Reasoning about Minimal Knowledge in Nonmonotonic Modal Logics

  • Authors:
  • Riccardo Rosati

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma ’’La Sapienza‘‘, Via Salaria 113, 00198 Roma, Italy (E-mail: rosati@dis.uniroma1.it)

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Logic, Language and Information
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We study the problem of embedding Halpern and Moses‘s modal logic ofminimal knowledge states into two families of modal formalism fornonmonotonic reasoning, McDermott and Doyle‘s nonmonotonic modal logicsand ground nonmonotonic modal logics. First, we prove that Halpern andMoses‘s logic can be embedded into all ground logics; moreover, thetranslation employed allows for establishing a lower bound (Π3p) forthe problem of skeptical reasoning in all ground logics. Then, we show atranslation of Halpern and Moses‘s logic into a significant subset ofMcDermott and Doyle‘s formalisms. Such a translation both indicates theability of Halpern and Moses‘s logic of expressing minimal knowledgestates in a more compact way than McDermott and Doyle‘s logics, and allowsfor a comparison of the epistemological properties of such nonmonotonicmodal formalisms.