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Jaakko Hintikka on Knowledge and Game-Theoretical Semantics pp 339–362Cite as

Possible Worlds Semantics Based on Observation and Communication

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Part of the book series: Outstanding Contributions to Logic ((OCTR,volume 12))

Abstract

We analyze a recent trend in epistemic logic which consists in studying construction of knowledge from the agents’ observational abilities. It is based on the intuition that an agent’s knowledge comes from three possible sources: her observations, communication with other agents, and inference. The approaches mainly focus on the former two and suppose that the object of observations are propositional variables and that agents learn from public announcements. This allows to model knowledge in a more compact and intuitive way than with Hintikka’s semantics. However, the semantics that one can find in the literature come with some counter-intuitive validities such as common knowledge of visibilities or the knowledge operator distributing over disjunctions. We propose a solution of each of these two issues and illustrate them with well-known toy examples of epistemic logic.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer whose comments have helped us to clarify some points and to improve the presentation of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Andreas Herzig, Emiliano Lorini & Faustine Maffre

Authors
  1. Andreas Herzig
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  2. Emiliano Lorini
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  3. Faustine Maffre
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andreas Herzig .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. LORIA, CNRS, Université de Lorraine, Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, France

    Hans van Ditmarsch

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Gabriel Sandu

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Herzig, A., Lorini, E., Maffre, F. (2018). Possible Worlds Semantics Based on Observation and Communication. In: van Ditmarsch, H., Sandu, G. (eds) Jaakko Hintikka on Knowledge and Game-Theoretical Semantics. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62864-6_14

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