Dishonest Reasoning by Abduction

Chiaki Sakama

Abstract: This paper studies a computational logic for dishonest reasoning. We introduce logic programs with disinformation to represent and reason with dishonesty. We then consider two different cases of dishonesty: deductive dishonesty and abductive dishonesty. The former misleads another agent to deduce wrong conclusions, while the latter interrupts another agent to abduce correct explanations. In deductive or abductive dishonesty, an agent can perform different types of dishonest reasoning such as lying, bullshitting, and withholding information. We show that these different types of dishonest reasoning are characterized by extended abduction, and address their computational methods using abductive logic programming.