Inferential knowledge and epistemic dimensions

Abstract

Knowledge representation is one way to exploit expertise in a given domain by logical means. But, what kind of knowledge does one acquire from an inference (or inference on a query result over a knowledge base)? Such a question may appear awkward since the answer seems so obvious: from an inference, one simply acquires knowledge. This is undoubtedly the case when only one type of knowledge (for instance, expert knowledge) is involved in an inference. What if several types of knowledge are involved? What type of knowledge can one deduce from a plurality of knowledge types? I claim that reasoning with different knowledge concepts requires a fine-grained representation of knowledge in which every knowledge type finds a singular expression in order to avoid some epistemic equivocity associated with a coarse-grained representation of knowledge. In the first part of the paper, I revisit the Muddy Children Puzzle, which usually serves to illustrate common knowledge in dynamic epistemic logic. I try to show that this problem also shows some sort of epistemic equivocity between concepts of knowledge and, consequently, that the problem calls for some epistemological refinements concerning the representation of the types of knowledge at play in an inference. In the second part, I address this issue from a semantic point of view, and I develop a fragment of epistemic logic capable of providing a solution to the problem of epistemic equivocity.