A matter of trust: Dynamic attitudes in epistemic logic

Leif Benjamin Rodenhauser

Research output: ThesisThesis defended at external organisation, UG (co)promotor, external graduate (EDEP)

Abstract

While propositional attitudes-like knowledge and belief-capture an agent's opinion about a particular piece of information, dynamic attitudes, as understood in this dissertation, capture an agent's opinion about a particular source of information, more precisely: they represent the agent's assessment of (or opinion about) the reliability (or trustworthiness) of the source. The project of this dissertation is to study the latter notion from a general qualitative vantage point. The proposal of the thesis is to formally represent assessments of reliability by means of operations on information states: dynamic attitudes are encoded as strategies for belief change, capturing how an agent plans to "change her mind" once receiving a particular piece of information from a particular (type of) source. In this way, the dissertation establishes a connection to the rich existing literature on information dynamics, which has been a major focus of attention in belief revision theory, dynamic epistemic logic and dynamic semantics. The main focus of the work presented here is a study of the interplay between dynamic attitudes and the more well-known propositional attitudes.
Original languageEnglish
QualificationDoctor of Philosophy
Awarding Institution
  • University of Amsterdam
Supervisors/Advisors
  • Veltman, F. J. M. M., Supervisor, External person
  • Verbrugge, Rineke, Supervisor
  • Smets, Sonja, Co-supervisor
Award date19-Jun-2014
Place of Publication[Amsterdam]
Publisher
Print ISBNs9789462592209
Publication statusPublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes

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