Sentences, belief and logical omniscience, or what does deduction tell us?

Rohit Parikh

pp. 627-647

in: Horacio Arló-Costa, Vincent F. Hendricks, Johan van Benthem (eds), Readings in formal epistemology, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

We propose a model for belief which is free of presuppositions. Current models for belief suffer from two difficulties. One is the well known problem of logical omniscience which tends to follow from most models. But a more important one is the fact that most models do not even attempt to answer the question what it means for someone to believe something, and just what it is that is believed. We provide a flexible model which allows us to give meaning to beliefs in general contexts, including the context of animal belief (where action is usually our only clue to a belief), and of human belief which is expressed in language.