Operators vs. arguments

the ins and outs of reification

Antony Galton

pp. 415-441

in: Torben Brauner, Per V. Hasle, Peter Øhrstrøm (eds), The logic of time and modality, Synthese 150 (3), 2006.

Abstract

So-called ‘reified temporal logics’ were introduced by researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the early 1980s, and gave rise to a long-running series of debates concerning the proper way to represent states, events, causation, action, and other notions identified as crucial to the knowledge representation needs of AI. These debates never resulted in a definitive resolution of the issues under discussion, and indeed continue to produce aftershocks to the present day; none the less, we are now sufficiently far removed in time from their heyday for it to be a worthwhile exercise to stand back and review them as a connected piece of history.