A Logic of Inability
For researchers in multi-agent systems and AI safety, this provides a formal framework to reason about constraints and impossibility, though the contribution is incremental as it is a conservative extension.
The paper extends Coalition Logic with an explicit inability operator to formally reason about what coalitions cannot achieve, proving soundness, completeness, and conservativity over standard Coalition Logic.
Coalition Logic is primarily concerned with what coalitions can achieve, whereas what coalitions cannot achieve -- their \emph{inability} -- has received comparatively little explicit attention. This asymmetry matters in artificial intelligence and safety-critical multi-agent systems, where one often needs to specify not merely what agents are instructed or disposed not to do, but what they are \emph{unable} to bring about. We develop a conservative extension of Coalition Logic with an explicit inability operator, interpreted as the negation of coalition ability. This operator is introduced as a conservative and formally tractable starting point for studying inability as a modal concept in its own right. We prove soundness, completeness, and conservativity over standard Coalition Logic, and analyse the resulting modal behaviour: anti-monotonicity with respect to coalition inclusion, contravariance with respect to goal strength, asymmetric interaction with conjunction and disjunction, failure of superadditivity, non-equivalence with opponent ability, and the connection between grand-coalition inability and systemic impossibility. Making this definable operator explicit reveals a systematic modal structure governing the limits of agency, and supports reasoning about constraints, negative capabilities, and impossibility in multi-agent systems.