Two Traditions in the Logic of Belief: Bringing them Together

Abstract

The terms ‘epistemic logic’ and ‘doxastic logic’ were introduced by Georg Henrik von Wright in his 1951 An essay in modal logic [8], but it was not until Jaakko Hintikka published his seminal book Knowledge and Belief [4] that the discipline named by them took off. During the following ten to fifteen years epistemic/doxastic logic received a good deal of attention in the philosophical community, but towards the end of the 1970s the philosophers seem to have considered that the theme had been played out.¹ As often happens, however, interest in the subject was rekindled in a different quarter: computer scientists discovered or re-invented epistemic logic, as they prefer to call the subject; at the present time it is flourishing.²