘turning a blind eye’ to unethical behaviour, since the students do not want to jeopardize their grades and future medical career. Maybe it was the development of this habit and the failure to develop the habit of moral courage instead that prevented the medical doctors participating in torture programs from defending moral ideals of their profession more effectively. (shrink)

Web legal information retrieval systems need the capability to reason with the knowledge modeled by legal ontologies. Using this knowledge it is possible to represent and to make inferences about the semantic content of legal documents. In this paper a methodology for applying NLP techniques to automatically create a legal ontology is proposed. The ontology is defined in the OWL semantic web language and it is used in a logic programming framework, EVOLP+ISCO, to allow users to query the semantic (...) content of the documents. ISCO allows an easy and efficient integration of declarative, object-oriented and constraint-based programming techniques with the capability to create connections with external databases. EVOLP is a dynamic logic programming framework allowing the definition of rules for actions and events. An application of the proposed methodology to the legal web information retrieval system of the Portuguese Attorney General’s Office is described. (shrink)

The political independence of the United States of America was proclaimed in a Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress, in Philadelphia, on July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson drafted the document, and the changes made in the text reflected the struggle among different factions in the revolutionary camp. Jefferson's initial version was fundamentally retained, however; and that is precisely what makes the Declaration of Independence not merely a legal document but a vivid example of a bourgeois revolutionary program expressing (...) in concentrated form the ideology of the radical wing of the American Enlightenment. The form of the Declaration was an address to world public opinion explaining the causes and bases for the decisive political break of the 13 British colonies with the home country. In fact it provided a general philosophical justification for the validity of revolutionary change in the social order by the people. The Declaration became the legal ground for the American system of government, sanctioning its independence and serving as the basis for the documents of a constitutional nature that followed. The treatment of the nature of man and his rights is the most important feature of the revolutionary conclusions of the Declaration. (shrink)

Miller, D., G. Nadathur, F. Pfenning and A. Scedrov, Uniform proofs as a foundation for logic programming, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 51 125–157. A proof-theoretic characterization of logical languages that form suitable bases for Prolog-like programming languages is provided. This characterization is based on the principle that the declarative meaning of a logic program, provided by provability in a logical system, should coincide with its operational meaning, provided by interpreting logical connectives as simple and fixed (...) search instructions. The operational semantics is formalized by the identification of a class of cut-free sequent proofs called uniform proofs. A uniform proof is one that can be found by a goal-directed search that respects the interpretation of the logical connectives as search instructions. The concept of a uniform proof is used to define the notion of an abstract logic programming language, and it is shown that first-order and higher-order Horn clauses with classical provability are examples of such a language. Horn clauses are then generalized to hereditary Harrop formulas and it is shown that first-order and higher-order versions of this new class of formulas are also abstract logic programming languages if the inference rules are those of either intuitionistic or minimal logic. The programming language significance of the various generalizations to first-order Horn clauses is briefly discussed. (shrink)

Cerrito has proposed a declarative semantics for allowed logic programs using Girard's linear logic, with weakening. We propose an alternative semantics using pure linear logic. The main difference between our approach and that of Cerrito is that the comma of a logic program is interpreted as the multiplicative connective instead of the additive &. This enables us to establish a soundness result without the introduction of the projection symbols employed by Cerrito. The price to be paid for this simplification (...) occurs in the establishment of a completeness result. Our definition of the completed program is more complicated than that given by Cerrito. We establish a completeness result for the class of allowed programs and queries using our definition of the program completion. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to develop a declarative semantics for N-Prolog with negation as failure. N-Prolog is an extension of Prolog proposed by Gabbay and Reyle, which allows for occurrences of nested implications in both goals and clauses. Our starting point is an operational semantics of the language defined by means of top-down derivation trees. Negation as finite failure can be naturally introduced in this context. A goal-G may be inferred from a database if every top-down derivation (...) of G from the database finitely fails, i.e., contains a failure node at finite height.Our purpose is to give a logical interpretation of the underlying operational semantics. In the present work we take into consideration only the basic problems of determining such an interpretation, so that our analysis will concentrate on the propositional case. Nevertheless we give an intuitive account of how to extend our results to a first order language. A full treatment of N-Prolog with quantifiers will be deferred to the second part of this work. (shrink)

