Formal Analysis of Epistemic Modalities and Conditionals Based on Logic of Belief Structures

摘要

There is a strong context dependency in meaning of modalities in natural languages. Kratzer demonstrates how to deal with this problem within possible world semantics. In this paper, we propose to interpret epistemic modalities in background of an epistemic state. Our analysis is a meta-linguistic one and we extensively use the proof-theoretic consequence relation. We define, then, a belief structure and introduce a belief structure revision operator. We call this framework Logic of Belief Structures (LBS). Then, we apply LBS to formalization of belief revision and interpretation of conditionals and investigate the relationship between belief revision and conditionals. Furthermore, we propose two types of conditionals, epistemic and causal conditionals.