Epistemic Oughts in Stit Semantics

Abstract

This paper explores ways in which agentive, deontic, and epistemic concepts combine to yield ought statements, or "oughts," of different characters. I am especially interested in agentive ought statements whose violation invites criticism of the agent. I refer to these statements as "epistemic oughts," since an appeal to knowledge seems to play such an important role in their description. The investigation takes place in the setting of stit semantics, a modal framework for the analysis of agentive statements. I begin by supplementing stit semantics with an epistemic operator, and then exploring an initial account of epistemic oughts that results from combining this operator with agentive and deontic concepts in a straightforward way. After showing that this initial proposal is flawed, I then offer an account of epistemic oughts in which the role of knowledge is more complex, but which escapes the flaws of the initial proposal. Finally, I mention two directions for generalization: to relativistic oughts, and to conditional oughts. 1. This phrase has also been used to describe ought statements that are based on epistemic, rather than moral or practical, norms, such as "The keys ought to be in the office, since I've looked everywhere else," as well as ordinary ought statements that are themselves concerned with epistemic matters, such as "You ought to have known not to wait till the last minute." I do not discuss these other uses of the phrase here. 2. Histories of the subject, with references to the works of these writers and others, can be found in Segerberg (1992), and at various points throughout Belnap, Perloff, and Xu (2001).

A Deontic Stit Logic Based on Beliefs and Expected Utility

“…In principle, if an agent does not know how to fulfill an obligation, it should be excused for not having done so. The mentioned [21], [13], and [1] all extend Horty's stit theory of act utilitarian ought-to-do with knowledge operators and explore the relation between uncertainty and obligation. In turn, here we will be extending the logics of [13] and [1] with modalities for belief.…”

“…Horty's idea of optimality is undeniably inspired by solution concepts from game theory, particularly by dominance of strategies. Following this idea, the recent works [21] and [1] introduce epistemic (resp. subjective) ought-to-do's to account for the relation between knowledge and obligation.…”

“…The logic presented in the previous section offers many benefits for addressing complex interactive situations. The common thread among these situations is that agentive knowledge is taken into consideration when deciding whether an agent is responsible for having brought about some circumstance (see Horty's coin-flip puzzles in [21] and [1]). However, we want to enhance the analysis by accounting for agents' belief-systems.…”

Towards AI Logic for Social Reasoning

“…Indeed STIT-logic not only well captures individual actions but also collective ones [69], and thus it has be widely applied into the analysis of social influence [70], strategic games [71], and legal reasoning [19,24]. Recently STIT-logics of obligation and knowledge have been developed [12,14]. For more discussions of STIT please refer to [72].…”

“…In a sense, social collective behavior is the sum of the individual behaviors of the agents [13], but it is still challenging to relate social reasoning to the practical reasoning of the agents in formal theories. Individual agent reasoning is built on ability and knowledge, where the abilities of an agent are reflected by the actions it can execute, and its knowledge contains also the uncertainty, under which it makes decisions [14,15]. In particular, we address the following questions concerning the development of social AI logic:…”