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On the representation of normative sentences in FOL. (English) Zbl 1356.68032
Artikis, Alexander (ed.) et al., Logic programs, norms and action. Essays in honor of Marek J. Sergot on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-642-29413-6/pbk). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7360. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 273-294 (2012).
Summary: Rules, regulations and policy statements quite frequently contain nested sequences of normative modalities as in, for example:
$$\bullet$$ The database manager is obliged to permit the deputy-manager to authorise access for senior departmental staff.
$$\bullet$$ Parking on highways ought to be forbidden.
Accordingly, a knowledge-representation language for such sentences must be able to accommodate nesting of this kind. However, if-as some have proposed-normative modalities such as obligatory, permitted, and authorised are to be interpreted as first-order predicates of named actions, then nesting appears to present a problem, since the scope formula of obligatory in “obligatory that it is permitted that $$a$$” (where $$a$$ names an action) is not a name but a sentence.
The ‘disquotation’ theory presented in [S. O. Kimbrough, “A note on interpretations for federated languages and the use of disquotation”, in: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on artificial intelligence and law, ICAIL ’05. New York, NY: ACM. 10–19 (2005; doi:10.1145/1165485.1165488)] and elsewhere may provide a candidate solution to this FOL problem. In this paper we rehearse parts of that theory and evaluate its efficacy for dealing with the indicated normative nesting problem.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1241.68007].
##### MSC:
 68N17 Logic programming 68T27 Logic in artificial intelligence
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