The Dynamic Logic of Stating and Asking: A Study of Inquisitive Dynamic Modalities

Inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic (IDEL) extends public announcement logic incorporating ideas from inquisitive semantics. In IDEL, the standard public announcement action can be extended to a more general public utterance action, which may involve a statement or a question. While uttering a statement has the effect of a standard announcement, uttering a question typically leads to new issues being raised. In this paper, we investigate the logic of this general public utterance action. We find striking commonalities, and some differences, with public announcement logic. We show that dynamic modalities admit a set of reduction axioms, which allow us to turn any formula of IDEL into an equivalent formula of static inquisitive epistemic logic. This leads us to establish several complete axiomatizations of IDEL, corresponding to known axiomatizations of public announcement logic.