An Awareness Epistemic Framework for Belief, Argumentation and Their Dynamics

Abstract

The notion of argumentation and the one of belief stand in a problematic relation to one another. On the one hand, argumentation is crucial for belief formation: as the outcome of a process of arguing, an agent might come to (justifiably) believe that something is the case. On the other hand, beliefs are an input for argument evaluation: arguments with believed premisses are to be considered as strictly stronger by the agent to arguments whose premisses are not believed. An awareness epistemic logic that captures qualified versions of both principles was recently proposed in the literature. This paper extends that logic in three different directions. First, we try to improve its conceptual grounds, by depicting its philosophical foundations, critically discussing some of its design choices and exploring further possibilities. Second, we provide a (heretofore missing) completeness theorem for the basic fragment of the logic. Third, we study, using techniques from dynamic epistemic logic, how different forms of information change can be captured in the framework.