20 research outputs found
Logic and Topology for Knowledge, Knowability, and Belief - Extended Abstract
In recent work, Stalnaker proposes a logical framework in which belief is
realized as a weakened form of knowledge. Building on Stalnaker's core
insights, and using frameworks developed by Bjorndahl and Baltag et al., we
employ topological tools to refine and, we argue, improve on this analysis. The
structure of topological subset spaces allows for a natural distinction between
what is known and (roughly speaking) what is knowable; we argue that the
foundational axioms of Stalnaker's system rely intuitively on both of these
notions. More precisely, we argue that the plausibility of the principles
Stalnaker proposes relating knowledge and belief relies on a subtle
equivocation between an "evidence-in-hand" conception of knowledge and a weaker
"evidence-out-there" notion of what could come to be known. Our analysis leads
to a trimodal logic of knowledge, knowability, and belief interpreted in
topological subset spaces in which belief is definable in terms of knowledge
and knowability. We provide a sound and complete axiomatization for this logic
as well as its uni-modal belief fragment. We then consider weaker logics that
preserve suitable translations of Stalnaker's postulates, yet do not allow for
any reduction of belief. We propose novel topological semantics for these
irreducible notions of belief, generalizing our previous semantics, and provide
sound and complete axiomatizations for the corresponding logics.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2017, arXiv:1707.08250. The full version of this
paper, including the longer proofs, is at arXiv:1612.0205
Uncertainty About Evidence
We develop a logical framework for reasoning about knowledge and evidence in
which the agent may be uncertain about how to interpret their evidence. Rather
than representing an evidential state as a fixed subset of the state space, our
models allow the set of possible worlds that a piece of evidence corresponds to
to vary from one possible world to another, and therefore itself be the subject
of uncertainty. Such structures can be viewed as (epistemically motivated)
generalizations of topological spaces. In this context, there arises a natural
distinction between what is actually entailed by the evidence and what the
agent knows is entailed by the evidence -- with the latter, in general, being
much weaker. We provide a sound and complete axiomatization of the
corresponding bi-modal logic of knowledge and evidence entailment, and
investigate some natural extensions of this core system, including the addition
of a belief modality and its interaction with evidence interpretation and
entailment, and the addition of a "knowability" modality interpreted via a
(generalized) interior operator.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2019, arXiv:1907.0833
Informative counterfactuals
A single counterfactual conditional can have a multitude of interpretations that differ, intuitively, in the connection between antecedent and consequent. Using structural equation models (SEMs) to represent event dependencies, we illustrate various types of explanation compatible with a given counterfactual. We then formalize in the SEM framework the notion of an acceptable explanation, identifying the class of event dependencies compatible with a given counterfactual. Finally, by incorporating SEMs into possible worlds, we provide an update semantics with the enriched structure necessary for the evaluation of counterfactual conditionals
Language-Based Games
We introduce language-based games, in which utility is defined over descriptions in a given language. By choosing the right language, we can capture psychological games [9] and reference-dependent preference [15]. Of special interest are languages that can express only coarse beliefs (e.g., the probability of an event is "high" or "low", rather than "the probability is .628"): by assuming that a player's preferences depend only on what is true in a coarse language, we can resolve a number of well-known paradoxes in the literature, including the Allais paradox. Despite the expressive power of this approach, we show that it can describe games in a simple, natural way. Nash equilibrium and rationalizability are generalized to this setting; Nash equilibrium is shown not to exist in general, while the existence of rationalizable strategies is proved under mild conditions on the language