Dear all,
We\'d like to remind you of the GROLOG/LIRa Logic afternoon. Please find the details below:
Date and Time: Monday, July 1st 2019, 14:00-17:00
Venue: Room Beta, Faculty of Philosophy, Oude Boteringestraat 52,
Groningen.
Speaker #1: Roberto Ciuni (University of Padova)
Title: Information-based oughts and their interaction with knowledge
and belief.
Abstract. In this talk, I present a conditional logic that enables us
to reason about information-based oughts and the role they play in
decision-theoretical scenarios that crucially involve knowledge and
beliefs. Unconditional oughts and beliefs turn to be special cases of
their conditional counterparts. The paper proceeds as follows. After
providing a bit of background and setup, I introduce the notions of an
objective ought and an information-based ought, and we present a
maximality-based semantics for them and the doxastic notions we deal
with, in the style of Hansson, Board, van Benthem, Baltag and Smets.
Finally, I present a complete axiom system for the resulting logic.
Speaker #2: Louwe Kuijer (University of Liverpool)
Title: Minimal rationality constraints for conditional obligation.
Abstract. A conditional obligation is of the form O(p|q), with the
meaning that p is obligatory under the condition that q is true. We
can give semantics to this O operator using a preference relation on
states, by saying that O(p|q) holds if p is true on all the \"best\" q
states.
But of course that does not fully determine the semantics unless we
specify what we mean by a state being one of the \"best\". There are
several options: we could say that a states is \"best\" if it is maximal
(i.e., there is no other state that is strictly preferred) or if it is
optimal (i.e., weakly preferred over all other states). Here, we take
a different option and say that a state is among the \"best\" states if
it is part of at least one so-called minimal retentive set. Defining
\"best\" in this way leads to a weak logic for O, but we can find
contexts where this weak logic is the appropriate choice.
In this talk I will (i) introduce the semantics for O based on minimal
retentive sets and give an example, (ii) introduce a sound an complete
axiomatization, and discuss how it differs from other axiomatizations
of conditional obligations and (iii) briefly discuss the challenges
encountered while defining a canonical model for this logic.
Speaker #3: Karolina Krzyzanowska (ILLC, University of Amsterdam)
Title: True clauses, false connections, and the limits of pragmatic
explanations.
Abstract. It is a common intuition that the antecedent of an
indicative conditional should have something to do with its
consequent, that they should be somehow connected. However, only very
few theories of conditionals do justice to this intuition. In fact,
many prominent accounts of indicative conditionals validate the
Principle of Conjunctive Sufficiency that allows to infer a
conditional from the truth of its antecedent and the consequent.
Consequently, many odd conditionals whose antecedents and consequents
are not connected at all are rendered true, or highly acceptable, on
these accounts. Their proponents tend to dismiss the oddness of such
conditionals as a pragmatic phenomenon, outside the scope of interest
of a semanticist or a logician. This is not to say that no pragmatic
explanations of the oddity of missing-link conditionals have been
proposed. In my talk, I will discuss the most salient of these
proposals and I will present empirical data that show how they all
fail.
The talks will be followed by drinks and dinner with the speakers.
For more information about the GROLOG seminar and scheduled events,
please check the GROLOG seminar webpage.
Hope to see you there!
The LIRa team
