Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Comments to ‘logics of public communications’

  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Take your average publication on the dynamics of knowledge. In one of its first paragraphs you will probably encounter a phrase like “a logic of public announcements was first proposed by Plaza in 1989 (Plaza 1989).” Tracking down this publication seems easy, because googling its title ‘Logics of Public Communications’ takes you straight to Jan Plaza’s website where it is online available in the author’s own version, including, on that page, very helpful and full bibliographic references to the proceedings in which it originally appeared. Those proceedings are then somewhat harder to find. In fact, I have never seen them. Unfortunately, for the research community, Plaza’s work has never been followed up by a journal version. I am very grateful to the editor Wiebe van der Hoek of the journal ‘Knowledge, Rationality, and Action’ to correct this omission.

Plaza’s work is reprinted as such, without an update encompassing more than fifteen additional years of research in this area. This commentary aims to provide some background to bridge that gap.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Alchourrón C., Gärdenfors P., Makinson D. (1985) On the logic of theory change: Partial meet contraction and revision functions. Journal of Symbolic Logic 50: 510–530

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aucher, G. (2003). A combined system for update logic and belief revision. Master’s thesis, ILLC, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. ILLC report MoL-2003-03.

  • Balbiani, P., van Ditmarsch, H., Herzig, A., & Lima, T. D. (2006). What becomes true after arbitrary announcements. Computer Science technical report OUCS-2006-06, University of Otago.

  • Baltag, A., & Moss, L. (2004). Logics for epistemic programs. Synthese, 139, 165–224. Knowledge, Rationality & Action 1–60.

  • Baltag, A., Moss, L., & Solecki, S. (1998). The logic of public announcements, common knowledge, and private suspicions. In I. Gilboa (Ed.), Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK 98), pp. 43–56.

  • Baltag, A., & Smets, S. (2006). Dynamic belief revision over multi-agent plausibility models. Proceedings of LOFT 2006 (7th Conference on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory).

  • Chandy, K., & Misra, J. (1985). How processes learn. In PODC ’85: Proceedings of the fourth annual ACM symposium on principles of distributed computing (pp. 204–214). New York, NY, USA: ACM Press.

  • de Rijke, M. (1994). Meeting some neighbours. In J. van Eijck, & A. Visser (Eds.), Logic and information flow (pp. 170–195). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  • Demolombe R., Herzig A., Varzinczak I. (2003) Regression in modal logic. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 13(2): 165–185

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fagin R., Halpern J. (1994) Reasoning about knowledge and probability. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery: 41(2): 340–367

    Google Scholar 

  • Fagin R., Halpern J., Moses Y., Vardi M. (1995) Reasoning about knowledge. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Fine K. (1970) Propositional quantifiers in modal logic. Theoria 3: 336–346

    Google Scholar 

  • Freudenthal H. (1969) (formulation of the Sum-and-Product problem). Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde 3(17): 152

    Google Scholar 

  • Gerbrandy, J. (1999). Bisimulations on planet Kripke. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam. ILLC Dissertation Series DS-1999-01.

  • Gerbrandy J., Gerbrandy W.J., Groeneveld W. (1997) Reasoning about information change. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 6: 147–169

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Groenendijk J., Stokhof M. (1991) Dynamic predicate logic. Linguistics and Philosophy 14(1): 39–100

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Groeneveld, W. (1995). Logical investigations into dynamic semantics. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam. ILLC Dissertation Series DS-1995-18.

  • Halpern J. (2003) Reasoning about uncertainty. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Halpern, J., & Moses, Y. (1984). Knowledge and common knowledge in a distributed environment. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM symposium on principles of distributed computing (PODS) (pp. 50–61). A newer version appeared in the Journal of the ACM, vol. 37:3, 1990, pp. 549–587.

  • Jaspars, J. (1994). Calculi for constructive communication. Ph.D. thesis, University of Tilburg. ILLC Dissertation Series DS-1994-4, ITK Dissertation Series 1994-1.

