Naming and identity in epistemic logic part II: a first-order logic for naming

摘要

Modal epistemic logics for many agents sometimes ignore or simplify the distinction between the agents themselves, and the names these agents use when reasoning about each other. We consider problems motivated by practical computer science applications, and show that the simplest theories of naming are often inadequate. The issues we raise are related to some well-known philosophical concerns, such as indexical descriptions, de re knowledge, and the problem of referring to nonexistent objects. However, our emphasis is on epistemic logic as a descriptive tool for distributed systems and artificial intelligence applications, which leads to some nonstandard solutions.