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Krister Segerberg’s Philosophy of Action

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Krister Segerberg on Logic of Actions

Part of the book series: Outstanding Contributions to Logic ((OCTR,volume 1))

Abstract

In his logic of action, Krister Segerberg has provided many insights about how to formalize actions. In this chapter I consider these insights critically, concluding that any formalization of action needs to be thoroughly connected to the relevant reasoning, and in particular to temporal reasoning and planning in realistic contexts. This consideration reveals that Segerberg’s ideas are limited in several fundamental ways. To a large extent, these limitations have been overcome by research that has been carried out for many years in Artificial Intelligence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Segerberg’s work on action is presented in articles dating from around 1980. See the articles by Segerberg cited in the bibliography of this chapter.

  2. 2.

    See [9].

  3. 3.

    Now we are working with Turing machines that run pseudocode, and whose states consist of assignments of values to an infinite set of variables. This assumption is legitimate, and loses no generality.

  4. 4.

    Corresponding to any state-tree, there is the set of its branches. Conversely, however, not every set of sequences can be pieced together into a tree.

  5. 5.

    Further examples along these lines, and a classification of the cases, can be found in [2]. I believe that an adequate theory of action must do justice to Austin’s distinctions.

  6. 6.

    See, for instance, [7].

  7. 7.

    Such routines might be helpful in designing a robot that could learn to throw darts, but issues like this are controversial in robotics itself. See [6] and other references on “situated robotics.”

  8. 8.

    See [13].

  9. 9.

    There are problems with such a termination rule in cases where the agent can exercise knowledge acquisition routines—routines that can expand the routines available to the agent. But this problem is secondary, and we need not worry about it.

  10. 10.

    In more complex cases, and to do justice to the way humans often plan, we might want to associate various levels of abstraction with a domain, and allow the primitive actions at higher levels of abstraction to be decomposed into complex lower-level actions. This idea has been explored in the AI literature; see, for instance, [15, 37]. One way to look at what Segerberg seems to be doing is this: he is confining means-end reasoning to realization and ignoring causality. He discusses cases in which the reasoning moves from more abstract goals to more concrete goals that realize them. But he ignores cases where, at the same level of abstraction, the reasoning moves from a temporal goal to an action that will bring the goal about if performed.

  11. 11.

    In this section, we use italics for predicates and SmallCaps for actions.

  12. 12.

    We can, of course, think of states as propositions of a special, very informative sort.

  13. 13.

    An action is trivial in \(s\) if it leaves \(s\) unchanged.

  14. 14.

    Reasoning in this direction is cumbersome; it is easier to find opportunities to act in a state \(s\) than to find ways in which \(s\) might have come about. Evidently, Segerberg’s method is not the most natural way to approach this planning problem.

  15. 15.

    See, for instance, [10, 14, 34, 39]. In this chapter I don’t follow any of the usual formalisms precisely, but have invented one that, I hope, will seem more familiar to readers who know some modal logic.

  16. 16.

    I hope the notation is clear. \([a]\) is a modal operator indicating what holds after performing action denoted by \(a\).

  17. 17.

    For more about methods for testing knowledge-based programs, see [12, 36]. For a discussion of the relation of logic to agent architectures, see ([40], Chap. 9).

  18. 18.

    These include [18, 20–24, 30, 31].

  19. 19.

    For more about intention-belief inconsistency, see ([5], pp. 37–38).

  20. 20.

    If this example fails to convince you, consider the following one. I’m a terrible typist. When I began to prepare this chapter, I believed I would make many typographical errors in writing it. But when I intended to write the chapter, I didn’t intend to make typographical errors.

  21. 21.

    The theory presented in [31] is by no means the only logic of intention to suffer from this problem. See, for instance, ([40], Chap. 4).

  22. 22.

    For mixed models of this kind, see, for instance, [16].

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  1. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Richmond H. Thomason

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Correspondence to Richmond H. Thomason .

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  1. The John Paul II Catholic University of, Lublin, Poland

    Robert Trypuz

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Thomason, R.H. (2014). Krister Segerberg’s Philosophy of Action. In: Trypuz, R. (eds) Krister Segerberg on Logic of Actions. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7046-1_1

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