The Logic of Public Announcements, Common Knowledge, and Private Suspicions

Abstract

This paper presents a logical system in which various group-level epistemic actions are incorporated into the object language. That is, we consider the standard modeling of knowledge among a set of agents by multi-modal Kripke structures. One might want to consider actions that take place, such as announcements to groups privately, announcements with suspicious outsiders, etc. In our system, such actions correspond to additional modalities in the object language. That is, we do not add machinery on top of models (as in Fagin et al [1], but we reify aspects of the machinery in the logical language.