A Guide to the Modal Logics of Knowledge and Belief: Preliminary Draft

1 . I n t r o d u c t i o n Reasoning about knowledge and belief has long been an issue of concern in philosophy and artificial intelligence (cf. . Recently we have argued that reasoning about knowledge is also crucial in understanding and reasoning about protocols in distributed systems, since messages can be viewed as changing the state of knowledge of a system [HM]; knowledge also seems to be of v i tal importance in cryptography theory [Me] and database theory. In order to formally reason about knowledge, we need a good semantic model. Part of the difficulty in providing such a model is that there is no agreement on exactly what the properties of knowledge are or should * This author's work was supported in part by DARPA contract N00039-82-C-0250. be. For example, is it the case that you know what facts you know? Do you know what you don't know? Do you know only true things, or can something you "know" actually be false? Possible-worlds semantics provide a good formal tool for "customizing" a logic so that, by making minor changes in the semantics, we can capture different sets of axioms. The idea, first formalized by Hintikka [Hi l ] , is that in each state of the world, an agent (or knower or player: we use all these words interchangeably) has other states or worlds that he considers possible. An agent knows p exactly if p is true in all the worlds that he considers possible. As Kripke pointed out [Kr], by imposing various conditions on this possibil i ty relation, we can capture a number of interesting axioms. For example, if we require that the real world always be one of the possible worlds (which amounts to saying that the possibility relation is reflexive), then it follows that you can't know anything false. Similarly, we can show that if the relation is transitive, then you know what you know. If the relation is transitive and symmetric, then you also know what you don't know. The one-knower models where the possibility relation is reflexive corresponds to the classical modal logic T, while the reflexive and transitive case corresponds to S4, and the reflexive, symmetric and transitive case corresponds to S5.) Once we have a general framework for modelling knowledge, a reasonable question to ask is how hard it is to reason about knowledge. In particular, how hard is it to decide if a given formula is valid or satisfiable? The answer to this question depends crucially on the choice of axioms. For example, in the oneknower case, Ladner [La] has shown that for T and S4 the problem of deciding satisfiability is complete in polynomial space, while for S5 it is NP-complete, J. Halpern and Y. Moses 481 and thus no harder than the satisf iabi l i ty problem for propos i t iona l logic. Our a im in th is paper is to reexamine the possiblewor lds f ramework for knowledge and belief w i t h four par t icu lar po ints of emphasis: (1) we show how general techniques for f inding decision procedures and complete ax iomat izat ions apply to models for knowledge and belief, (2) we show how sensitive the di f f icul ty of the decision procedure is to such issues as the choice of moda l operators and the ax iom system, (3) we discuss how not ions of common knowledge and impl ic i t knowl edge among a group of agents fit in to the possibleworlds f ramework, and, f inal ly, (4) we consider to what extent the possible-worlds approach is a viable one for model l ing knowledge and belief. We begin in Section 2 by reviewing possible-world semantics in deta i l , and prov ing tha t the many-knower versions of T, S4, and S5 do indeed capture some of the more common axiomatizat ions of knowledge. In Section 3 we t u r n to complexity-theoret ic issues. We review some standard not ions f rom complexi ty theory, and then reprove and extend Ladner's results to show tha t the decision procedures for the many-knower versions of T, S4, and S5 are a l l complete in po lynomia l space. Th is suggests tha t for S5, reasoning about many agents' knowledge is qual i ta t ive ly harder than jus t reasoning about one agent's knowledge of the real wor ld and of his own knowledge. In Section 4 we t u rn our at tent ion to mod i fy ing the model so tha t i t can deal w i t h belief rather than knowledge, where one can believe something tha t is false. Th is turns out to be somewhat more compl i cated t han dropp ing the assumption of ref lexivi ty, but i t can s t i l l be done in the possible-worlds f ramework. Results about decision procedures and complete axiomat i i a t i ons for belief paral le l those for knowledge. In Section 5 we consider what happens when operators for common knowledge and implicit knowledge are added to the language. A group has common knowledge of a fact p exact ly when everyone knows tha t everyone knows tha t everyone knows ... tha t p is t rue. (Common knowledge is essentially wha t McCar thy 's " f oo l " knows; cf.  