Arguments that Aquinas’s literal commentaries on Aristotle present his own philosophy are often proxies for larger claims about the relation of philosophy to theology. While trying to secure a place for Thomas in philosophic conversation, such arguments impose modern notions of an autonomous and apodictic philosophy, with fixed genres of declarative speech. The result is neither a plausiblereading of the Thomistic corpus nor a helpful exemplar for contemporary Catholic philosophy.

Violence, poverty, and illness are all too prevalent in our world. In order to alleviate their hold systematically, we need normative schemes with a global reach and with definite responsibilities. Martha Nussbaum’s human capabilities theory (Martha Nussbaum 2006) provides us with an insightful example. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (The United Nations 1948), however, already includes most of the human capabilities central to Nussbaum’s theory, and violence, poverty, and illness usually appear as objectionable enough without any additional reference to (...) capabilities. In the current article, the author argues that the primary global responsibilities can mainly be established without Nussbaum’s account of capabilities. The human rights-based approach is more promising for this purpose (Jack Donnelly 2007; Abigail Gosselin, Human Rights Review 8:35–52, 2006; Ivar Kolstad, Human Rights Review, doi:10.1007/s12142-008-0103-1, 2008). However, the author also contends that Nussbaum’s theory may be very instructive as a relatively comprehensive moral approach that supplements the human rights view and inspires its adherents to assume secondary responsibilities in addition to the primary ones. Once we learn to see Nussbaum’s agenda in this way, not as the global program, but as one of the many reasonable and relatively comprehensive views in the global background culture, we can also learn to cultivate the responsibilities it implies in a duly dialogical way. (shrink)

Doctoral programs at U.S. universities play a critical role in the development of human resources both in the United States and abroad. This volume reports the results of an extensive study of U.S. research-doctorate programs in five broad fields: physical sciences and mathematics, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, biological sciences, and the humanities. Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States documents changes that have taken place in the size, structure, and quality of doctoral education since the widely used 1982 editions. This (...) update provides selected information on nearly 4,000 doctoral programs in 41 subdisciplines at 274 doctorate-granting institutions. This volume also reports the results of the National Survey of Graduate Faculty, which polled a sample of faculty for their views on the scholarly quality of program faculty and the effectiveness of doctoral programs in preparing research scholars/scientists. This much-anticipated update of such an essential reference will be useful to education administrators, university faculty, and students seeking authoritative information on doctoral programs. (shrink)

The First International Workshop brings together researchers from the theoretical ends of the logic programming and artificial intelligence communities to discuss their mutual interests. Logic programming deals with the use of models of mathematical logic as a way of programming computers, where theoretical AI deals with abstract issues in modeling and representing human knowledge and beliefs. One common ground is nonmonotonic reasoning, a family of logics that includes room for the kinds of variations that can be found (...) in human reasoning. Topics covered: Stable Semantics. Default Logic. AutoEpistemic Logic. Truth Maintenance Systems. Implementation Issues. Diagnosis. Applications. Inheritance Reasoning. Logics of Belief. Inconsistency and Non-Monotonicity. (shrink)

"An important contribution to contemporary jurisprudential debate and to legal thought more generally, Just Interpretations is far ahead of currently available work."--Peter Goodrich, author of Oedipus Lex "I was struck repeatedly by the clarity of expression throughout the book. Rosenfeld's description and criticism of the recent work of leading thinkers distinguishes his work within the legal theory genre. Furthermore, his own theory is quite original and provocative."--Aviam Soifer, author of Law and the Company We Keep.

