Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Logics of belief are usually either quite complex, unintuitive, make overly idealistic assumptions, or all of the above, because they have to cope with the unusual characteristics of the belief operator (relation, predicate). Some of these problematic characteristics are referential opacity, the possible falsehood of objects of belief, belief recursion, identification of referents from outside of the belief operator in quantification contexts, etc. The difficulties faced by traditional logical treatments seem to stem mainly from the fact that an essentially subjective, intensional phenomenon gets analyzed from an objective, outside observer's point of view in an extensional, logical framework. As an alternative, we propose a subjective, intensional logic SL, which takes seriously the usual characterization of belief as a propositional attitude, that is, in SL belief is treated as a relation between an agent and a proposition (an intensional object). As results we gain technical simplicity and a simple, intuitive semantics for belief sentences.