Uncertainty about Evidence

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 22-07-2019
Journal Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science
Event 17th Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge
Volume | Issue number 297
Pages (from-to) 68-81
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
Abstract
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.
Document type Article
Note Extended abstract. - In: Proceedings Seventeenth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge : Toulouse, France, 17-19 July 2019. Edited by: Lawrence S. Moss .
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.297.5
Published at https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.09098v1
Other links http://eptcs.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/content.cgi?TARK2019
Downloads
1907.09098v1 (Final published version)
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