I discuss three ways of responding to the logical omniscience problems faced by traditional ‘possible worlds’ epistemic logics. Two of these responses were put forward by Hintikka and the third by Cresswell; all three have been influential in the literature on epistemic logic. I show that both of Hintikka’s responses fail and present some problems for Cresswell’s. Although Cresswell’s approach ...

What characters believe, how they act based on those beliefs, and how their beliefs are updated is an essential element of many stories. State-space narrative planning algorithms treat their search spaces like a set of temporally possible worlds. We present an extension that models character beliefs as epistemically possible worlds and describe how such a space is generated. We also present the...

As an introduction, I want to contrast two general traditions in semantics, one realistic and one cognitive. According to the realistic approach to semantics the meaning of an expression is something out there in the world. In technical terms, a semantics for a language is defined as a mapping from the syntactic structures to things in the world (or in several possible worlds). Often meanings a...

This paper develops a new STIT based deontic logic, pessimistic utilitarian deontic logic, capable of analyzing the miners puzzle. The key idea of the semantics of this logic is: one set of possible worlds is better than another set of possible worlds iff the worst world in the first set is better than the worst world in the second. This semantics gives an idea to write predictions in the miner...

Given any symmetric monoidal (closed) category C and any suitable collections W of objects of C, it is shown how to construct C[W], a polynomial such category, the result of freely adjoining to C a system of monoidal indeterminates for every element of W. It is then shown that all of the categories of “possible worlds” used to treat languages that allow for dynamic creation of “new” variables, ...

Conversationally relevant descriptions are definite descriptions that are not merely tools for the identification of a referent, but are also crucial to the discourse in other respects. I analyze the uses of such descriptions in assertions as conveying a particular ~ype of conversational implicatures. Such implicstures can be represented within the framework of possible world semantics. The ana...

The four dimensional Abelian Higgs model with monopoles and Θ-term is considered in the limit of the large mass of the higgs boson. We show that for Θ = 2π the theory is equivalent, at large distances, to summation over all possible world-sheets of fermionic strings with Dirichlet type boundary conditions on string coordinates. Dedicated to the memory of Alexandr Hohlov. e–mail: akhmedov@vxitep...

Tense logic is often said to possess insufficient expressive resources to serve as a theory of the nature of time. This paper counters this objection by showing how to obtain quantification over times in a tense logic in which all temporal distinctions are ultimately spelled out in terms of the two simple tense operators “it was the case that” and “it will be the case that.” This account of tim...

I start from three premises, roughly as follows: (1) that if possible world x is better than world y for every individual who exists in either world, then x is better than y; (2) that if x has a higher average utility, a higher total utility, and no more inequality than y, then x is better than y; (3) that better than is transitive. From these premises, it follows that equality lacks intrinsic ...

The paper reviews the technical results from modal logic as well as their philosophical significance. It focuses on possible worlds semantics in general and on the notion of a possible world, of accessibility, and object.