Deontic epistemic stit logic distinguishing modes of mens rea

Abstract

Most juridical systems contain the principle that an act is only unlawful if the agent conducting the act has a 'guilty mind' ('mens rea'). Different law systems distinguish different modes of mens rea. For instance, American law distinguishes between 'knowingly' performing a criminal act, 'recklessness', 'strict liability', etc. This paper shows we can formalize several of these categories. The formalism used is a complete stit logic featuring operators for actions taking effect in next states, operators for S5-knowledge and operators for SDL-type obligation. The different modes of 'mens rea' correspond to the violation conditions of different types of obligation definable in the logic.

State and path coalition effectivity models of concurrent multi-player games

“…Other approaches include the semantics based on the concept of bundled tree [13], a Kripke-style semantics based on the concept of Ockhamist frame [24], as well as the semantics based on the concept of Kamp frame [10]. Applying our results to the other semantics of stit is an interesting issue, but we leave it for another study.…”

Stit Logics, Games, Knowledge, and Freedom

“…10 This is trivial if we confine our attention to a two-agent CSTIT; in this case, the STIT property of strong confluence reduces to the confluence property of S5 2 ("squared S5"), which is decidable and finitely axiomatizable. 11 The interesting virtue of STIT is that it keeps these properties even when more than two operators are at stake. The key issue is indeed strong confluence, which in turn reduces all the confluences of arbitrary length to the confluence…”

“…11 Balbiani, Herzig, and Troquard [1, p. 395] prove that the logic of two-agent Chellas stit is nothing but S5 2 . 12 See Hirsch, Hodkinson, and Kurucz [19].…”

“…16 To be more precise, the temporal component of BT + AC structures are trees. Along the years, other temporal components of indeterministic time for choices and agents have been introduced; see, for instance, the XSTIT frames due to Broersen [11], the bundled choice trees of Ciuni and Zanardo [18], and the Kripke STIT frames of Lorini [26]. 17 Display of a temporal order is necessary to define the so-called 'stit operators for noninstantaneous agency', that is operators that express a temporal hiatus between choice and result.…”

“…STIT has its roots in the field of formal philosophy, and has been applied to clarify some crucial conceptual issues in the theory of action and ethics-for example, connections between moral responsibility and the principle of "could have done otherwise" [4], the rigorous formulation of criteria for consequentialist theories of action [24], the judicial notion of mens rea [11], and the attribution of individual responsibility in cases of group agency [16]. However, in the twenty some years since its introduction, 1 the applications of STIT have slowly shifted to theoretical computer science and related areas, particularly the logical foundations of multi-agent systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory.…”