Reactive Kripke models and contrary to duty obligations. Part A: Semantics (Q1948290)

When logic and computer science first began their history of interaction in the last quarter of the twentieth century, there was a major effort to use the former to give declarative meaning to procedures of the latter; an important product of that enterprise was the development of declarative programming languages such as Prolog. More recently, Dov Gabbay has played an important role in the opposite direction -- seeking to deepen our understanding of logical notions by giving them procedural content. To be sure, one perspective does not contradict the other; there is nothing to stop one from articulating declarative meaning for the procedures thus elaborated, bringing us back to the purely logical sphere once more but hopefully at a deeper level. A salient instance of this way of doing logic has been the development of reactive Kripke models. They are like ordinary Kripke models, familiar from modal and intuitionistic contexts, but may undergo transformation as we traverse the model in order to evaluate a given formula. In particular, their accessibility relation(s) may grow or diminish as we pass from one point to another in the evaluation. Gabbay has applied reactive Kripke models in a number of areas, not only in the home grounds of modal and intuitionistic inference, but also in nonmonotonic reasoning, the general theory of conditionals, semantic tableaux, general proof theory, and grammars -- as well as to the logic of conditional norms, which is the subject of the paper under review. In that last area, his main goal has been to obtain improved semantics for contrary-to-duty obligations, where one obligation may be activated (or deactivated) by the violation of another. Reactive Kripke structures hold promise for modeling this vexing phenomenon, since passage from one point to another in the model may close or open links to other points, thereby creating or dissolving obligations. Alone or with co-authors, Gabbay has published three papers on the subject, with more in the pipeline. The text under review seeks to provide readers with a bird's eye view of reactive Kripke models in general and their application to contrary-to-duty norms in particular, with pointers to the other papers for technical details.