On Friday February 26th we will have a LIRa session with Jan Broersen.
Everyone is cordially invited!
NOTE: Today we start half an hour later than usual, at 13:30.
Speaker: Jan Broersen (Universiteit Utrecht)
Date and Time: Friday, February 26th 2016, 13:30-15:00
Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107
Title: Agents Necessitating Effects in Newtonian Time and Space: from Power and Opportunity to Effectivity.
Abstract. We extend stit logic by adding a spatial dimension. This enables us to distinguish between powers and opportunities of agents. Powers are agent-specific and do not depend on an agent’s location. Opportunities do depend on locations, and are equal for every agent. The central idea is to define the possibility to see to the truth of a condition in space and time as the combination of the power and the opportunity to do so. The focus on agent-relative powers and space-relative opportunities firmly roots effectivity of an autonomous choice making agent in a space-time picture. Our space-time view will be classical Newtonian, since we assume relativistic phenomena do not play a role in agentive effectivity. We show how our semantics naturally distinguishes between different kinds of histories; histories that reflect real (factual) possibilities and histories that reflect counterfactual possibilities (of a particular hypothetical kind). Furthermore, we discuss how the spatial picture sheds a clear light on conceptual problems for the central stit property of ‘independence of agency’.