On Friday, March 6, 2015, we will have a LogiCIC/LIRa session with Roberto Ciuni.
Everyone is cordially invited!
Speaker: Roberto Ciuni
Date and Time: Friday, March 6, 2015, 14:30-16:00
Venue: Science Park 107, Room F1.15
Title: Plausibility Trees and Simple Future
Abstract. In this talk I introduce a new formal setting for simple-future sentences in branching time. The new setting combines a quantification over histories–which is available in all branching-time logics–together with a plausibility relation between histories, so that a sentence like (a) ‘There will be a sea battle’ is taken to mean ‘There is a history h such that for all the histories h’ that are equally or more plausible than h, there is a later moment where it is the case that there is a sea battle’ (the implicit condition here is that we consider histories passing through the moment of valuation.) I present the new semantics against the background of current branching-time semantics, and I show that the new setting can help overcome some conceptual problems current branching-time semantics have in modelling ‘future contingents’ – that is simple-future sentences about states of affairs that are neither impossible nor inevitable.
Please note that next week we will have two joint LogiCIC/LIRa sessions:
Wednesday March 11, 11:30-13:00 with Hans van Ditmarsch at SP 107, Room F1.15
Thursday March 12, 15:00-17:00 with Christian List at SP 904, Room B0.207