Deontic logic deals with obligation, permission and related normative concepts. It has become increasingly relevant for domains where it is necessary to distinguish between what is the case and what ought to be the case. In multi-agent systems and AI, it is viewed as instrumental in the design of a fully autonomous system, able to reason about the lawfullness of its own behavior, and make ethical decisions. In legal informatics, it provides effective and general means for the automation of normative reasoning processes based on legal knowledge bases. In philosophy, it provides a means of precise description of meaning, and helps tounderstand the nature of normative (e.g. ethical) reasoning, whose very possibility has been questioned. In linguistics it is a powerful tool for the semantic analysis of deontic modalities like ``must" or ``may'', thus allowing to draw meaning from texts
containing these modalities.
The course will cover the fundamentals of deontic logic, which emphasis on their semantics.
Two research traditions have dominated the landscape of deontic logic, one drawing on methods from modal logic, and the other drawing on methods from AI and rule-based systems. This course will introduce to three frameworks representative of these two research traditions: monadic deontic logic (MDL), dyadic deontic logic (DDL), and input/output (I/O) logic. We will describe their language, semantics, axiom systems,and gives soundness and completeness theorems. We will also introduce students to some of the main topics discussed in deontic logic, including reasoning about norm violation and conflicts. If time allows the course will provide a glimpse of normative automated reasoning (Isabelle/HOL).
This is primarily meant as a logic course. However, it will also introduce to topics in philosophy of norms and in the philosophy of language, of direct relevance to the course.
The course will be based on a textbook co-written by the lecturer and Prof. Dr. van der Torre (University of Luxembourg), Introduction to Deontic Logic and Normative Systems (College Publications, UK, 2018). The textbook is freely available on the publisher's website.
The course is organized in on-line lectures, homework and exercise sessions
Blocked course over 12 days, with one lecture per day at 4 pm Vienna Time / 10 am Tufts time
Scheduled for 1-13 June 2023.
