Do You Know What I Mean? A Syntactic Representation for Differential Bounded Awareness

Abstract

Without the assumption of complete, shared awareness, it is necessary to consider communication between agents who may entertain different representations of the world. A syntactic (language-based) approach provides powerful tools to address this problem. In this paper, we define translation operators between two languages which provide a `best approximation' for the meaning of propositions in the target language subject to its expressive power. We show that, in general, the translation operators preserve some, but not all, logical operations. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a joint state space and a joint language, in which the subjective state spaces of each agent, and their individual languages, may be embedded. This approach allows us to compare languages with respect to their expressiveness and thus, with respect to the properties of the associated state space.