MoL-2025-30: Collaborative Knowability

MoL-2025-30: Marais, Klarise (2025) Collaborative Knowability. [Report]

Text MoL-2025-30.text.pdf - Published Version Download (660kB)

Abstract

Formal epistemologists design and study formalisms that represent concepts or processes from mainstream epistemology. The purpose of this is either to contribute to mainstream epistemology literature by showing relationships between or implications of theories and concepts, or to be used in implementations. In this thesis, we attempt to create a formalism that has the potential to serve both purposes. On the philosophical side, we attempt to use our formalism to show consequences of theories on group knowledge, and on the technological side, we aim to make our formalism suited to teach artificial systems about learning/collaboration. We create our formalism by adding elements relevant to collaboration to existing dynamic epistemic logic literature, and using this setting to formally define a notion of group knowledge/knowability called potential collaborative knowledge. We then use this notion to formally show how it is possible for a group to know/learn more than the sum of what individual members know/learn, benefitting the philosophical literature by showing implications of concepts/theories, and showing how potential collaborative knowledge is a generalisation of distributive knowledge, a commonly studied type of group knowledge. We then work towards axiomatising our formalism by proposing an axiomatisation and proving soundness. We end with a discussion of some possible future directions of research.

Item Type:	Report
Report Nr:	MoL-2025-30
Series Name:	Master of Logic Thesis (MoL) Series
Year:	2025
Subjects:	Logic Mathematics
Depositing User:	Dr Marco Vervoort
Date Deposited:	12 Jan 2026 13:22
Last Modified:	12 Jan 2026 13:22
URI:	https://eprints.illc.uva.nl/id/eprint/2406

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