Object-Based Unawareness

Joint with: Oliver Board

The goal of this paper is to construct a user-friendly model of unawareness. We start from an axiom system (in first-order modal logic) that enables us to express the

following kinds of sentences: “the agent is not sure whether or not there is anything that he is unaware of”, and “I am not sure whether or not you are aware of something that I am not”. We then prove a characterization theorem which describes a class of structures, called object-based unawareness structures, that correspond to this axiom

system. As an application, we explain how an object-based unawareness structure can be use to model those American founding fathers who were opposed to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the constitution.

For more information, contact Andrew Postlewaite.