Summary |
Epistemic logics are logics that allow one to reason about knowledge in some way. The term ‘epistemic logic’ is often applied also to logics of related notions, such as logics of belief (more strictly, doxastic logics) and justification. Many epistemic logics are modal logics, whose language contains one or more knowledge operators and whose semantics is given in terms of relational Kripke models, containing epistemically possible worlds related to one another by epistemic accessibility relations. This modal approach to epistemic logic has been widely adopted in formal logic, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, economics and game theory. The sub-sategory ‘Doxastic and Epistemic Logic’ also includes formal work on belief revision. This category also includes inductive logics and non-monotonic logics, both of which add to the stock of valid inferences, beyond those valid in classical logic. (These logics are super-classical, containing inferences which are not deductively valid and hence, in some sense, less than certain. In such logics, there is no guarantee that truth will be preserved from premises to conclusions. Non-monotonic logics have the feature that an inference from premises X to conclusion A may be valid, and yet the inference to A may fail if we add an addition premise B to X, so that X ⊢ A but not X, B ⊢ A. |