Paper #31

Author(s): Thomas Agotnes and Michal Walicki

Title: Complete Axiomatizations of Finite Syntactic Epistemic States

Abstract: An agent who bases his actions upon explicit logical formulae has at any given point time a finite set of formulae he has computed. Closure or consistency conditions on this set cannot in general be assumed - reasoning takes time and real agents frequently have contradictory beliefs. This paper discusses a formal model of knowledge as explicitly computed sets of formulae. It is assumed that agents represent their knowledge syntactically, and that they can only know finitely many formulae at a given time. Existing syntactic characterizations of knowledge seem to be too general to have any interesting properties, but we extend the meta language to include an operator expressing that an agent knows at most a particular finite set of formulae. The specific problem we consider is the axiomatization of this logic. A sound system is presented. Strong completeness is impossible, so instead we characterize the theories for which we can get completeness. Proving that a theory actually fits this characterization, including proving weak completeness of the system, turns out to be non-trivial. One of the main results is a collection of algebraic conditions on sets of epistemic states described by a theory, which are sufficient for completeness. The paper is a contribution to a general abstract theory of resource bounded agents. Interesting results, e.g. complex algebraic conditions for completeness, are obtained from very simple assumptions, i.e. epistemic states as arbitrary finite sets and operators for knowing at least and at most.

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