Abstract
There exists a considerable body of work on epistemic logics for resource-bounded reasoners. In this paper, we concentrate on a less studied aspect of resource-bounded reasoning, namely, on the ascription of beliefs and inference rules by the agents to each other. We present a formal model of a system of bounded reasoners which reason about each other’s beliefs, and investigate the problem of belief ascription in a resource-bounded setting. We show that for agents whose computational resources and memory are bounded, correct ascription of beliefs cannot be guaranteed, even in the limit. We propose a solution to the problem of correct belief ascription for feasible agents which involves ascribing reasoning strategies, or preferences on formulas, to other agents, and show that if a resource-bounded agent knows the reasoning strategy of another agent, then its ascription of beliefs to the other agent is correct in the limit.
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Alechina, N., Logan, B. Belief ascription under bounded resources. Synthese 173, 179–197 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9706-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9706-6