An Epistemic Theory of Deductive Arguments

Epistemic logic and the theory of argumentation have only very recently started to interact, despite the central role that the epistemic view of argument plays in contemporary epistemology. In this paper, we present a novel epistemic language for reasoning about three types of beliefs of agents: explicit belief, plain implicit belief, and focused implicit belief. We use it to represent the concept of deductive argument and to elucidate its connection with the concept of belief. Our language is interpreted through a formal semantics that relies on belief bases. This semantics allows us to naturally represent the reasons an agent has for believing something, which we show to be closely related to the notion of argument. We provide results on expressiveness, axiomatization and decidability for the language.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

• Publication date

  2025-11-01

• Fields of study

  Philosophy, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.24963/kr.2025/44
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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