A Deontic Logic of Knowingly Complying

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Carlos Areces, Valentin Cassano, Pablo F. Castro, Raul Fervari, Andrés R. Saravia

Published: 2023, Last Modified: 11 Mar 2026AAMAS 2023EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: We introduce a logic for representing the deontic notion of knowingly complying associated to an agent's conciousness of taking a normative course of action for achieving a certain goal. Our logic features an operator for describing normative courses of actions, and another operator for describing what each agent knowingly complies with. We provide a sound and complete axiom system for our logic, and study the computational complexity of its satisfiability problem. Finally, we extend our logic with an additional operator for capturing the general abilities of the agents. This operator enables us to distinguish 'what agents can do' and 'what agents do according to norms'. For this extension, we also provide a sound and complete axiom system.