ILLC-LIRa May 2016

illc-lira@list.uva.nl

1 participants
8 discussions

Tomorow: LIRa session with Hein Duijf
by LIRa Seminar 26 May '16

26 May '16

Dear all, tomorrow we will have a LIRa session with Hein Duijf. Everyone is cordially invited! Speaker: Hein Duijf (Utrecht University) Date and Time: Friday, May 27th 2016, 13:00-14:30 Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 Title: Cooperative Rationality: beyond team reasoning. Abstract. The vast majority of philosophical accounts of collective intentionality rely on members \'intentions to do their part in the collective act\'. It is, however, far from clear what this means. It has been proposed that the economic literature on team reasoning (as studied by Bacharach, Sugden and Gold) can shed some light on this philosophical debate. Although it has been argued that team reasoning corrects and extends individualistic decision theory (by studying Hi-Lo games), we aim to show that it is surprisingly weak in two regards: (1) it fails to transcend individualistic decision theory, since it can be explained as a change of motive, and (2) a new challenge is presented where the team reasoning account fails and individualistic decision theory succeeds in capturing the cooperative incentives, thus providing justification that they are on a paradoxical par. Reform is required. We propose a logic of agency and intentionality to adequately reduce team reasoning to a certain intention type, coined team intention. Such a member\'s team intention inclines her to perform an individual action that is, merely, compatible with a best group action. On the one hand, this reduction shows that team reasoning can be adequately explained by a change of motive. Team reasoning is hence moved into the ball park of individualistic decision theory, coupled with preference transformations, which it was supposed to transcend. On the other hand, it reveals the weakness of team reasoning and points to an enhancement. To rectify the situation, we utilise the logical language to introduce participatory intentions, which incline an agent to promote that a best group action is performed. Our main result is two-fold: (1) participatory intentions correctly address the new challenge and (2) participatory intentions surpass team intentions, and therefore also team reasoning. Hope to see you there! The LIRa team

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Affiliated event on June 17th: Joe Halpern at CWI
by LIRa Seminar 23 May '16

23 May '16

Dear all, next month Joe Halpern will give a talk at CWI. Speaker: Joe Halpern (Cornell University) Title: Decision theory with resource-bounded agents Date/location: Friday 17th of June, 15:00 Location: Room L016 @ CWI Abstract: There have been two major lines of research aimed at capturing resource-bounded players in game theory. The first, initiated by Rubinstein, charges an agent for doing costly computation; the second, initiated by Neyman does not charge for computation, but limits the computation that agents can do, typically by modeling agents as finite automata. We review recent work on applying both approaches in the context of decision theory. For the first approach, we take the objects of choice in a decision problem to be Turing machines, and charge players for the ``complexity\'\' of the Turing machine chosen (e.g., its running time). This approach can be used to explain well-known phenomena like first-impression-matters biases (i.e., people tend to put more weight on evidence they hear early on) and belief polarization (two people with different prior beliefs, hearing the same evidence, can end up with diametrically opposed conclusions) as the outcomes of quite rational decisions. For the second approach, we model people as finite automata, and provide a simple algorithm that, on a problem that captures a number of settings of interest, provably performs optimally as the number of states in the automaton increases. Perhaps more importantly, it seems to capture a number of features of human behavior, as observed in experiments. This is joint work with Rafael Pass and Lior Seeman. No previous background is assumed.

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Next Friday: LIRa session with Hein Duijf
by LIRa Seminar 22 May '16

22 May '16

Dear all, On Friday May 27th, we will have a LIRa session with Hein Duijf. Everyone is cordially invited! Speaker: Hein Duijf (Utrecht University) Date and Time: Friday, May 27th 2016, 13:00-14:30 Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 Title: TBA. Abstract. TBA. Hope to see you there! The LIRa team

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Tomorrow: LIRa session with Benjamin Icard and Markus Pfundstein
by LIRa Seminar 19 May '16

