Eating from the tree of ignorance

Jan and Rineke are having a discussion while making preparations for theirfarewell talk at NIAS. They have already sent out a title and an abstract.Rineke: Have you seen the instructions for the NIAS lectures? They frightenme a bit, really. Listen to this: NIAS talks should combine scienti c depthwith general accessibility; they should be geared at the general NIAS audience,but they should de nitely be more than just super cial overviews.Jan: I suppose we should not only talk about ignorance but we should alsopresuppose ignorance. Ignorance about logic, that is. Can you show me ourabstract again, please?Rineke: Here it is.Eating from the Tree of IgnoranceJan van Eijck & Rineke VerbruggeIn this talk, we will rst introduce some examples of contexts, such asnegotiations, where participants need to reason about others’ knowledgeand ignorance. Based on these examples, we will then introduce a log-ical model that can be used to reason about knowledge and ignorance:epistemic logic. This logic turns out to be well-suited for modeling socialtypes of knowledge, for example common knowledge, which forms the ba-sis of conventions such as "everybody drives on the right". Limitations ofthe idealized logical point of view on knowledge will also be given.