Conditionals and Action Logics

Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning

Volume

Papers from the 2007 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

The logic of conditionals (and, especially, of subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals) is a long-standing problem for the theory of common sense reasoning and philosophical logic. In this paper, I explore commonalities between the logical accounts of the conditional involving ``closeness'' relations over possible worlds and work in the logic of action and change that attempts to characterize the situation that results from the performance of an action. I will try to show that the latter approaches readily generalize to the case of conditionals (with suitably restricted antecedents), and that they fill a gap in the earlier, more abstract work on conditional logic.