A Judgmental Theory of Collective Modal Knowledge with Applications

Period 01-10-2009 to 30-09-2012
Type Postdoctoral Fellowship
Fellow Dr. Giuseppe Primiero
Funding agency Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)

Rationality in today's information society is a highly complex phenomenon. The exchange of data defining the agents' epistemic actions is a novel formal element to take into account in the normative description of their ways of reasoning. The main task of this research is to provide such a model by formalizing collective knowledge in terms of modal judgements based on assumptions. Its key objectives are: 1. to define a notion of knowledge on the basis of relevant information; 2. to use modalities to formalize the agents' epistemic attitudes; 3. to design a multi-source and multi-receiver language for individually acceptedand distributed knowledge. I focus on information exchange and knowledge assertions within a constructive modal language. The multi-source and multi-receiver language includes 1) a notion of trust, to relate agents in the same communication group, and 2) a notion of priority, to model relations of reliable knowledge exchange. Applications of such a model are: the verification and nature of programs in distributed systems; the definition of knowledge in the context of information retrieval based processes; the explanation of information cascades from economics.