One of the main tasks of engineers is to design structural systems light and economic as possible, yet resistant enough to withstand all possible loads arising during their service life and to absorb the induced seismic energy in a controlled and predictable fashion. The traditional trial-and-error design approach is not capable to determine an economical design satisfying also the code require...

The issue of reduction of propositions to sets of possible worlds is addressed. It is shown that, under some natural assumptions, there always exist recursive propositions, i.e. decidable sets of possible worlds, which are not assigned to any sentence of a language. Some consequences of this result are discussed.

1. MAYBMS Incomplete information is frequent in real-world applications. This is often the case in data integration scenarios, in scientific data collections, or whenever the information is acquired using human interaction and is erroneous or imperfect. The different interpretations of incomplete information yield different possible worlds. A system for managing incomplete data faces the challe...

Karttunen (1971) first pointed out that T&E can sometimes have ‘implicative’ readings, implying that their complement holds (in the case of enough)—or fails to hold (in the case of too)—in the actual world, instead of merely holding in some possible world(s). In uttering (2) for example, the speaker seems to imply that Jean actually left early (contrast this inference to the (lack of) inference...

The probabilistic top-k queries based on the interplay of score and probability, under the possible worlds semantic, become an important research issue that considers both score and uncertainty on the same basis. In the literature, many different probabilistic top-k queries are proposed. Almost all of them need to compute the probability of a tuple ti to be ranked at the j-th position across th...

Among the most remarkable developments in metaphysics since the 1950’s is the explosion of philosophical interest in possible worlds. This paper proposes an explanation of what possible worlds are, and argues that this proposal, the interpreted models conception, should be attractive to anyone who thinks that modal facts are primitive, and so not to be explained in terms of some non-modal notio...

Logical structures for modeling agents’ reasoning about unawareness are presented where it can hold simultaneously that: (i) agents’ beliefs about whether they are fully aware need not be veracious with partitional information; and (ii) the agent is fully aware if and only if she is aware of a fixed domain of formulae. In light of (ii), all states are deemed “possible”. Semantics operate in two...

The traditional thesis that God exists necessarily I could as well not exist. Had I fallen from the cliff last year, I would not exist now. Furthermore, had my parents not met, or had God not created a universe, I would never have come into existence. At any rate, there are many ways the world could be without me, or even without anybody like me. It is, in this sense, possible that I do not exi...