Abstract
We look at two fundamental logical processes, often intertwined in planning and problem solving: inference and update. Inference is an internal process with which we uncover what is implicit in the information we already have. Update, on the other hand, is produced by external communication, usually in the form of announcements and in general in the form of observations, giving us information that might not have been available (even implicitly) before. Both processes have received attention from the logic community, usually separately. In this work, we develop a logical language that allows us to describe them together. We present syntax, semantics and a complete axiom system; we discuss similarities and differences with other approaches and mention how the work can be extended.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Johan van Benthem for his invaluable ideas and suggestions that led to the present work. He also thanks the organizers and participants of the ILLC’s Seminar on Logics for Dynamics of Information, as well as DGL’08 and LaII’08 workshops; their comments have helped to improve earlier versions.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Velázquez-Quesada, F.R. Inference and update. Synthese 169, 283–300 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9556-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9556-2