A Logical Modeling of Severe Ignorance. Bonzio, S., Fano, V., Graziani, P., & Pra Baldi, M. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 52(4):1053–1080, August, 2023.
A Logical Modeling of Severe Ignorance [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
In the logical context, ignorance is traditionally defined recurring to epistemic logic. In particular, ignorance is essentially interpreted as “lack of knowledge”. This received view has - as we point out - some problems, in particular we will highlight how it does not allow to express a type of content-theoretic ignorance, i.e. an ignorance of φ that stems from an unfamiliarity with its meaning. Contrarily to this trend, in this paper, we introduce and investigate a modal logic having a primitive epistemic operator I, modeling ignorance. Our modal logic is essentially constructed on the modal logics based on weak Kleene three-valued logic introduced by Segerberg (Theoria, 33(1):53–71, 1997). Such non-classical propositional basis allows to define a Kripke-style semantics with the following, very intuitive, interpretation: a formula φ is ignored by an agent if φ is neither true nor false in every world accessible to the agent. As a consequence of this choice, we obtain a type of content-theoretic notion of ignorance, which is essentially different from the traditional approach. We dub it severe ignorance. We axiomatize, prove completeness and decidability for the logic of reflexive (three-valued) Kripke frames, which we find the most suitable candidate for our novel proposal and, finally, compare our approach with the most traditional one.
@article{bonzio_logical_2023,
	title = {A {Logical} {Modeling} of {Severe} {Ignorance}},
	volume = {52},
	issn = {1573-0433},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-022-09697-x},
	doi = {10.1007/s10992-022-09697-x},
	abstract = {In the logical context, ignorance is traditionally defined recurring to epistemic logic. In particular, ignorance is essentially interpreted as “lack of knowledge”. This received view has - as we point out - some problems, in particular we will highlight how it does not allow to express a type of content-theoretic ignorance, i.e. an ignorance of φ that stems from an unfamiliarity with its meaning. Contrarily to this trend, in this paper, we introduce and investigate a modal logic having a primitive epistemic operator I, modeling ignorance. Our modal logic is essentially constructed on the modal logics based on weak Kleene three-valued logic introduced by Segerberg (Theoria, 33(1):53–71, 1997). Such non-classical propositional basis allows to define a Kripke-style semantics with the following, very intuitive, interpretation: a formula φ is ignored by an agent if φ is neither true nor false in every world accessible to the agent. As a consequence of this choice, we obtain a type of content-theoretic notion of ignorance, which is essentially different from the traditional approach. We dub it severe ignorance. We axiomatize, prove completeness and decidability for the logic of reflexive (three-valued) Kripke frames, which we find the most suitable candidate for our novel proposal and, finally, compare our approach with the most traditional one.},
	language = {en},
	number = {4},
	urldate = {2024-03-29},
	journal = {Journal of Philosophical Logic},
	author = {Bonzio, S. and Fano, V. and Graziani, P. and Pra Baldi, M.},
	month = aug,
	year = {2023},
	keywords = {Bochvar external logic, Ignorance, PRINTED (Fonds papier), Three-valued modal logic, Weak Kleene logic},
	pages = {1053--1080},
}

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