Attainable Knowledge and Omniscience

Abstract

The paper investigates an evidence-based semantics for epistemic logics. It is shown that the properties of knowledge obtained from a potentially infinite body of evidence are described by modal logic S5. At the same time, the properties of knowledge obtained from only a finite subset of this body are described by modal logic S4. The main technical result is a sound and complete bi-modal logical system that describes properties of these two modalities and their interplay.