Culture Merging: A Logic Based Method

Studies in Logic, Vol. 13, No. 6 (2020): 89–110           PII: 1674­3202(2020)­06­0089­22

Xiaoxin Jing

Abstract. Intercultural conflict resolution is an important issue worldwide. However, we should avoid resolving them by war, violence, or even terrorism. To this end, this paper proposes a logic based merging method to resolve opinion conflicts on the same things in different cultures. Specifically, we first define each agent’s logic system, in a specific culture, as a tuple of the language and a binary relation over the language, which can well reflect different opinions on the same things in different cultures. Then we define a kind of the Hamming distance to measure the distance between any two cultural logic systems. Further, based on the distance measure, we define a kind of merging operator (including its special cases such as impartial merging operator, cautious operator, and tolerant merging operator) and reveal some of their properties such as consistency, agreement, strong unanimity, groundedness, anonymity, majority preservation, and uniqueness. In addition, we propose a method for merging cultural logic systems with different degrees of importance and with opinions which are important differently.