Situation Theory and situation semantics are recent approaches to language and information, approaches first formulated by Jon Barwise and John Perry in Situations and Attitudes (1983). The present volume collects some of Barwise's papers written since then, those directly concerned with relations among logic, situation theory, and situation semantics. Several papers appear here for the first time.

Reasoning about knowledge—particularly the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each other's knowledge—was once the exclusive province of philosophers and puzzle solvers. More recently, this type of reasoning has been shown to play a key role in a surprising number of contexts, from understanding conversations to the analysis of distributed computer algorithms. Reasoning About Knowledge is the first book to provide a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory. It brings eight years of work by the authors into a cohesive framework for understanding and analyzing reasoning about knowledge that is intuitive, mathematically well founded, useful in practice, and widely applicable. The book is almost completely self-contained and should be accessible to readers in a variety of disciplines, including computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, and game theory. Each chapter includes exercises and bibliographic notes.

Situation theory is the result of an interdisciplinary effort to create a full-fledged theory of information. Created by scholars and scientists from cognitive science, computer science, AI, linguistics, logic, philosophy, and mathematics, the theory is forging a common set of tools for the analysis of phenomena from all these fields. This volume presents work that evolved out of the Second Conference on Situation Theory and its Applications. Twenty-six essays exhibit the wide range of the theory, covering such topics as natural language semantics, philosophical issues about information, mathematical applications, and the visual representation of information in computer systems.Jon Barwise is a professor of philosophy, mathematics, and logic at Indiana University in Bloomington. Jean Mark Gawron is a researcher at SRI International and a consultant at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Gordon Plotkin is a professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh. Syun Tutiya is in the philosophy department at Chiba University in Japan.

The Poetics of the Common Knowledge focuses on Descartes, Hegel, Freud, and the information theorists, on the one hand, and the poets of the American avant-garde, on the other. This book is a call literally for a new poetry, a new making that manifests the possibility for sense-making in a postmodern condition without universals or absolutes. In such a poetry, fragmentation bespeaks not brokenness but the richness of the world apprehended without the habits of recognition.

Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge contains the proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge (TARK 1994) held in Pacific Grove, California, on March 13-16, 1994. The conference provided a forum for discussing the theoretical aspects of reasoning about knowledge and tackled topics ranging from the logic of iterated belief revision and backwards forward induction to information acquisition from multi-agent resources, infinitely epistemic logic, and coherent belief revision in games. Comprised of 23 chapters, this book begins with a review of situation calculus and a solution to the frame problem, along with the use of a regression method for reasoning about the effect of actions. A novel programming language for high-level robotic control is described, along with a knowledge-based framework for belief change. Subsequent chapters deal with consistent belief reasoning in the presence of inconsistency; an epistemic logic of situations; an axiomatic approach to the logical omniscience problem; and an epistemic proof system for parallel processes. Inductive learning, knowledge asymmetries, and convention are also examined. This monograph will be of interest to both students and practitioners in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer science.

This book provides an analysis of the meeting point between mainstream and formal theories of knowledge.