Existing approaches to knowledge representation and reasoning in the context of open systems either deal with “objective” knowledge or with beliefs. In contrast, there has been almost no research on the formal modelling of opinions, i.e., communicatively asserted ostensible beliefs. This is highly surprising, since opinions are in fact the only publicly visible kind of knowledge in open systems...

People often see the same evidence but draw opposite conclusions, becoming increasingly polarized over time. Prior discussions of this puzzle have focused on the failure of Bayesian reasoning or on the possibility of non-common priors. By contrast, we offer a model of diverging opinions in a Bayesian environment with common priors. In our model, people hold different private information and dis...

among islamic sects there are two groups that disagree about the issue ofbada`: imamiyeh or shiites, from one hand considers bada` as one of theoriginal principles of islamic beliefs and in order to prove this believe theyhave proposed four reasons, among which the most important is the deletionand notation verse (mahv va esbat) in quran. on the other hand, sunni'sscholars are strongly aga...