Epistemic Modal Logic - Historical Development

Historical Development

Many papers were written in the fifties that spoke of a logic of knowledge in passing, but it was Finnish philosopher von Wright's paper An Essay in Modal Logic from 1951 that is seen as a founding document. It was not until 1962 that another Finn, Hintikka, would write Knowledge and Belief, the first book-length work to suggest using modalities to capture the semantics of knowledge rather than the alethic statements typically discussed in modal logic. This work laid much of the groundwork for the subject, but a great deal of research has taken place since that time. For example, epistemic logic has been combined recently with some ideas from dynamic logic to create public announcement logic and product update logic, which attempt to model the epistemic subtleties of conversations. The seminal works in this field are by Plaza, van Benthem, and Baltag, Moss, and Solecki.