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Acting, Events and Actions

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5076))

Abstract

A logic of action is essential for many treatments of normative concerns, but most treatments either ignore the role of agents, as in PDL, or omit all possibility of naming actions, as in various versions of stit theory. Moreover, most treatments of either type do not attempt to provide an account of what actions are, in a way that would distinguish actions from other processes or events. In this paper, I explore an account of actions as a species of events, with events interpreted against a background of the logic of branching time. This opens a new approach to exploring the relations between logics of personal action (e.g. Belnap’s and Horty’s stit theories) and impersonal logics of actions such as PDL, and offers some prospect of a deontic logic which integrates tunsollen (ought to do) into a system of seinsollen (ought to be).

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Ron van der Meyden Leendert van der Torre

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Brown, M.A. (2008). Acting, Events and Actions. In: van der Meyden, R., van der Torre, L. (eds) Deontic Logic in Computer Science. DEON 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5076. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70525-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70525-3_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-70524-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70525-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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