  • Kooi, B. (2003). Knowledge, chance, and change. Ph.D. thesis, University of Groningen. ILLC Dissertation Series DS-2003-01.

  • Landman, F. (1986). Towards a theory of information. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam.

  • Laverny, N. (2006) Révision, mises à jour et planification en logique doxastique graduelle’. Ph.D. thesis, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), Toulouse, France.

  • Liu, F. (2004). Dynamic variations: Update and revision for diverse agents. Technical report, University of Amsterdam. ILLC report MoL-2004-05 (MSc thesis).

  • Lomuscio, A., & Ryan, M. (1998). An algorithmic approach to knowledge evolution. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (AIEDAM), 13(2). Special issue on Temporal Logic in Engineering.

  • Lutz, C. (2006). Complexity and succinctness of public announcement logic. In Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (AAMAS 06), pp. 137–144.

  • McCarthy, J. (1990). Formalization of two puzzles involving knowledge. In V. Lifschitz (Ed.), Formalizing common sense: Papers by John McCarthy, Ablex Series in Artificial Intelligence. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Original manuscript dated 1978–1981.

  • Parikh, R., & Ramanujam, R. (1985). Distributed processing and the logic of knowledge. In Logic of Programs, Vol. 193 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 256–268), Springer. A newer version appeared in Journal of Logic, Language and Information, vol. 12, 2003, pp. 453–467.

  • Plaza, J. (1989). Logics of public communications. In M. Emrich, M. Pfeifer, M. Hadzikadic, & Z. Ras (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on methodologies for intelligent systems: Poster session program (pp. 201–216). Oak Ridge National Laboratory. ORNL/DSRD-24.

  • Renardel de Lavalette G. (2004) Changing modalities. Journal of Logic and Computation 14(2): 253–278

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scherl R., Levesque H. (2003) Knowledge, action and the frame problem. Artificial Intelligence 144(1–2): 1–39

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ten Cate B. (2006) Expressivity of second-order propositional modal logic. Journal of Philosophical Logic 35: 209–223

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van Benthem, J. (1989). Semantic parallels in natural language and computation. In Logic colloquium ’87. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

  • van Benthem J., van Eijck J., Kooi B. (2006) Logics of communication and change. Information and Computation 204(11): 1620–1662

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van Ditmarsch, H. (2000). Knowledge games. Ph.D. thesis, University of Groningen. ILLC Dissertation Series DS-2000-06.

  • van Ditmarsch H. (2005) Prolegomena to dynamic logic for belief revision. Synthese (Knowledge, Rationality & Action) 147: 229–275

    Google Scholar 

  • van Ditmarsch, H., Ruan, J., & Verbrugge, R. (2007a). Sum and product in dynamic epistemic logic. Journal of Logic and Computation. To appear.

  • van Ditmarsch, H., van der Hoek, W., & Kooi, B. (2005). Dynamic epistemic logic with assignment. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 05) (pp. 141–148). New York: ACM Inc.

  • van Ditmarsch, H., van der Hoek, W., & Kooi, B. (2007b). Dynamic epistemic logic, Vol. 337 of Synthese Library. Springer.

  • van Emde Boas, P., Groenendijk, J., & Stokhof, M. (1984). The Conway paradox: Its solution in an epistemic framework. In J. Groenendijk, T. Janssen, & M. Stokhof (Eds.), Truth, interpretation and information: Selected papers from the third amsterdam colloquium (pp. 159–182). Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

  • Veltman F. (1996) Defaults in update semantics. Journal of Philosophical Logic 25: 221–261

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Hans P. van Ditmarsch

Authors
  1. Hans P. van Ditmarsch
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hans P. van Ditmarsch.

Additional information

This is a commentary on Jan Plaza’s ‘Logics of Public Communications’, reprinted in this same issue.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

van Ditmarsch, H.P. Comments to ‘logics of public communications’. Synthese 158, 181–187 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-007-9167-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-007-9167-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation