Dynamic Epistemic Logic

Larry Moss

Prerequisites: Some logical literacy, and also familiarity with the semantics of modal logic. Familiarity with dynamic logic would be helpful, especially as it pertains to the notion of common knowledge.

Summary: This course is concerned with the modeling of "epistemic actions" of a general sort, notions having to do with the update of knowledge among agents in an interactive setting. The actions studied include things like public announcements, private announcements, cheating in various forms, etc. These action types lead to logical systems, and our main work is to formalize and study them.

One appealing feature of the subject matter is how interdisciplinary it is. The course will touch on issues related to the modeling of dialog. There are also connections to the logic/game theory area. The technical work builds on relevant work from term rewriting theory and from dynamic logic, and the course will develop the needed background in those areas from scratch. Another appealing feature is that the area is fairly new, and so there are many open technical and conceptual problems.

The course will feature presentations by Alexandru Baltag. He will speak on a number of issues related to the main lectures.


Back to course listing.