Introduction to Formal Epistemology

12 - 17 August, 2007
European Summer School for Logic, Language and Infromation

Dublin, Ireland

Course Information | Literature | Course Schedule (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5)

Intstructor: Eric Pacuit (ILLC, University of Amsterdam) and Rohit Parikh (GC and Brooklyn College, CUNY)

Prerequisites: The goal of this course is to introduce students to the field of formal epistemology. Although formal methods will be used, the focus of the course is not technical but rather on intuitions and the main conceptual issues (such as the logical omniscience problem). As such, there are no prerequisites for this course except some mathematical maturity.

Content: Formal models of knowledge and belief have been used by a wide range of communities including computer scientists, economists and philosophers. One important challenge is to determine to what extent these formal models represent the social situations that they are intended to model. With this challenge in mind, we will survey the main approaches to formalizing social interactive situations from the computer science, game-theoretic and philosophical literature. This includes both probabilistic models (such as Harsanyi type spaces) and non-probabilistic models (such as Kripke structures and Aumann structures). We will then discuss some of the key theorems (such as Aumann's agreement theorem and related results) and conceptual puzzles. An important part of the course will be a thorough presentation of common knowledge and related concepts as well as a discussion of applications in game theory

The main text will be notes written by the lecturers and some outside sources.

Course Notes: Introduction to Formal Epistemology (version July 3, 2007)


Levels of Knowledge, Games and Group Action by Rohit Parikh

Logical Omniscience in the Many Agent Case by Rohit Parikh

Sentences, Propositions and Logical Omniscience, or What does Deduction tell us? by Rohit Parikh