Deceit and indefeasible knowledge: the case of <i>dubitatio</i>

Abstract

The current trend in knowledge revision in the Dynamic Epistemic Logic tradition focuses on the addition of new knowledge, rather than the possibility of losing knowledge. Yet there are natural situations, such as an agent who does not want another agent to know that she knows a certain piece of information, where there is a need to be able to model the retraction of a proposition from a knowledge base. One situation where this is systematically required is the variant of the medieval theory of obligationes known as dubitatio, where one of the agents in the dialogue is obliged to hold the initial proposition, the dubitatum, as doubtful, regardless of what other propositions she may concede or deny during the disputation. In this paper, we use dubitatio as a motivation for studying deceitful agents, and we discuss various ways that an agent can move from a model where f is known to one where f is not known.