This volume presents a collection of refereed papers reflecting the state of the art in the area of over-constrained systems. Besides 11 revised full papers, selected from the 24 submissions to the OCS workshop held in conjunction with the First International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP '95, held in Marseilles in September 1995, the book includes three comprehensive background papers of central importance for the workshop papers and the whole field. Also included is an introduction (...) by one of the volume editors together with a bibliography listing 243 entries. All in all this is a very useful reference book relevant for all researchers and practitioners interested in hierarchical, partial, and over-constrained systems. (shrink)

We present a high-level declarative programming language for representing argumentation schemes, where schemes represented in this language can be easily validated by domain experts, including developers of argumentation schemes in informal logic and philosophy, and serve as executable specifications for automatically constructing arguments, when applied to a set of assumptions. This new rule language for representing argumentation schemes is validated by using it to represent twenty representative argumentation schemes.

Viyana Çevresi, sunduğu program ve felsefe-bilim ilişkisine dair görüşleriyle 20. yüzyıl felsefesinin kurucu unsurlarından biridir. Viyana Çevresi felsefesini tarihsel bağlamından bağımsız olarak, mantıkçı olguculuk ve benzeri birtakım kavramlarla sınırlı anlama girişimleri, çevrenin gerçekte nasıl bir program önerdiğinin kavranmasını güçleştirmiştir. Hatta bu tür girişimler, Viyana Çevresinin metafiziğe ilişkin savlarından da yola çıkarak, çevrenin programının, toplumsal ve insani olanı dışlayıcı bir öze sahip olduğu biçiminde yorumlanmasına neden olmuştur. Bu yazıda, Viyana Çevresinin bilim ve felsefeye dair sunduğu programın, günümüz felsefesinin biçimlenmesinde etkin bir (...) rol oynadığı, bu rolün de sanılanın aksine Viyana Çevresinin toplumsal konulara ilişkin ortaya koyduğu tezlerden de kaynaklandığı, tarihsel ve düşünsel bir arkaplan soruşturmasıyla gösterilmeye çalışılacaktır.With its considerations on the relations between science and philosophy and its declared program, Vienna Circle is one of the constitutive elements of the twentieth century philosophy. Attempts to understand the Circle limited with some expressions like logical positivism, regardless of its historical context, have led to some difficulties about the real nature of its program. Such attempts, moreover, have adduced from the thoughts of the Vienna Circle on metaphysics that the program of the Circle, in essence, was hostile to anything that is social and human. In this paper, through a historical and intellectual background inquiry it is tried to put that the declared program of Vienna Circle about science and philosophy has played a crucial role for the formation of the philosophy today, and unlike as one may think, this role can only be conceived fully if one respects the theses of the Circle about the social problems properly. (shrink)

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Frontiers of Combining Systems, FroCoS 2000, held in Nancy, France, in March 2000.The 14 revised full papers presented together with four invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 31 submissions. Among the topics covered are constraint processing, interval narrowing, rewriting systems, proof planning, sequent calculus, type systems, model checking, theorem proving, declarative programming, logic programming, and equational theories.

Representation and computation of negation is very important in problem solving in various application domains. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach to negation. While most theories for negation are based on the logic paradigm, this theory is constructed based on the equivalent transformation computation model, since the ET model provides us with “decomposability of programs,” i.e., a program in the ET model is a set of ET rules and can be synthesized by generating each ET (...) rule independently of other ET rules. To represent negation in the ET model, a constraint is introduced as a pair of an object and a domain. A constraint becomes true when the object is specialized to a ground object within the domain. A negative constraint has a domain that is the complement of the meaning of the corresponding declarative description. Computation of negation in the ET paradigm is realized by equivalent transformation of declarative descriptions including negative constraints. For each negative constraint in a definite clause, a new declarative description is produced and transformed equivalently. When it is transformed to a set of unit clauses, the negative constraint is solved. Each unit clause returns a simple constraint to the “caller” clause. This paper proves two theorems that provide a basis for such equivalent transformation of negative constraints. (shrink)

