Framing Effects

This chapter introduces two kinds of one-place TSIMs representing, respectively, belief activated in working memory and belief left passively stored in long-term memory. The distinction between the two sorts of belief is shown to help with the modelling of a typical form of the well-known framing effect, whereby people can have different attitudes towards logically or necessarily equivalent propositions. The chapter introduces a semantics for active and passive topic-sensitive belief to represent and reason about, agents whose belief states can be subject to framing effects. The analysis of framing calls for a precise characterization of the sense in which framed agents are logically non-omniscient given that they can believe exactly one of two intensionally equivalent propositions even when they are fully on top of the relevant subject matters and, in a ‘dormant’ sense, they are even aware of the equivalence. The formal framework here combines topic-sensitivity with ideas from subset space semantics.