Reasoning about knowledge of unawareness revisited

Among the many possible approaches to dealing with logical omniscience, I consider here awareness and impossible worlds structures. The former approach, pioneered by Fagin and Halpern, distinguishes between implicit and explicit knowledge, and avoids logical omniscience with respect to explicit knowledge. The latter, developed by Rantala and by Hintikka, allows for the existence of logically impossible worlds to which the agents are taken to have “epistemological” access; since such worlds need not behave consistently, the agents’ knowledge is fallible relative to logical omniscience. The two approaches are known to be equally expressive in propositional systems interpreted over Kripke semantics. In this paper I show that the two approaches are equally expressive in propositional systems interpreted over Montague-Scott (neighborhood) semantics. Furthermore, I provide predicate systems of both awareness and impossible worlds structures interpreted on neighborhood semantics and prove the two systems to be equally expressive.

Games and Economic Behavior, 2008

We analyze a model of interactive unawareness introduced by Heifetz, Meier and Schipper (HMS). We consider two axiomatizations for their model, which capture different notions of validity. These axiomatizations allow us to compare the HMS approach to both the standard (S5) epistemic logic and two other approaches to unawareness: that of Fagin and Halpern and that of Modica and Rustichini. We show that the differences between the HMS approach and the others are mainly due to the notion of validity used and the fact that the HMS is based on a 3-valued propositional logic. * A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Tenth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK05).

Zeitschrift für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik, 1989

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 stages, with belief in the second stage determined by truth in the first stage. Characterization theorems show that, without the first stage, the structures validate the same conditions as those of Halpern and Rego (2009a).

数理解析研究所講究録, 1999

Games, 2016

The modeling of awareness and unawareness is a significant topic in the doxastic logic literature, where it is usually tackled in terms of full belief operators. The present paper aims at a treatment in terms of partial belief operators. It draws upon the modal probabilistic logic that was introduced by Aumann (1999) at the semantic level, and then axiomatized by Heifetz and Mongin (2001). The paper embodies in this framework those properties of unawareness that have been highlighted in the seminal paper by Modica and Rustichini (1999). Their paper deals with full belief, but we argue that the properties in question also apply to partial belief. Our main result is a (soundness and) completeness theorem that reunites the two strands—modal and probabilistic—of doxastic logic.

2010

The well-known Church-Fitch paradox shows that the verificationist knowability principle all truths are knowable, yields an unacceptable omniscience property. Our semantic analysis establishes that the knowability principle fails because it misses the stability assumption ‘the proposition in question does not change from true to false in the process of discovery,’ hidden in the verificationist approach. Once stability is made explicit, the resulting stable knowability principle accurately represents verificationist knowability, does not yield the omniscience property, and can be offered as a resolution of the knowability paradox. Two more principles are considered: total knowability stating that it is possible to know whether a proposition holds or not, and monotonic knowability stemming from the intrinsically intuitionistic reading of knowability. The study of these four principles yields a “knowability diamond” describing their logical strength. These results are obtained within a...

Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - AAMAS '03, 2003

We introduce and motivate a non-standard multi-modal logic to represent and reason about ignorance in Multi-Agent Systems. We argue that in Multi-agent systems being able to reason about what agents ignore is just as important as being able to reason about what agents know. We show a sound and complete axiomatisation for the logic. We investigate its applicability by restating the feasibility condition for the FIPA communication primitive of inform.

Logical Dynamics of Information and Interaction, 2000

Classical epistemic logic describes implicit knowledge of agents about facts and knowledge of other agents based on semantic information. The latter is produced by acts of observation or communication that are described well by dynamic epistemic logics. What these logics do not describe, however, is how significant information is also produced by acts of inference-and key axioms of the system merely postulate "deductive closure". In this paper, we take the view that all information is produced by acts, and hence we also need a dynamic logic of inference steps showing what effort on the part of the agent makes a conclusion explicit knowledge. Strong omniscience properties of agents should be seen not as static idealizations, but as the result of dynamic processes that agents engage in. This raises two questions: (a) how to define suitable information states of agents and matching notions of explicit knowledge, (b) how to define natural processes over these states that generate new explicit knowledge. To this end, we use a static base from the existing awareness literature, extending it into a dynamic system that includes traditional acts of observation, but also adding and dropping formulas from the current 'awareness' set. We give a completeness theorem, and we show how this dynamics updates explicit knowledge. Then we extend our approach to multi-agent scenarios where awareness changes may happen privately. Finally, we mention further directions and related approaches. Our contribution can be seen as a 'dynamification' of existing awareness logics.

The Review of Symbolic Logic, 2019

Modal logic S5 is commonly viewed as an epistemic logic that captures the most basic properties of knowledge. Kripke proved a completeness theorem for the first-order modal logic S5 with respect to a possible worlds semantics. A multiagent version of the propositional S5 as well as a version of the propositional S5 that describes properties of distributed knowledge in multiagent systems has also been previously studied. This article proposes a version of S5-like epistemic logic of distributed knowledge with quantifiers ranging over the set of agents, and proves its soundness and completeness with respect to a Kripke semantics.