Reasoning about knowledge of unawareness

Joseph Halpern () and Leandro C. Rêgo

Games and Economic Behavior, 2009, vol. 67, issue 2, 503-525

Abstract: Awareness has been shown to be a useful addition to standard epistemic logic. However, standard propositional logics for knowledge and awareness cannot express the fact that an agent knows that there are facts of which he is unaware without there being an explicit fact that the agent knows he is unaware of. We extend Fagin and Halpern's logic of general awareness to a logic that allows quantification over variables, so that there is a formula in the language that says "an agent explicitly knows that there exists a fact of which he is unaware." Moreover, that formula can be true without the agent explicitly knowing that he is unaware of any particular formula. We provide a sound and complete axiomatization of the logic. Finally, we show that the validity problem for the logic is recursively enumerable, but not decidable.

Keywords: Modal; logic; Awareness; Axiomatization; Decidability; Multi-agent; system; Interactive; epistemology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

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