Object-Based Unawareness

Oliver Board, Kim‐Sau Chung · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2007

The goal of this paper is to construct a user-friendly model of unawareness. We start from an axiom system (in first-order modal logic) that enables us to express the following kinds of sentences: “the agent is not sure whether or not there is anything that he is unaware of”, and “I am not sure whether or not you are aware of something that I am not”. We then prove a characterization theorem which describes a class of structures, called object-based unawareness structures, that correspond to this axiom system. As an application, we explain how an object-based unawareness structure can be use to model those American founding fathers who were opposed to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the constitution. 1

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