ILLC-LIRa October 2021

illc-lira@list.uva.nl

2 participants
13 discussions

LIRa-related event with Alexandru Baltag
by LIRa Seminar 05 Oct '21

05 Oct '21

Dear all, The following event might be interesting to many in the LIRa audience: ---------------------------------------------------- This Thursday, the 7th of October at 11am there will be a DIEP seminar with Alexandru Baltag on: Title: Group (Ir)Rationality: Can Logic help? Abstract: I present some applications of logical methods (in particular, of so-called dynamic epistemic logics) to the study of emergent phenomena in groups of `agents', capable of reflection, communication, reasoning, argumentation etc.The main focus on the understanding of belief/preference formation and diffusion in social networks, and on how this affects the group's ``epistemic potential": the ability of the agents to track the truth of the matter (with respect to some given relevant topic). While in some cases, ``wisdom of the crowds" can increase the epistemic potential, in other situations the group's dynamics leads to informational distortions (-- the ``madness of the crowds": cascades, ``groupthink", the curse of the committee, pluralistic ignorance, group polarization, doxastic cycles etc). I explain how logic (in combination with probabilistic methods) can be used to provide some explanations for both types of situations, as well as to suggest some partial solutions to informational distortions. Zoom link: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/85608909905 ---------------------------------------------------- The LIRa team

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LIRa-related event
by LIRa Seminar 01 Oct '21

01 Oct '21

Dear all, The following event might also be of interest to the LIRa audience: ---------------------------------------- Recipients of this mailing may be interested in the following talk at the EXPRESS Seminar (https://inferentialexpressivism.com/seminar/). In order to receive the Zoom link, please fill in the form provided in the website. The time of 4pm is CEST (time of Amsterdam). Speaker: Richard Pettigrew (Bristol) Title: Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality Date: Tuesday 5 October 2021 Time: 16:00 - 18:00 Location: online on Zoom. Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality How much does rationality constrain what we should believe on the basis of our evidence? According to this talk, not very much. For most people and most bodies of evidence, there is a wide range of beliefs that rationality permits them to have in response to that evidence. The argument, which takes inspiration from William James’ ideas in ‘The Will to Believe’, proceeds from two premises. The first is a theory about the basis of epistemic rationality. It’s called epistemic utility theory, and it says that what it is epistemically rational for you to believe is what it would be rational for you to choose if you were given the chance to pick your beliefs and, when picking them, you were to care only about their epistemic value. So, to say which beliefs are permitted, we must say how to measure epistemic value, and which decision rule to use when picking your beliefs. The second premise is a claim about attitudes to epistemic risk, and it says that rationality permits many different such attitudes. These attitudes can show up in epistemic utility theory in two ways: in the way you measure epistemic value; and in the decision rule you use to pick beliefs. This talk explores the latter. The result is permissivism about epistemic rationality: different attitudes to epistemic risk lead to different choices of prior beliefs; given most bodies of evidence, different priors lead to different posteriors; and even once we fix your attitudes to epistemic risk, if they are at all risk-inclined, there is a range of different priors and therefore different posteriors they permit. ----------------------------------------

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LIRa Session: Dingmar van Eck (Thursday, 7 October 16:30)
by LIRa Seminar 01 Oct '21

01 Oct '21

Dear all, We will have our next LIRa session on Thursday, 7 October 16:30. Please use our recurring zoom link: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/88142993494?pwd=d1BsQWR4T2UyK0Job29YNThjaGRkUT09 (Meeting ID: 881 4299 3494, Passcode: 352984) You can find the details of the talk below. Speaker: Dingmar van Eck (University of Amsterdam, Ghent University) Date and Time: Thursday, October 7th 2021, 16:30-18:00, Amsterdam time. Venue: online. Title: Mechanist Idealisation in Systems Biology Abstract. This paper adds to the philosophical literature on mechanistic explanation by elaborating two related explanatory functions of idealisation in mechanistic models. The first function involves explaining the presence of structural/organizational features of mechanisms by reference to their role as difference-makers for performance requirements. The second involves tracking counterfactual dependency relations between features of mechanisms and features of mechanistic explanandum phenomena. To make these functions salient, we relate our discussion to an exemplar from systems biological research on the mechanism for countering heat shock—the heat shock response (HSR) system—in Escherichia coli (E.coli) bacteria. This research also reinforces a more general lesson: ontic constraint accounts in the literature on mechanistic explanation provide insufficiently informative normative appraisals of mechanistic models. We close by outlining an alternative view on the explanatory norms governing mechanistic representation. Hope to see you there! The LIRa team

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ILLC-LIRa October 2021