A Logic of Knowing How

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modal logic framework for formal reasoning about an agent's goal-directed knowledge of how to achieve certain outcomes, integrating ideas from linguistics, philosophy, and planning.

Contribution

It develops a novel modal language and semantics based on labelled transition systems to model 'knowing how' and provides a sound and complete proof system for reasoning about it.

Findings

Defines a new semantics for 'knowing how' using labelled transition systems

Provides a sound and complete proof system for the logic

Highlights the compositional nature of 'knowing how'

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a single-agent modal logic framework for reasoning about goal-direct "knowing how" based on ideas from linguistics, philosophy, modal logic and automated planning. We first define a modal language to express "I know how to guarantee phi given psi" with a semantics not based on standard epistemic models but labelled transition systems that represent the agent's knowledge of his own abilities. A sound and complete proof system is given to capture the valid reasoning patterns about "knowing how" where the most important axiom suggests its compositional nature.