PROCESS REASONING · Reasoning about processes: a logico-philosophical investigation
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-01-01 → 2022-12-31
- EU contribution
- €207,312
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
Reasoning about processes: a logico-philosophical investigation
This research project was a logico-philosophical investigation into the formal aspects of process ontology against the background of an open future. The core metaphysical picture is this: the world is constantly changing, full of happenings and doings, and there are alternative future possibilities. Until a couple of years ago, static world views were the mainstream position, but currently dynamic world views are on the rise. The last decades have witnessed a growing interest in process ontologies, and the intuitive idea of a dynamic reality has also gained traction in the current debate on dispositions and powers. The formal aspects of such views are, however, notoriously under-investigated, and the metaphysical debate is in need of clarification. A thorough dynamic basis is also a desideratum in related disciplines, such as linguistics and computer science, where processes and change are relevant to capturing the variety of aspectual properties and modelling concurrent actions. The overall aim of this project was to develop a formal framework for representing processes and reasoning about them in an indeterministic setting that is philosophically well-informed and which ties in with the study of tense and aspect in linguistics as well as with logics of action in computer science. Central to the project was the utilisation of the transition approach developed by the researcher in her PhD thesis and subsequent work. The project pursued three objectives: (1) to provide a formal conceptualisation of processes and their modal-temporal properties in terms of transitions, (2) to implement the idea in a modal-temporal logic, and (3) to explore potential applications of the account to pertinent themes in linguistics and computer science. Building on the transition approach, the project provided a novel foundation for processes, shedding new light on our thinking about their dynamics.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The goal of this project is to develop a formal framework for reasoning about processes, as a contribution to modal-temporal logic, process ontology, formal semantics, and AI. The core metaphysical idea is this: the world is constantly changing – it is full of happenings and doings –, and the future is open. Even though this idea meshes very well with our common-sense reasoning about the world, an entirely static – pointillistic – picture of reality has established itself as the standard theoretical account. On that picture, the world is but a sequence of static states, and change is nothing over and above an object having different properties at different times. While the static idea fits well with our mathematical description of the world, it does not square with our intuitions about time, change, and agency. The last decades have thus witnessed a growing interest in a dynamic world view, and theories building on genuine dynamic entities, such as processes, dispositions, or powers, are on the rise. Despite the increasing interest in a dynamic conception of reality, the formal foundations of such views are notoriously under-investigated. The present project aims to fill in this lacuna: building on previous work by the ER, the project will propose a formal account of processes as genuinely dynamic entities and implement that account in a branching time logic. In developing a dynamic account of processes and their modal-temporal properties, the project will draw on discussions in the metaphysics of time and modality in order to arrive at a formal framework that is philosophically well-informed. Vice versa, making the ideas formally precise will help to clarify fundamental metaphysical questions. But the prospects of the project go far beyond philosophy: a rigorous formal account of processes will also prove fruitful in the study of tense and aspect in linguistics, and it opens up the possibility for implementation in AI and social robotics.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- AARHUS UNIVERSITET · Aarhus CCoordinatorDenmark
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/892905
- https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/projects/reasoning-about-processes-a-logicophilosophical-investigation-msca-individual-fellowship
Data: CORDIS, © European Union