The logic of objective knowledge and rational belief

Abstract

In this paper, we study the logical relations between different notions of knowledge and belief by means of a generalization of the usual Kripke models for epistemic logic. We argue that the obtained generalized Kripke models might be useful for carefully distinguishing the many different notions of knowledge and belief. We identify the (highly idealized) notions of objective knowledge and rational (introspective) belief, which correspond with fairly standard notions of knowledge and belief, and propose a system OKRIB for combining both notions which differs essentially from some other such proposals found in the literature. We also consider some other notions of knowledge and belief, and study how they relate to objective knowledge and rational belief.