19 May '16

Dear all, tomorrow we will have a LIRa session with Benjamin Icard and Markus Pfundstein. Everyone is cordially invited! Date and Time: Friday, May 20th 2016, 13:00-15:00 Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 First Speaker: Benjamin Icard (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris) Title: The ‘Surprise Deception Paradox’: a conceptual and logical insight into veridical deception. Abstract. Epistemologists have devoted efforts to the analysis of deception (i.e. causing someone to hold a false belief through a false piece of information) by offering epistemic accounts of this pervasive attitude. They have used both conceptual methods [e.g. Chisholm & Feehan 1977; Adler 1997; Mahon 2008] and more formal ones [e.g. Sakama et al. 2010a, 2010b; van Ditmarsch et al. 2012, 2014]. In doing so, however, they have focused on deception caused by false information. But a more subtle form of deception can also happen with the dissemination of true information. We may call veridical deception the method of causing someone to hold a false belief through a true piece of information. Veridical deception has aroused strong interest as well, particularly for those working at the interface with pragmatics on double bluff strategies [e.g. Fallis 2014], presupposition failures [e.g. Harder & Kock 1976; Vincent & Castelfranchi 1981] and false implicatures [e.g. Adler 1997; Fallis 2014]. In this talk, I will focus on one aspect of veridical deception which, as far as I know, has not yet been examined in the literature: the ability for someone to deceive while telling the truth about their deceitful attitude, that is to say the capacity for them to deceive after having publicly announced that they would do so. Following Baltag and Smets’ treatment of the “Surprise Exam Paradox” [Baltag & Smets, Forthcoming], I will show that a paradox about deception I identified in Smullyan [1978] raises similar issues. Moreover, I will argue that it can be simply formalized in Dynamic Belief Revision Theory and receive a solution using adequate plausibility orders over a set of possible states. In this paradox, a sly speaker makes the truthful announcement that he will deceive a vulnerable addressee, but the addressee cannot consistently believe the announcement since it is pragmatically misleading. Indeed, the speaker falsely implicates that he will deceive the addressee by doing a particular action (commission) but he deceives him by not doing any action (omission). Nevertheless, the addressee can consistently believe something after the announcement, namely that the deceiver is ‘unreliable’ because he explicitly states that he is deceitful, thus either truthful or untruthful (or both), therefore absolutely unpredictable. In a nutshell, I aim to show by model-theoretical means that the paradox can be solved if the addressee adopts successive “belief upgrades” regarding the deceiver’s announcement and implicature. Second Speaker: Markus Pfundstein Title: A Framework for modelling knowledge about Wireless Sensor Networks using Dynamic Epistemic Logic. Hope to see you there! The LIRa team

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Next Friday: LIRa session with Benjamin Icard and Markus Pfundstein
by LIRa Seminar 15 May '16

15 May '16

Dear all, On Friday May 20th, we will have a LIRa session with Benjamin Icard and Markus Pfundstein. Everyone is cordially invited! Date and Time: Friday, May 20th 2016, 13:00-15:00 Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 First Speaker: Benjamin Icard (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris) Title: The ‘Surprise Deception Paradox’: a conceptual and logical insight into veridical deception. Abstract. Epistemologists have devoted efforts to the analysis of deception (i.e. causing someone to hold a false belief through a false piece of information) by offering epistemic accounts of this pervasive attitude. They have used both conceptual methods [e.g. Chisholm & Feehan 1977; Adler 1997; Mahon 2008] and more formal ones [e.g. Sakama et al. 2010a, 2010b; van Ditmarsch et al. 2012, 2014]. In doing so, however, they have focused on deception caused by false information. But a more subtle form of deception can also happen with the dissemination of true information. We may call veridical deception the method of causing someone to hold a false belief through a true piece of information. Veridical deception has aroused strong interest as well, particularly for those working at the interface with pragmatics on double bluff strategies [e.g. Fallis 2014], presupposition failures [e.g. Harder & Kock 1976; Vincent & Castelfranchi 1981] and false implicatures [e.g. Adler 1997; Fallis 2014]. In this talk, I will focus on one aspect of veridical deception which, as far as I know, has not yet been examined in the literature: the ability for someone to deceive while telling the truth about their deceitful attitude, that is to say the capacity for them to deceive after having publicly announced that they would do so. Following Baltag and Smets’ treatment of the “Surprise Exam Paradox” [Baltag & Smets, Forthcoming], I will show that a paradox about deception I identified in Smullyan [1978] raises similar issues. Moreover, I will argue that it can be simply formalized in Dynamic Belief Revision Theory and receive a solution using adequate plausibility orders over a set of possible states. In this paradox, a sly speaker makes the truthful announcement that he will deceive a vulnerable addressee, but the addressee cannot consistently believe the announcement since it is pragmatically misleading. Indeed, the speaker falsely implicates that he will deceive the addressee by doing a particular action (commission) but he deceives him by not doing any action (omission). Nevertheless, the addressee can consistently believe something after the announcement, namely that the deceiver is ‘unreliable’ because he explicitly states that he is deceitful, thus either truthful or untruthful (or both), therefore absolutely unpredictable. In a nutshell, I aim to show by model-theoretical means that the paradox can be solved if the addressee adopts successive “belief upgrades” regarding the deceiver’s announcement and implicature. Second Speaker: Markus Pfundstein Title: TBA. Abstract. TBA. Hope to see you there! The LIRa team

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Tomorrow: LogiCIC/LIRa session with Guido Bacciagaluppi
by LIRa Seminar 12 May '16

