Towards Syntactic Epistemic Logic

Abstract

Traditionally, Epistemic Logic represents epistemic scenarios using a single model. This, however, covers only complete descriptions that specify truth values of all assertions. Indeed, many—and perhaps most—epistemic descriptions are not complete. Syntactic Epistemic Logic, SEL, suggests viewing an epistemic situation as a set of syntactic conditions rather than as a model. This allows us to naturally capture incomplete descriptions; we discuss a case study in which our proposal is successful. In Epistemic Game Theory, this closes the conceptual and technical gap, identified by R. Aumann, between the syntactic character of game-descriptions and semantic representations of games.