DIMENSIONS IN EPISTEMIC LOGIC

ROSKILDE UNIVERSITY
MAY 2 - 4, 2002

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In the early 1960’s Hintikka published his seminal work on the logic of knowledge and belief. Since then, epistemic and doxastic logics have grown into a mature discipline with many important applications in philosophy, computer science, game theory, economics and linguistics to mention of few areas of application. In philosophy, epistemic logic has contributed to the general epistemological understanding of propositional knowledge. Artificial intelligence and knowledge representation studies have profited from the tools, methods and systems of epistemic logic. Epistemic logic has also proved quite important in game theory and economics in terms of modelling for instance non-cooperative games of perfect information.
But epistemic logic suffers from a weakness, which it shares with many modal logics. Already in 1970 Dana Scott noted:

Here is what I consider one of the biggest mistakes of all in modal logic: concentration on a system with just one modal operator. The only way to have any philosophically significant results in deontic logic or epistemic logic is to combine these operators with: Tense operators (otherwise how can you formulate principles of change?); the logical operators (otherwise how can you compare the relative with the absolute?); the operators like historical or physical necessity (otherwise how can you relate the agent to his environment?); and so on and so on.

Even though this substantial criticism towards the way in which philosophical logic proceeds to a great extent still holds true, new results in epistemic logic suggest otherwise and begin to realize what Scott for long has wished for. Recently logicians have begun to develop multi-modal systems in which both epistemic, alethic and temporal operators can be defined in unified formal frameworks. These multi-modal systems have then been used to study new features of our cognition like how knowledge may evolve over time, knowledge in linear vs. branching time, the dynamics of knowledge databases, alethic modality and epistemic capabilities.
The conference Dimensions in Epistemic Logic has two aims:

1. To track the history and development of epistemic logic from Hintikkas first formulations to its contemporary forms and consider some of the many applications in philosophy, computer science, economics etc.

2. To describe and discuss the developments of epistemic logic in multi-modal systems.

All lectures will be of such a nature that they can be followed by students and scholars of philosophy, computer science, linguistics etc. without deep professional training in epistemic logic but provided with general knowledge of foundational issues.

Conference Chair: Vincent F. Hendricks and Stig Andur Pedersen

Click for abstracts.

Professor JOSEPH HALPERN, Computer Science Department, Cornell University, USA.

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Substantive Rationality and Backward Induction

Professor Jaakko Hintikka, Department of Philosophy, Boston University, USA.

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Independence - the most important dimension of epistemic logic

Professor Wiebe van der Hoek, Department of Computer Science, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands.

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On Epistemic Action Languages

Professor Wolfgang Lenzen, Department of Philosophy, University of Osnabrück, Germany.

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Knowledge, Belief, and Subjective Probability - Outlines of a Unified System of Epistemic/Doxastic Logic

Professor Hans Rott, Department of Philosophy, University of Regensburg, Germany.

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Interpreting Belief Dynamics: from Logic to Philosophy

Professor Krister Segerberg, Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University, Sweden.

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Two Attempts at Deconstructing Epistemic Logic

Professor John F. Sowa, USA.

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Laws, Facts, and Contexts: Foundations for Multimodal Reasoning

Professor Robert Stalnaker, Department of Philosophy, MIT, USA.

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Knowledge and Belief, Rational Action and Interaction: Epistemic models for games

Professor Moshe Y. Vardi, Department of Computer Science, Rice University, USA.

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Common Knowledge Revisited

Professor Ryszard Wojcicki, Department of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland.

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Referential Semantics