The Dynamics of Knowing How

Areces, C., Fervari, R., Saravia, A., and Velázquez-Quesada, F.. The Dynamics of Knowing How. Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 2025. To appear

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Abstract

We investigate dynamic operations acting over a knowing how logic. Our ap- proach uses a recently introduced semantics for the knowing how operator, which is based on an indistinguishability relation between plans, and which is arguably closer to the standard presentation of knowing that modalities in classic epis- temic logic. Here, we discuss how the new indistinguishability-based semantics enables us to define dynamic modalities representing different ways in which an agent can learn how to achieve a goal. In this regard, we study different alterna- tives for implementing two types of updates: ontic and epistemic. For the former, we provide axiomatizations over a restricted class of models. For the latter, we investigate some semantic properties and discuss what the difficulties are in ax- iomatizing dynamic modalities. In turn, we introduce a novel dynamic epistemic modality for which we have reduction axioms over an extended static knowing how language.

BibTeX

@article{arec:dyna25,
  author = {Areces, C. and Fervari, R. and Saravia, A. and Velázquez-Quesada, F.},
  title = {The Dynamics of Knowing How},
  journal = {Journal of Logic, Language and Information},
  note = {To appear},
  year = 2025,
  issn = "1572-9583",
  abstract = "We investigate dynamic operations acting over a knowing
                  how logic. Our ap- proach uses a recently introduced
                  semantics for the knowing how operator, which is
                  based on an indistinguishability relation between
                  plans, and which is arguably closer to the standard
                  presentation of knowing that modalities in classic
                  epis- temic logic. Here, we discuss how the new
                  indistinguishability-based semantics enables us to
                  define dynamic modalities representing different
                  ways in which an agent can learn how to achieve a
                  goal. In this regard, we study different alterna-
                  tives for implementing two types of updates: ontic
                  and epistemic. For the former, we provide
                  axiomatizations over a restricted class of
                  models. For the latter, we investigate some semantic
                  properties and discuss what the difficulties are in
                  ax- iomatizing dynamic modalities. In turn, we
                  introduce a novel dynamic epistemic modality for
                  which we have reduction axioms over an extended
                  static knowing how language.",
}