12 May '16

Dear all, tomorrow we will have a joint LogiCIC/LIRa session with Guido Bacciagaluppi. Everyone is cordially invited! Speaker: Guido Bacciagaluppi (Utrecht University) Date and Time: Friday, May 13th 2016, 13:00-14:30 Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 Title: Von Neumann\'s no-Hidden-Variables Theorem (and Hermann\'s Critique). Abstract. There has been some recent debate about what von Neumann intended with his famous no-hidden-variables theorem (from his 1932 book), and on whether Bell\'s now equally famous criticism is really fair to von Neumann. I revisit von Neumann\'s result, which was originally published in 1927 in a paper trying to give what one would now call a \"reconstruction\" of quantum mechanics, and suggest a more nuanced reading. I pay special attention also to the critique of von Neumann provided by Grete Hermann in her 1935 essay on the foundations of quantum mechanics (and in an unpublished manuscript from 1933). Hope to see you there! The LIRa team

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Open position for a postdoctoral researcher in Logic
by LIRa Seminar 11 May '16

11 May '16

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam has a _vacancy_ for a *Postdoctoral researcher in Logic * 38 hours per week vacancy number 16-218 Description: -------------- We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher who will join the research group of Prof. Sonja Smets. Preference will be given to a candidate who is active in one of the following areas: 1. Logic and its applications to formal epistemology or multi-agent systems. In particular we are interested in the use of logical methods to study the dynamics of information. Topics of interest can relate to belief revision theory, social network theory, epistemic game theory, truth approximation or formal learning theory. 2. Logic and its applications in the area of quantum mechanics or quantum information theory. In particular we are interested in quantum logic and its use in quantum information theory (e.g. logics used for the formal verification of quantum information protocols). Requirements: ---------------- Applicants should have a PhD degree in any area connected to Logic, Theoretical Philosophy, Mathematics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Physics. Fluent English is a prerequisite. We are looking for a candidate with a strong interest in Logic (especially in any of the areas such as Modal Logic, Epistemic Logic, Dynamic Logic or Probabilistic Logic) and at least one of the following areas of research: Belief Revision Theory, Formal Learning Theory, Formal Epistemology, Epistemic Game Theory, Multi-Agent Systems in AI, Quantum Logic, Quantum Information Theory. Preference will be given to candidates who have published or submitted for publication original work in at least one of the above areas (or interdisciplinary work at the interface of these areas). We are primarily looking for candidates who have a strong research profile. But it would also be helpful if a candidate has any experience or potential for research supervision, teaching (in areas related to logic) or research organization (e.g. organizing small workshops or research seminars). Job application: ------------------- Applications should include the following information, in separate pdf files (not zipped), using surname, initials and a self-evident word as file names, e.g. , Smith J CV 1. a Curriculum Vitae; 2. a Letter of Motivation (maximum 1 page), explaining why you are interested in this position; 3. a Research Statement (maximum 2 pages), explaining your research interests and how you think they can be related to one of the areas mentioned in the above given job description; 4. a copy of your most important research paper, which can be a joint paper (co-authored with others), and which has appeared in or is submitted for publication to a scientific journal; 5. a brief summary of your PhD thesis in maximum 2 pages; 6. the name and contact details (including email address) of two referees who can provide details about your profile. Completed applications should be submitted by *15 June 2016 *to application-science(a)uva.nl and should state your name and vacancy number 16-218 in the subject field. The committee does not guarantee that late or incomplete applications will be considered. Further Information: https://www.uva.nl/en/about-the-uva/working-at-the-uva/vacancies/item/16-21…

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Next Friday: LogiCIC/LIRa session with Guido Bacciagaluppi
by LIRa Seminar 08 May '16

08 May '16

Dear all, next Friday we will have a joint LogiCIC/LIRa session with Guido Bacciagaluppi. Everyone is cordially invited! Speaker: Guido Bacciagaluppi (Utrecht University) Date and Time: Friday, May 13th 2016, 13:00-14:30 Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 Title: Von Neumann\'s no-Hidden-Variables Theorem (and Hermann\'s Critique). Abstract. There has been some recent debate about what von Neumann intended with his famous no-hidden-variables theorem (from his 1932 book), and on whether Bell\'s now equally famous criticism is really fair to von Neumann. I revisit von Neumann\'s result, which was originally published in 1927 in a paper trying to give what one would now call a \"reconstruction\" of quantum mechanics, and suggest a more nuanced reading. I pay special attention also to the critique of von Neumann provided by Grete Hermann in her 1935 essay on the foundations of quantum mechanics (and in an unpublished manuscript from 1933). Hope to see you there! The LIRa team

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ILLC-LIRa May 2016