The fundamental problem of logical omniscience

Abstract

We propose a solution to the problem of logical omniscience in what we take to be its fundamental version: as concerning arbitrary agents and the knowledge attitude per se. Our logic of knowledge is a spin-off from a general theory of thick content, whereby the content of a sentence has two components: (i) an intension, taking care of truth conditions; and (ii) a topic, taking care of subject matter. We present a list of plausible logical validities and invalidities for the logic of knowledge per se for arbitrary agents, and isolate three explanatory factors for them: (1) the topic-sensitivity of content; (2) the fragmentation of knowledge states; (3) the defeasibility of knowledge acquisition. We then present a novel dynamic epistemic logic that yields precisely the desired validities and invalidities, for which we provide expressivity and completeness results. We contrast this with related systems and address possible objections.