What do epistemic logic and cognitive science have to do with each other?
Epistemic logic is a multi-faceted theory aimed at targeting notions such as knowledge, belief, information, awareness, memory and other propositional attitudes, by means of logical and semantical tools. These concepts ought to be in the spotlight of cognitive science too, but the two have not yet seriously been explored in cooperation. In this paper, it is shown that a number of possibilities is opened up by attempting to answer the question of what epistemic logic and cognitive science have to do with each other. Among the proposed answers are: (i) new quantified versions of multi-agent epistemic logic capture locutions involving object identification, giving rise to applications in representing knowledge in multi-agent systems and parallel processing. (ii) The framework of game-theoretic semantics for the ensuing logics enjoys increased cognitive plausibility as the true semantics for epistemic notions. (iii) Several recent findings in cognitive neuroscience pertaining to the notions of awareness and explicit versus implicit processing contribute to logical studies. These three connections are explored here from both logical and cognitive perspectives. Reflecting neuroscientific research, new extensions of epistemic logic are defined, increasing formal understanding of unconscious and unaware information processing in the brain, and making the formalism thus amenable to knowledge representation in multi-agent configurations.
epistemic logic knowledge awareness multi-agent systems game-theoretic semantics cognitive neuroscience