Cautious Distributed Belief

EasyChair Preprint 8493

Abstract

This manuscript introduces and studies a notion of *cautious* distributed belief. Different from the standard distributed belief, the cautious distributed belief of a group is inconsistent only when *all* group members are individually inconsistent. The text presents basic results about cautious distributed belief, investigates whether it inherits properties from individual belief, and compares it with standard distributed belief. Although both notions are equivalent in the class of reflexive models, this is not the case in general. The propositional language extended only with cautious distributed belief is strictly less expressive than the propositional language extended only with standard distributed belief. Yet, the text identifies what is the additional tool the former needs to be as expressive as the latter.

Keyphrases: bisimilarity, cautious distributed belief, distributed knowledge, epistemic logic, expressivity

@booklet{EasyChair:8493,
  author    = {John Lindqvist and Fernando R. Velázquez-Quesada and Thomas Ågotnes},
  title     = {Cautious Distributed Belief},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 8493},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}