Truth as Utility: A Conceptual Synthesis
This work provides a conceptual synthesis for AI and logic researchers, extending existing frameworks to handle complex constraints and ignorance in utility assessment, but it is incremental as it builds on prior logics of preference.
The paper tackles the problem of quantifying the quality of solutions or desirability of policies in reasoning and decision-making by introducing constraint-dependent measures that can be interpreted as truth values in a multi-valued logic, and it shows how to combine these into global utility measures while relating them to preferences and fuzzy logic models.
This paper introduces conceptual relations that synthesize utilitarian and logical concepts, extending the logics of preference of Rescher. We define first, in the context of a possible worlds model, constraint-dependent measures that quantify the relative quality of alternative solutions of reasoning problems or the relative desirability of various policies in control, decision, and planning problems. We show that these measures may be interpreted as truth values in a multi valued logic and propose mechanisms for the representation of complex constraints as combinations of simpler restrictions. These extended logical operations permit also the combination and aggregation of goal-specific quality measures into global measures of utility. We identify also relations that represent differential preferences between alternative solutions and relate them to the previously defined desirability measures. Extending conventional modal logic formulations, we introduce structures for the representation of ignorance about the utility of alternative solutions. Finally, we examine relations between these concepts and similarity based semantic models of fuzzy logic.