Public announcements for non-omniscient agents

Abstract

A public announcement is the most basic form of communication between agents. The effects of such action have been studied within the field of dynamic epistemic logic, in particular, in the so called public announcement logic. Nevertheless, being a direct extension of epistemic logic, what public announcement logic has studied is actually the effect of a public announcement on the knowledge of an omniscient agent. The present work studies different forms of public announcement and how they affect the knowledge of non-omniscient agents. More precisely, we recall the definitions of the so called implicit and explicit public announcements and present some of their properties in our setting. Then, after arguing that these definitions still assume some form of logical omniscience, we introduce two forms of non-omniscient public announcements that fit better the intuition behind the involved agents. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.