Promotional Information

Halpern presents a masterful, complete, and unified account of the many ways in which the connections between logic, probability theory, and commonsensical linguistic terms can be formalized. Terms such as 'true,' 'certain,' 'plausible,' 'possible,' 'believed,' 'known,' 'default,' 'relevant,' 'independent,' and 'preferred' are given rigorous semantical and syntactical analyses, and their interrelationships explicated and exemplified. An authoritative panoramic reference for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers. -- Judea Pearl, Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles For some years now I have been testing a hypothesis: if a topic involving probability is of current interest to a philosopher, then Joseph Halpern has proved an important result that is relevant to it. Its accuracy can be gauged by the frequency with which I recommend his papers to colleagues and students. This book, which presents all these valuable contributions in a single volume, provides a rich source of technical and philosophical insight. -- Bas C. van Fraassen, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University Reasoning about Uncertainty pursues its own unified theoretical perspective in a remarkably systematic way, yet it is also a remarkably rich and complete textbook. It will be a rewarding book to work through for students and researchers alike. -- Wolfgang Spohn, Department of Philosophy, University of Konstanz

About the Author

Joseph Y. Halpern is Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He is the author of Actual Causality and the coauthor of Reasoning about Knowledge, both published by the MIT Press.