No label defined (Q4955433)

The main purpose of the paper is to investigate the formal properties of knowledge and to establish a useful axiomatic framework for appropriate notions of belief and knowledge. The three contributions of the paper may be summarized as follows: (1) By defining the belief directly as a property of an individuals' preference relations, it is possible to deduce (rather than assume) the basic properties of belief. Primitive axioms on preference relations imply properties of the different notions of belief. (2) The paper provides an unified treatment for reasoning about belief in the context of non-expected utility maximizers. Alternative definitions of belief or knowledge of non-expected utility maximizing individuals need no longer have an ad hoc flavour: a given notion of belief can be investigated across different settings (e.g., lexicographic and maxmin expected utility). (3) By identifying the relationship between different notions of belief the author provides a foundation for further work relating preferences and logical properties of belief. The obtained results extend also previously existing ones, with the proviso to make explicit the notions of belief intended to be used within special axioms such as the knowledge axiom and the positive introspection axiom. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0931.00027].