Standard State Space Models of Unawareness (Extended Abstract)
This work addresses foundational issues in modeling unawareness for decision theory and logic, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing debates without introducing new methods.
The paper challenges the view that standard state-space models cannot represent unawareness, arguing that they can adequately model two of three identified notions of awareness, offering simplicity and enabling proofs of completeness and decidability.
The impossibility theorem of Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini has been thought to demonstrate that standard state-space models cannot be used to represent unawareness. We first show that Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini do not establish this claim. We then distinguish three notions of awareness, and argue that although one of them may not be adequately modeled using standard state spaces, there is no reason to think that standard state spaces cannot provide models of the other two notions. In fact, standard space models of these forms of awareness are attractively simple. They allow us to prove completeness and decidability results with ease, to carry over standard techniques from decision theory, and to add propositional quantifiers straightforwardly.