A Qualitative Theory of Cognitive Attitudes and their Change

TL;DR

This paper develops a logical framework to model and analyze agents' cognitive attitudes like knowledge, belief, desire, and preference, including their dynamics and decision-making processes.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive logical system for qualitative reasoning about cognitive attitudes and their changes, with extensions for choice and dynamic belief/desire updates.

Findings

Logical framework expresses various cognitive attitudes.

Extensions handle choice and belief/desire change.

Axiomatizations ensure soundness and completeness.

Abstract

We present a general logical framework for reasoning about agents' cognitive attitudes of both epistemic type and motivational type. We show that it allows us to express a variety of relevant concepts for qualitative decision theory including the concepts of knowledge, belief, strong belief, conditional belief, desire, conditional desire, strong desire and preference. We also present two extensions of the logic, one by the notion of choice and the other by dynamic operators for belief change and desire change, and we apply the former to the analysis of single-stage games under incomplete information. We provide sound and complete axiomatizations for the basic logic and for its two extensions. The paper is under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).