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The Dynamics of Epistemic Attitudes in Resource-Bounded Agents

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Abstract

The paper presents a new logic for reasoning about the formation of beliefs through perception or through inference in non-omniscient resource-bounded agents. The logic distinguishes the concept of explicit belief from the concept of background knowledge. This distinction is reflected in its formal semantics and axiomatics: (i) we use a non-standard semantics putting together a neighborhood semantics for explicit beliefs and relational semantics for background knowledge, and (ii) we have specific axioms in the logic highlighting the relationship between the two concepts. Mental operations of perceptive type and inferential type, having effects on epistemic states of agents, are primitives in the object language of the logic. At the semantic level, they are modelled as special kinds of model-update operations, in the style of dynamic epistemic logic. Results about axiomatization, decidability and complexity for the logic are given in the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRIT, CNRS, Toulouse University, Toulouse, France

    Philippe Balbiani & Emiliano Lorini

  2. Department of Mathematics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    David Fernández-Duque

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  1. Philippe Balbiani
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  2. David Fernández-Duque
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  3. Emiliano Lorini
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Correspondence to Emiliano Lorini.

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Special Issue: 40 years of FDE.

Edited by Giacomo Bonanno, Wiebe Van Der Hoek and Andres Perea

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Balbiani, P., Fernández-Duque, D. & Lorini, E. The Dynamics of Epistemic Attitudes in Resource-Bounded Agents. Stud Logica 107, 457–488 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-018-9798-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-018-9798-4

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