Abstract
Epistemic Logic has recently acquired importance as a growing field with influence in Distributed Computing, Philosophy, Economics, and of late even in Social Science and Animal behavior. Here, on a relatively light note, we give examples of epistemic reasoning occurring in literature and used very effectively by writers like Shakespeare, Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle, and O’Henry. For variety we also give an example of epistemic reasoning used by fireflies, although it is far fetched to suppose that fireflies use epistemic reasoning in any kind of a conscious way. Surely they are getting a lot of help from Darwin. It is this writer’s hope that epistemic reasoning as a formal discipline will some day acquire importance comparable to that of Statistics. Hopefully these examples make part of the case.
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Notes
- 1.
Although Temple has great difficulty figuring out what adults and children are up to, she has enormous communication and empathy with animals. She has worked out methods to ease the last moments on earth of animals bound for slaughter.
- 2.
Some of the examples in this section also occur in (Parikh et al.). Some are new.
- 3.
In the quoted paragraph, \(ch(b, \{U, \lnot U\}\) refers to Vikram’s choice between the two actions, take umbrella and not take umbrella when Vikram is in state \(b\). Note that we are taking a state as an element of the space of all possible states. Believing that it is raining will be a subset consisting of all states in which Vikram believes it is raining. Thus a state where Vikram believes it is raining and is standing will be distinct from a state where he believes it is raining and is sitting down. Neither state deserves to be called the state of believing that it is raining.
- 4.
Note, however that we do not address false information, as conveyed by the Photuris in this paper. That will be the subject of a sequel.
- 5.
This incident is also discussed at length in Genot and Jacot (2012).
- 6.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Steven Brams, Yang Liu, Carol Parikh, Prashant Parikh, Paul Pedersen, Hilary Putnam, Noson Yanofsky and Ruili Ye for comments. This paper was supported by a grant from PSC-CUNY under the Faculty Research Assistance Program.
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Parikh, R. (2014). Epistemic Reasoning in Life and Literature. In: Hansson, S. (eds) David Makinson on Classical Methods for Non-Classical Problems. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7759-0_8
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