Doxastic Reasoning with Multi-Source Justifications based on Second Order Propositional Modal Logic

In multi-agent systems, an agent generally forms her belief based on information from multiple sources, such as messages from other agents or perception of the external environment. While modal epistemic logic has been a standard formalism for reasoning about agent’s belief, it lacks the expressive power for tracking information sources. Justification logic (JL) provides the missing expressivity by using justification terms to keep track of the belief formation process. However, because JL does not make a clear distinction between potential and actual evidence, the interpretation of justification formulas in JL turns out to be ambiguous. In this paper, we present a justification-based multi-source reasoning formalism built upon second-order propositional modal logic. Our framework not only inherits the source-tracking advantage of JL but also allows the distinction between the actual observation and simply potential admissibility of evidence.