A formal description of agents' epistemic states and environments

Abstract

To reason the interaction between agents' epistemic states and environments, the agents' epistemic states should include ontologies of agents (the agents' assumptions about environments), what the agents know, believe and desire, and also should include the agents' interpretations about these symbols in ontologies onto the environments. A formal description of such agents' epistemic states and several examples are given to show how such a description can be used to explain the puzzles in reasoning the modal sentences. For example, a sentence holding in a structure may have different consequences reasoned by different agents, because of the different epistemic states.