A Logical Analysis of an Information Filtering Architecture Based on Epistemic Trust Inference

In agent theory, epistemic trust is used to infer beliefs, for ex-
ample by filtering out the information the agent receives from
untrustworthy agents. Moreover, trust itself can be inferred
from other information. We introduce a simple information
filtering architecture that clearly distinguishes the relation be-
tween the two kinds of inference. Moreover, we provide a
logical analysis of the architecture, based on a new family of
input/output logics, and we explore information filtering and
belief manipulation within this formal framework. Our key
finding is that due to this architecture, some of the widely
debated logical rules for trust inference are redundant with
respect to information-filtering mechanisms and some other
are redundant with respect to belief manipulation.