A group has i m p l ic i t knowledge of p i f, roughly speaking, when the agents poo l the i r knowledge together they can deduce p. (Note our usage of the not ion of " imp l i c i t knowl edge" here differs s l ight ly f rom the way it is used in [Lev2] and [FH].) As shown in [ H M l ] , common knowl edge is an essential state for reaching agreements and * A problem is said to be complete w i th respect to a complexity class if, roughly speaking, it is the hardest problem in that class (see Section 3 for more details). coordinating action. For very similar reasons, common knowledge also seems to play an important role in human understanding of speech acts (cf. . The notion of implicit knowledge arises when reasoning about what states of knowledge a group can attain through communication, and thus is also crucial when reasoning about the efficacy of speech acts and about communication protocols in distributed systems. It turns out that adding an implicit knowledge operator to the language does not substantially change the complexity of deciding the satisfiability of formulas in the language, but this is not the case for common knowledge. Using standard techniques from PDL (Propositional Dynamic Logic; cf. , we can show that when we add common knowledge to the language, the satisfiability problem for the resulting logic (whether it is based on T, S4, or S5) is complete in deterministic exponential time, as long as there at least two knowers. Thus, adding a common knowledge operator renders the decision procedure qualitatively more complex. (Common knowledge does not seem to be of much interest in the in the case of one knower. In fact, in the case of S4 and S5, if there is only one knower, knowledge and common knowledge are identical.) We conclude in Section 6 with some discussion of the appropriateness of the possible-worlds approach for capturing knowledge and belief, particularly in light of our results on computational complexity. Detailed proofs of the theorems stated here, as well as further discussion of these results, can be found in the ful l paper ([HM2]). 482 J. Halpern and Y. Moses 2.2 Possib le-wor lds semant ics: Following Hintikka [H i l ] , Sato [Sa], Moore [Mo], and others, we use a posaible-worlds semantics to model knowledge. This provides us wi th a general framework for our semantical investigations of knowledge and belief. (Everything we say about "knowledge* in this subsection applies equally well to belief.) The essential idea behind possible-worlds semantics is that an agent's state of knowledge corresponds to the extent to which he can determine what world he is in. In a given world, we can associate wi th each agent the set of worlds that, according to the agent's knowledge, could possibly be the real world. An agent is then said to know a fact p exactly if p is true in all the worlds in this set; he does not know p if there is at least one world that he considers possible where p does not hold.  We discuss the ramifications of this point in Section 6.  The name K (m) is inspired by the fact that for one knower, the system reduces to the well-known modal logic K. J. Halpern and Y. Moses 483 484 J. Halpern and Y. Moses that can be said is that we are modelling a rather idealised reaaoner, who knows all tautologies and all the logical consequences of his knowledge. If we take the classical interpretation of knowledge as true, justified belief, then an axiom such as A3 seems to be necessary. On the other hand, philosophers have shown that axiom A5 does not hold wi th respect to this interpretation ([Len]). However, the S5 axioms do capture an interesting interpretation of knowledge appropriate for reasoning about distributed systems (see [HM1] and Section 6). We continue here wi th our investigation of all these logics, deferring further comments on their appropriateness to Section 6. Theorem 3 implies that the provable formulas of K (m) correspond precisely to the formulas that are valid for Kripke worlds. As Kripke showed [Kr], there are simple conditions that we can impose on the possibility relations Pi so that the valid formulas of the resulting worlds are exactly the provable formulas of T ( m ) , S4 (m) , and S5(m) respectively. We wi l l try to motivate these conditions, but first we need a few definitions.  Since Lemma 4(b) says that a relation that is both reflexive and Euclidean must also be transitive, the reader may auspect that axiom A4 ia redundant in S5. Thia indeed ia the caae. J. Halpern and Y. Moses 485 486 J. Halpern and Y. Moses