The Plan for PLEN: Revising and Applying the Protocol-theoretic Logic of Epistemic Norms

This book develops technical and philosophical refinements of the protocol-theoretic framework for the logic of epistemic norms, a new, hyperintensional formal framework for modeling and reasoning about epistemic dynamics and epistemic norms. This refinement provides further justification for philosophical logicians and formal epistemologists to adopt the new framework over or in addition to older models. The protocol-theoretic framework is founded on a reconceptualization of epistemology as fundamentally a regulative and procedural endeavor. This enables the application of well-developed logical tools for exact analysis: protocol and program logics. The author’s prior book shows that the application of protocol logics to the analysis of the logic of epistemic norms is theoretically productive. This book shows, by generalizing and applying the framework’s core results, that it is more productive than was previously known. The new results include the further examination of the hyperintensionality of the system, and the meta logical properties of a hybrid logic of epistemic deontic, epistemic operators, and normal application operators. Moreover, this book shows that the theoretical benefits of the new system can be acquired without abandoning the existing models by means of results showing that other models can be subsumed by the protocol-theoretic framework.