Doing Without Action Types

Abstract

This paper explores the analysis of ability, where ability is to be understood in the epistemic sense—in contrast to what might be called a causal sense. There are plenty of cases where an agent is able to perform an action that guarantees a given result even though she does not know which of her actions guarantees that result. Such an agent possesses the causal ability but lacks the epistemic ability. The standard analysis of such epistemic abilities relies on the notion of action types—as opposed to action tokens—and then posits that an agent has the epistemic ability to do something if and only if there is an action type available to her that she knows guarantees it. We show that these action types are not needed: we present a formalism without action types that can simulate analyzes of epistemic ability that rely on action types. Our formalism is a standard epistemic extension of the theory of “seeing to it that”, which arose from a modal tradition in the logic of action.

Neighbourhood semantics and axioms for strategic fragment of classical stit logic

“…Nevertheless, on the level of semantics this extension will require the addition of ∼ i relations to the osstit frames. The desired properties of the indistinguishability relations and their connections with Choice functions are not clear: the most recent discussions on the topic could be found in [8], [4].…”

Logics of Responsibility

“…A well-known issue is that uniform strategies lead to complications in ATEL (see Herzig & Troquard, 2006, for a brief discussion on the matter). 59 To clarify, in our joint paper (Duijf et al, 2021) we show that these two conditions can be thought of as corresponding conditions in two different classes of stit models: epistemic labelled bt-models, on the one hand, and ebt-models, on the other. 60 For a good introduction to epistemic modal logic, the reader is referred to standard textbooks on the matter (Blackburn et al, 2002;Fagin et al, 1995;Halpern & Fagin, 1989;Hintikka, 1962).…”

“…Conclusion • 73 the practice of tagging different action tokens under the same type allows us to describe uniformity across indistinguishable indices in labelled bt-models (see Definition 2.24); and (b) through uniformity of historical possibility, that establishes that the same knowledge should be historically possible at indistinguishable indices. Both conditions are further explored in Chapters 3 and 4, and they were shown to correspond to one another by Duijf et al (2021). 59 Of course, all these topics imply drawing a bridge between stit theory and a huge field in formal philosophy known as formal epistemology.…”

“…-Chapter 4 is based on an idea from an extended abstract (Broersen & Abarca, 2018a), that was later fully developed across two articles (Abarca & Broersen, 2019;Broersen & Abarca, 2018b). It is also highly influenced by my joint work with Hein Duijf, Jan Broersen, and Alexandra Kuncová (Duijf, Broersen, Kuncová, & Abarca, 2021). Additionally, its conclusion includes a restriction of a framework that was introduced in another article with Jan Broersen (Abarca & Broersen, 2021a).…”

“…However, Herzig and Troquard (2006) managed to circumvent the introduction of action types to BST and still succeeded in characterizing (UAAT). Their method was further developed by Duijf et al (2021), who showed that types are not necessary to formalize either (UAAT) or the epistemic sense of ability. All these topics are prominent throughout this thesis.…”