Justification Logic Reasoning with Reasons

Classical logic is concerned, loosely, with the behaviour of truths. Epistemic logic similarly is about the behaviour of known or believed truths. Justification logic is a theory of reasoning that enables the tracking of evidence for statements and therefore provides a logical framework for the reliability of assertions. This book, the first in the area, is a systematic account of the subject, progressing from modal logic through to the establishment of an arithmetic interpretation of intuitionistic logic. The presentation is mathematically rigorous but in a style that will appeal to readers from a wide variety of areas to which the theory applies. These include mathematical logic, artificial intelligence, computer science, philosophical logic and epistemology, linguistics, and game theory.

Introduction: 1. Why justification logic?; 2. The basics of justification logic; 3. The ontology of justifcations; 4. Fitting models; 5. Sequents and tableaus; 6. Realization – how it began; 7. Realization – generalized; 8. The range of realization; 9. Arithmetical completeness and BHK semantics; 10. Quantifiers in justification logic; 11. Going past modal logic.

Sergei Artemov is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York. He is a specialist in mathematical logic, logic in computer science, control theory, epistemology, and game theory. He is credited with solving long-standing problems in constructive logic that had been left open by Goedel and Kolmogorov since the 1930s. He has pioneered studies in the logic of proofs and justifications that renders a new, evidence-based theory of knowledge and belief. The most recent focus of his interests is epistemic foundations of game theory.
Melvin Fitting is Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York. He has written or edited a dozen books, and has worked in intensional logic, semantics for logic programming, theory of truth, and tableau systems for non-classical logics. In 2012 he received the Herbrand Award from the Conference on Automated Deduction. He was on the faculty of the City University of New York from 1969 to his retirement in 2013, at Lehman College, and at the Graduate Center, where he was in the Departments of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Philosophy.