Attainable Knowledge and Omniscience

The article investigates an evidence-based semantics for epistemic logics in which pieces of evidence are interpreted as equivalence relations on the epistemic worlds. It is shown that the properties of knowledge obtained from potentially infinitely many pieces of evidence are described by modal logic S5. At the same time, the properties of knowledge obtained from only a finite number of pieces of evidence 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.