Knowledge Accessibility and Action in Distributed Systems Models

Ante Debeljuh

University of Rijeka, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka

The majority of what we know is not manifested through linguistic behaviour, but through action. The field of formal epistemology attempts to provide a mathematical description of such notions. Knowledge and action are closely interconnected even in our pre-theoretic analysis of the world, and are often construed as operative elements within the relevant epistemic models. The underlying logics of the models (such as S4, S4.2, and S5 systems) give us information about what can be inferred within the proposed system, and the agents’ choice of behaviour tells us how good an agent is at problem-solving, or more generally, adequately interacting with their environment. Such choice of behaviour is often defined through choice of algorithms for problem-solving in the contemporary discourse.
In my presentation I will attempt to display the relationship between knowledge, action, inference, and algorithms in order to flesh out some contentious properties of certain epistemic models, such as systems’ inability to account for belief change, or knowledge accessibility. I will finally try to offer some potential remedies for the presented shortcomings, e.g. dynamisation of the systems in question, clearing up the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge. The framework for the model construction that I will be using is Distributed Systems Models, as it overtly and clearly showcases both the philosophical and the formal problems that might arise when attempting to model epistemic and doxastic states of non-idealised agents. The presentation will refer to relevant authors’ work in the field of formal epistemology such as Robert Stalnaker, Johan van Benthem, Hans van Ditmarsch, Ronald Fagin, Joseph Y. Halpern, etc.

Chair: Saam Nasseri

Time: 03 September, 17:30 – 18:00

Location: SR 1.007