Reasoning about Knowledge: A Response by the Authors

Reasoning about Knowledge:A Response by the Authors

RONALD FAGINIBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120-6099, U.S.A.(fagin@almaden.ibm.com)

JOSEPH Y. HALPERNDepartment of Computer Science, Cornell University, 4144 Upson Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, U.S.A.(halpern@cs.cornell.edu)

YORAM MOSESWeizmann Institute of Science, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, 76100Rehovot, Israel (yoram@wisdom.weizmann.ac.il)

MOSHE Y. VARDIDepartment of Computer Science, Rice University, 6100 S. Main Street, Houston, TX 77005-1892,U.S.A. (vardi@cs.rice.edu)

We thank Henry Kyburg for his detailed and scholarly review of our book, and themany complimentary remarks. While we do not agree with all the points he raised,he has already mentioned many of the points of disagreement in his review; thereseems little point in discussing these issues further.

There is, however, one addition point that we’d like to make. In our opinion,the review gives a somewhat misleading impression of the focus of the book. Aconsiderable part of the review is devoted to matters of terminology (e.g., ‘materialimplication’ vs. ‘conditionals’) and the issue of logical omniscience. While wedo not mean to downplay the terminological issues, and we certainly feel thatlogical omniscience is an important topic, most of the specific issues that Kyburgdiscusses concern (relatively few pages of) one of the eleven chapters in thebook. We feel that the main contribution of the book is a concrete framework forknowledge in multi-agent systems, which is applicable to a number of fields suchas distributed systems, AI, and economics, and which should also be of interestto philosophers and linguists. The framework should ultimately be judged both onits scientific appeal and its applicability. We hope that this point will not get lostamidst secondary concerns.

Minds and Machines 7: 113, 1997.c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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