An Epistemic Perspective on Agent Awareness

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal logical framework treating agent awareness as a form of knowledge, distinguishing between de re and de dicto awareness, and provides a sound and complete system for their interaction.

Contribution

It offers a novel epistemic perspective on agent awareness by formalizing it with two modalities and a 2D-semantics approach, expanding the understanding of awareness in logic.

Findings

Develops two modalities for de re and de dicto awareness

Provides a sound and complete logical system for these modalities

Formalizes the interaction between awareness and standard knowledge

Abstract

The paper proposes to treat agent awareness as a form of knowledge, breaking the tradition in the existing literature on awareness. It distinguishes the de re and de dicto forms of such knowledge. The work introduces two modalities capturing these forms and formally specifies their meaning using a version of 2D-semantics. The main technical result is a sound and complete logical system describing the interplay between the two proposed modalities and the standard "knowledge of the fact" modality.