Reasoning about Unreliable Actions

02/01/2012

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by   Graham White, et al.

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We analyse the philosopher Davidson's semantics of actions, using a strongly typed logic with contexts given by sets of partial equations between the outcomes of actions. This provides a perspicuous and elegant treatment of reasoning about action, analogous to Reiter's work on artificial intelligence. We define a sequent calculus for this logic, prove cut elimination, and give a semantics based on fibrations over partial cartesian categories: we give a structure theory for such fibrations. The existence of lax comma objects is necessary for the proof of cut elimination, and we give conditions on the domain fibration of a partial cartesian category for such comma objects to exist.