An Epistemic Theory of Deductive Arguments
Emiliano Lorini · 2025
Epistemic logic and the theory of argumentation have only very recently started to interact, despite the central role that the epistemic view of argument plays in contemporary epistemology. In this paper, we present a novel epistemic language for reasoning about three types of beliefs of agents: explicit belief, plain implicit belief, and focused implicit belief. We use it to represent the concept of deductive argument and to elucidate its connection with the concept of belief. Our language is interpreted through a formal semantics that relies on belief bases. This semantics allows us to naturally represent the reasons an agent has for believing something, which we show to be closely related to the notion of argument. We provide results on expressiveness, axiomatization and decidability for the language.