A Novel Semantics for Belief, Knowledge and Psychological Alethic Modality

TL;DR

This paper introduces PQG logic, a psychologically-grounded semantics for belief and knowledge that addresses logical omniscience by focusing on percepts, qualia, and cognitions, offering a new perspective on psychical-logical phenomena.

Contribution

It presents a novel semantics for belief and knowledge based on percepts, qualia, and cognitions, providing a psychologically-rooted solution to logical omniscience.

Findings

Addresses the problem of logical omniscience with a new semantics

Integrates psychological concepts into logical frameworks

Enables deeper investigation of belief and knowledge nature

Abstract

Recently there have been numerous proposed solutions to the problem of logical omniscience in doxastic and epistemic logic. Though these solutions display an impressive breadth of subtlety and motivation, the crux of these approaches seems to have a common theme-minor revisions around the ubiquitous Kripke semantics-rooted approach. In addition, the psychological mechanisms at work in and around both belief and knowledge have been left largely untouched. In this paper, we cut straight to the core of the problem of logical omniscience, taking a psychologically-rooted approach, taking as bedrock the "quanta" of given percepts, qualia and cognitions, terming our approach "PQG logic", short for percept, qualia, cognition logic. Building atop these quanta, we reach a novel semantics of belief, knowledge, in addition to a semantics for psychological necessity and possibility. With these notions we are well-equipped to not only address the problem of logical omniscience but to more deeply investigate the psychical-logical nature of belief and knowledge.