Doxastic Group Reasoning via Multiple Belief Shadowing

In real world situations an agent may need to switch between distinct roles and/or groups. This calls for a well-controlled and computationally-friendly adjustment of relevant beliefs, especially when groups’ structures and organization evolve dynamically. A need for adaptability may also emerge from the impossibility of fixing agents’ roles or teams at design time. In such changing circumstances reasoning about beliefs is a challenging issue. A concept of belief shadowing, introduced in [8], address these phenomena with a use of AasB operator expressing that A acts as B. That is, beliefs of AasB are those of B, unless B does not know the doxastic status of a given belief, in which case the belief of A is binding. This simple construct turns out to be efficient for shallow and transient forms of belief change. Yet, while being convenient in situations when an agent plays a specific role or joins a given group, single shadowing hardly fits cases of multiple roles and/or multiple groups entered simultaneously without prioritizing them. As a remedy we introduce multiple shadowing together with a query language, Open image in new window , where roles and groups are dealt with uniformly. The multiple shadowing operator appears simple yet flexible for reasoning about the associated beliefs, which otherwise are rather complex and onerous to reason about.Importantly, the presented language is tractable. Possible applications of Open image in new window as a lightweight tool for doxastic reasoning are pointed out.