A formal analysis of the notion of preference between deductive arguments

Abstract

In the last two decades, justification logic has addressed the problem of including justifications into the field of epistemic logic. Nevertheless, there is something that has not received enough attention yet: how epistemic agents might prefer certain justifications to others, in order to have better pieces of evidence to support a particular belief. In this work, we study the notion of preference between a particular kind of justifications: deductive arguments. For doing so, we have built a logic using tools from epistemic logic, justification logic and logics for belief dependence. According to our solution, the preferences of an epistemic agent between different deductive arguments can be reduced to other notions.