This book is an examination of the foundations and applications of the program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages introduced in 1967 by Donald Davidson in his classic paper “Truth and Meaning.” This is the second of two books on Donald Davidson’s central philosophical project. The first, Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), dealt with the basic framework of Davidson’s truth-theoretic approach to providing a meaning theory for a natural language, and then with his (...) development of his general project in the philosophy of language and theory of meaning by way of the analysis of the empirical confirmation of a meaning theory for a speaker, from the stance of the radial interpreter, that is, the interpreter who starts out without any detailed knowledge of the speakers’ meanings or attitudes. This book turns to the development of details of Davidson’s semantic program, specifically, the pursuit of the project of providing a compositional semantic theory for natural languages by making strategic use of an appropriately adapted Tarski-style axiomatic truth theory. Such a theory aims to provide a specification of the truth conditions of any felicitous utterance of a natural language sentence which serves to interpret it, and exhibits in the proof of the theorem that gives the truth conditions the compositional structure of the sentence and how its truth depends on its context of utterance. The book develops the basic framework, applies it to quantifiers, proper names, indexicals, simple and complex demonstratives, quotation, adjectives and adverbs, simple tenses of state and event verbs, temporal adverbs and quantifiers, tense in sentential complements and perfect tenses, opaque contexts, especially indirect discourse and attitude sentences, non-declarative sentences, semantic structure and logical form, and discusses the relation of the framework the metaphysics of truth. (shrink)

Inspired by legal reasoning, this paper presents a formal framework for assessing conflicting arguments. Its use is illustrated with applications to realistic legal examples, and the potential for implementation is discussed. The framework has the form of a logical system for defeasible argumentation. Its language, which is of a logic-programming-like nature, has both weak and explicit negation, and conflicts between arguments are decided with the help of priorities on the rules. An important feature of the system is that these (...) priorities are not fixed, but are themselves defeasibly derived as conclusions within the system. Thus debates on the choice between conflicting arguments can also be modelled.The proof theory of the system is stated in dialectical style, where a proof takes the form of a dialogue between a proponent and an opponent of an argument. An argument is shown to be justified if the proponent can make the opponent run out of moves in whatever way the opponent attacks. Despite this dialectical form, the system reflects a declarative, or relational approach to modelling legal argument. A basic assumption of this paper is that this approach complements two other lines of research in AI and Law, investigations of precedent-based reasoning and the development of procedural, or dialectical models of legal argument. (shrink)

The program of the evolution of the base of knowledge in machines' mechanisms on the example of technical systems of arbitrary purpose and structure with the aim of formalization and structurization of knowledge for creation of new techniques of automatized projecting in suggested. The program is declared as the process of transference of the base of knowledge from its initial state into final one, at the permissible restrictions in quality and resources in real time. The program's concept is based on (...) the introduction of N-measured structural space. Discrete coordinates of the multi-measured vector of this space are: flathierarchical sets of languages, objects, problems, estimations, resources, restrictions, types of working areas, etc. The vectors' co-ordinates define the set of the program projects. The possibility of choice of the optimal program strategies' realization is discussed. The concept can be applied to objects of arbitrary purpose. (shrink)

The SDML programming language which is optimized for modelling multi-agent interaction within articulated social structures such as organizations is described with several examples of its functionality. SDML is a strictly declarative modelling language which has object-oriented features and corresponds to a fragment of strongly grounded autoepistemic logic. The virtues of SDML include the ease of building complex models and the facility for representing agents flexibly as models of cognition as well as modularity and code reusability.

As Raymond Williams famously declared, nature is one of the most complex words in the English language – and, we may confidently predict, its Germanic relatives including Dutch. The workshop that took place in June 2007 in the Netherlands, from which this volume is derived, was based on an earlier program exploring connections between our concepts of nature and related concepts of science and religion. Though one may not immediately expect these three realms to be interrelated, countless examples suggest otherwise.