On the Epistemic Foundations of Agent Theories

We argue that none of the existing epistemic logics can adequately serve the needs of agent theories. We suggest a new concept of knowledge which generalizes both implicit and explicit knowledge and argue that this is the notion we need to formalize agents in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. A logic of the new concept is developed which is formally and practically adequate in the following sense: first, it does not suffer from any kind of logical omniscience. Second, it can account for the intuition that agents \emph{are} rational, though not hyper-rational. Third, it is expressive enough. The advantages of the new logic over other formalisms is demonstrated by showing that none of the existing systems can fulfill all these requirements simultaneously.
@InProceedings{Duc97ATAL,
author = 	 {H. N. Duc},
title = 	 {On the Epistemic Foundations of Agent Theories},
booktitle = 	 {Intelligent {A}gents {IV}. {P}roceedings of {ATAL-97}},
OPTcrossref =  {},
OPTkey = 	 {},
OPTeditor = 	 {},
OPTvolume = 	 {},
OPTnumber = 	 {},
OPTseries = 	 {Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence},
year =	 {1997},
OPTorganization = {},
publisher =	 {Springer Verlag},