A FRAMEWORK FOR LOGICS OF EXPLICIT BELIEF

The epistemic notions of knowledge and belief have most commonly been modeled by means of possible worlds semantics. In such approaches an agent knows (or believes) all logical consequences of its beliefs. Consequently, several approaches have been proposed to model systems of explicit belief, more suited to modeling finite agents or computers. In this paper a general framework is developed for the specification of logics of explicit belief. A generalization of possible worlds, called situations, is adopted. However the notion of an accessibility relation is not employed; instead a sentence is believed if the explicit proposition expressed by the sentence appears among a set of propositions associated with an agent at a situation. Since explicit propositions may be taken as corresponding to ''belief contexts'' or ''frames of mind'' the framework also provides a setting for investigating such approaches to belief, The approach provides a uniform and flexible basis from which various issues of explicit belief may be addressed and from which systems may be contrasted and compared. A family of logics is developed using this framework, which extends previous approaches and addresses issues raised by these earlier approaches. The more interesting of these logics are tractable, in that determining if a belief follows from a set of beliefs, given certain assumptions, can be accomplished in polynomial time.