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Reasoning tractably about explicit belief: A model-theoretic approach

✍ Scribed by Kwang Mong Sim


Publisher
John Wiley and Sons
Year
2000
Tongue
English
Weight
273 KB
Volume
15
Category
Article
ISSN
0884-8173

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✦ Synopsis


Existing epistemic logics such as the logic of implicit and explicit belief and the logic of awareness adopt a deducti¨e-theoretic approach for characterizing belief. In this approach, an agent represents the state of the world with a conjunction of axioms in its knowledge Ž . base KB and evaluates queries by trying to prove or disprove that they follow from KB.

Ž . This paper presents a multi¨alued epistemic logic MEL that allows agents to reason both deductively and model theoretically about implicit and explicit belief. By characterizing an agent's KB with a class of finite models, the set of formulas that an agent believes can be determined by checking their validity in all these models. This rests on the fact that MEL Ž has a complete axiomatization sentences that are true in all these models will also be . provable . In this paper, the soundness, completeness, and decidability of MEL are proven. Furthermore, a polynomial time model-checking algorithm for determining the satisfiability of a sentence at a particular state in a given model of MEL is also presented.