The received view says that possibility is the dual of necessity: a proposition is (metaphysically, logically, epistemically etc.) possible iff it is not the case that its negation is (metaphysically, logically, epistemically etc., respectively) necessary. This reading is usually taken for granted by modal logicians and indeed seems plausible when dealing with logical or metaphysical possibility. But what about epistemic possibility? We argue that the dual definition of epistemic possibility in terms of epistemic necessity generates tension when reasoning about non-idealized (...) agents and is a problem of concern for most hyperintensional epistemic logics that alleviate the problem of logical omniscience. The tension is particularly evident when knowledge is taken as a primitive to define other epistemic concepts, such as justification and belief, as done in the knowledge-first tradition. We propose a non-dual interpretation of epistemic possibility, employing a hyperintensionality filter similar to the one that makes the corresponding epistemic necessity operator hyperintensional. We employ the proposed semantics to model Stalnaker's belief as epistemic possibility of knowledge and provide a sound and complete axiomatization for a hyperintensional version of his bimodal logic of knowledge and belief. (shrink)

_Framing effects_ concern the having of different attitudes towards logically or necessarily equivalent contents. Framing is of crucial importance for cognitive science, behavioral economics, decision theory, and the social sciences at large. We model a typical kind of framing, grounded in (i) the structural distinction between beliefs activated in working memory and beliefs left inactive in long term memory, and (ii) the topic- or subject matter-sensitivity of belief: a feature of propositional attitudes which is attracting growing research attention. We introduce (...) a class of models featuring (i) and (ii) to represent, and reason about, agents whose belief states can be subject to framing effects. We axiomatize a logic which we prove to be sound and complete with respect to the class. (shrink)

We introduce Arbitrary Public Announcement Logic with Memory (APALM), obtained by adding to the models a ‘memory’ of the initial states, representing the information before any communication took place (“the prior”), and adding to the syntax operators that can access this memory. We show that APALM is recursively axiomatizable (in contrast to the original Arbitrary Public Announcement Logic, for which the corresponding question is still open). We present a complete recursive axiomatization, that includes a natural finitary rule, and study this (...) logic’s expressivity and the appropriate notion of bisimulation. We then examine Group Announcement Logic with Memory (GALM), the extension of APALM obtained by adding to its syntax group announcement operators, and provide a complete finitary axiomatization (again in contrast to the original Group Announcement Logic, for which the only known axiomatization is infinitary). We also show that, in the memory-enhanced context, there is a natural reduction of the so-called coalition announcement modality to group announcements (in contrast to the memory-free case, where this natural translation was shown to be invalid). (shrink)

Constructivist epistemology posits that all truths are knowable. One might ask to what extent constructivism is compatible with naturalized epistemology and knowledge obtained from inference-making using successful scientific theories. If quantum theory correctly describes the structure of the physical world, and if quantum theoretic inferences about which measurement outcomes will be observed with unit probability count as knowledge, we demonstrate that constructivism cannot be upheld. Our derivation is compatible with both intuitionistic and quantum propositional logic. This result is implied by (...) the Frauchiger-Renner theorem, though it is of independent importance as well. (shrink)

This paper proposes new semantics for propositional dynamic logic (PDL), replacing the standard relational semantics. Under these new semantics, program execution is represented as fundamentally deterministic (i.e., functional), while nondeterminism emerges as an epistemic relationship between the agent and the system: intuitively, the nondeterministic outcomes of a given process are precisely those that cannot be ruled out in advance. We formalize these notions using topology and the framework of dynamic topological logic (DTL) (Kremer and Mints in Ann Pure Appl Logic (...) 131:133–158, 2005). We show that DTL can be used to interpret the language of PDL in a manner that captures the intuition above, and moreover that continuous functions in this setting correspond exactly to deterministic processes. We also prove that certain axiomatizations of PDL remain sound and complete with respect to the corresponding classes of dynamic topological models. Finally, we extend the framework to incorporate knowledge using the machinery of subset space logic (Dabrowski et al. in Ann Pure Appl Logic 78:73–110, 1996), and show that the topological interpretation of public announcements as given in Bjorndahl (in: van Ditmarsch and Sandu (eds) Jaakko Hintikka on knowledge and game theoretical semantics, outstanding contributions to Logic, vol 12, Springer, 2018) coincides exactly with a natural interpretation of test programs. (shrink)

Stalnaker, 169–199 2006) introduced a combined epistemic-doxastic logic that can formally express a strong concept of belief, a concept of belief as ‘subjective certainty’. In this paper, we provide a topological semantics for belief, in particular, for Stalnaker’s notion of belief defined as ‘epistemic possibility of knowledge’, in terms of the closure of the interior operator on extremally disconnected spaces. This semantics extends the standard topological interpretation of knowledge with a new topological semantics for belief. We prove that the belief (...) logic KD45 is sound and complete with respect to the class of extremally disconnected spaces and we compare our approach to a different topological setting in which belief is interpreted in terms of the derived set operator. We also study belief revision as well as belief dynamics by providing a topological semantics for conditional belief and belief update modalities, respectively. Our setting based on extremally disconnected spaces, however, encounters problems when extended with dynamic updates. We then propose a solution consisting in interpreting belief in a similar way based on hereditarily extremally disconnected spaces, and axiomatize the belief logic of hereditarily extremally disconnected spaces. Finally, we provide a complete axiomatization of the logic of conditional belief and knowledge, as well as a complete axiomatization of the corresponding dynamic logic. (shrink)

We propose a new topological semantics for evidence, evidence-based justifications, belief, and knowledge. Resting on the assumption that an agent’s rational belief is based on the available evidence, we try to unveil the concrete relationship between an agent’s evidence, belief, and knowledge via a rich formal framework afforded by topologically interpreted modal logics. We prove soundness, completeness, decidability, and the finite model property for the associated logics, and apply this setting to analyze key epistemological issues such as “no false lemma” (...) Gettier examples, misleading defeaters, undefeated justification versus undefeated belief, as well as the defeasibility theories of knowledge. (shrink)