Two Tales of Epistemic Models

Abstract

This short paper has two parts. First, we prove a generalisation of Aumann’s surprising impossibility result in the context of rational decision making. We then move, in the second part, to discuss the interpretational meaning of some formal setups of epistemic models, and we do so by means of presenting an interesting puzzle in epistemic logic. The aim is to high-light certain problematic aspects of these epistemic systems concerning first/third-person asymmetry which underlies both parts of the story. This asymmetry, we argue, reveals certain limits of what epistemic models can be.