A Logical Modeling of Severe Ignorance

Abstract

AbstractIn the logical context, ignorance is traditionally defined recurring to epistemic logic. In particular, ignorance is essentially interpreted as “lack of knowledge”. This received view has - as we point out - some problems, in particular we will highlight how it does not allow to express a type of content-theoretic ignorance, i.e. an ignorance ofφthat stems from an unfamiliarity with its meaning. Contrarily to this trend, in this paper, we introduce and investigate a modal logic having a primitive epistemic operatorI, modeling ignorance. Our modal logic is essentially constructed on the modal logics based on weak Kleene three-valued logic introduced by Segerberg (Theoria, 33(1):53–71, 1997). Such non-classical propositional basis allows to define a Kripke-style semantics with the following, very intuitive, interpretation: a formulaφis ignored by an agent ifφis neither true nor false in every world accessible to the agent. As a consequence of this choice, we obtain a type of content-theoretic notion of ignorance, which is essentially different from the traditional approach. We dub itsevere ignorance. We axiomatize, prove completeness and decidability for the logic of reflexive (three-valued) Kripke frames, which we find the most suitable candidate for our novel proposal and, finally, compare our approach with the most traditional one.