Belief as an Effect of an Act of Introspection: Some Preliminary Remarks
Susan McRoy · 1993
1 The need for a better model of belief The aim of this paper is to challenge the pervasive no-tion of belief as a set of statements in a (modal) logic, divorced from the events of agency that generate them. Levesque (1984) points out that models of belief that have the property of logical omniscience are best thought of as models of what is implicit in an agent’s beliefs, rather than what the agent believes directly. For the task of modeling communication (my own concern in other research, e.g., McRoy 1993), this distinction is impor-tant, because it is the information that communicators actively hold to be true that influences how they reason about utterances. 1 But formal attempts to characterize what an agent actively believes have all been problem-atic in some regard. However, underlying these difficul-