Dear all,
We will have our next LIRa session on Thursday, 10 March 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: Stipe Pandzic (Utrecht University)
Date and Time: Thursday, March 10th 2022, 16:30-18:00, Amsterdam
time.
Venue: online.
Title: Default justification logic as a theory of arguments and
epistemic justification.
Abstract. My goal in this talk is to present a logic of structured
defeasible argumentation using the language of justification logic.
One of the key features that is absent in standard justification
logics is the possibility to weigh different epistemic reasons that
might conflict with one another. To amend this, we develop a semantics
for “defeaters”: conflicting reasons forming a basis to doubt the
original conclusion or to believe an opposite statement. Formally,
non-monotonicity of defeasible reasons is introduced through default
rules with justification logic formulas.
Default justification logic is unique for its ability to represent
defeasible arguments as object-level formulas. Sets of such formulas
are then interpreted with an acceptance semantics, in analogy to
Dung’s abstract argumentation framework semantics. In contrast to
argumentation frameworks, determining arguments’ acceptance in
default justification logic simply turns into finding (non-monotonic)
logical consequences from a starting theory with justification
assertions. We can show that a large subclass of Dung’s frameworks
is a special case of default justification logic. By the end of this
talk, I will connect this logic of arguments with the epistemological
debate on justified-true-belief definition of knowledge.
Hope to see you there!
The LIRa team
Dear all,
We will have our next LIRa session tomorrow, on Thursday, 3 March 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: Louwe Kuijer (University of Liverpool)
Date and Time: Thursday, March 3rd 2022, 16:30-18:00, Amsterdam
time.
Venue: online.
Title: Doing the best I can.
Abstract.
A preference structure is a graph that indicates preferences
between alternatives. These alternatives could be possible worlds,
outcomes of an action, strategies in a game or something else
entirely. The preferences, similarly, can mean many different things:
a world might be preferred over another if it is more plausible, an
outcome if it improves social welfare, and a strategy might be
preferred over another strategy that it defeats.
>From these preferences we can determine the set of "best" worlds,
outcomes and strategies. Generally, one should believe the best
worlds, strive to obtain the best outcomes and play the best
strategies. As usual in deontic logic, we can then define a notion of
obligation (to believe, bring about or play), where ϕ is obligatory,
denoted B(ϕ) if all of the best alternatives satisfy ϕ (and thus it
is impossible to satisfy the obligation to be "best'' without making
ϕ true).
This notion of obligation can be extended to a conditional one,
B(ϕ|ψ), where ϕ is obligatory given ψ, by relativization. In other
words, we restrict the preference structure to those alternatives that
satisfy ψ, and check whether ϕ is true in all of the best
alternatives in that structure.
The properties of this conditional obligation operator depend on (1)
exactly how we define what the "best" states in a preference structure
are and (2) what properties the preference relation satisfies (e.g.,
transitive, total, anti-symmetric).
In this talk, I will discuss characterizations of the conditional
belief operator under various such assumptions. We will also consider
one case where, despite searching for a long time, I did not manage to
find a characterization: this turned out to be because such a
characterization does not exist.
Hope to see you there!
The LIRa team
Dear all,
We will have our next LIRa session on Thursday, 3 March 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: Louwe Kuijer (University of Liverpool)
Date and Time: Thursday, March 3rd 2022, 16:30-18:00, Amsterdam
time.
Venue: online.
Title: Doing the best I can.
Abstract. A preference structure is a graph that indicates preferences
between alternatives. These alternatives could be possible worlds,
outcomes of an action, strategies in a game or something else
entirely. The preferences, similarly, can mean many different things:
a world might be preferred over another if it is more plausible, an
outcome if it improves social welfare, and a strategy might be
preferred over another strategy that it defeats.
>From these preferences we can determine the set of "best" worlds,
outcomes and strategies. Generally, one should believe the best
worlds, strive to obtain the best outcomes and play the best
strategies. As usual in deontic logic, we can then define a notion of
obligation (to believe, bring about or play), where ϕ is obligatory,
denoted B(ϕ) if all of the best alternatives satisfy ϕ (and thus it
is impossible to satisfy the obligation to be "best'' without making
ϕ true).
This notion of obligation can be extended to a conditional one,
B(ϕ|ψ), where ϕ is obligatory given ψ, by relativization. In other
words, we restrict the preference structure to those alternatives that
satisfy ψ, and check whether ϕ is true in all of the best
alternatives in that structure.
The properties of this conditional obligation operator depend on (1)
exactly how we define what the "best" states in a preference structure
are and (2) what properties the preference relation satisfies (e.g.,
transitive, total, anti-symmetric).
In this talk, I will discuss characterizations of the conditional
belief operator under various such assumptions. We will also consider
one case where, despite searching for a long time, I did not manage to
find a characterization: this turned out to be because such a
characterization does not exist.
Hope to see you there!
The LIRa team
Dear all,
We will have our next LIRa session tomorrow, on Thursday, 24 February 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: Hannes Leitgeb (LMU Munich)
Date and Time: Thursday, February 24th 2022, 16:30-18:00,
Amsterdam time.
Venue: online.
Title: A Finitistic Semantics for Mathematics
Abstract.
Is mathematics (arithmetic, analysis, set theory,...) committed to the
existence of infinitely many objects? The aim of my talk will be to
argue the answer is: No.
For that purpose, I will introduce a new semantics ("role
semantics“) according to which mathematical statements can be
understood as having only finite ontological commitments. I will
assess the semantics, show that its properties are similar to those of
standard Tarskian semantics, and hence conclude that there is not much
disadvantage in interpreting mathematics by the new semantics. At the
same time, the finitistic role semantics does not come with any
epistemological benefit: if anything, our epistemic access to
finitistic models of mathematics is mediated by standard infinitary
ones.
Hope to see you there!
The LIRa team
Dear all,
We will have our next LIRa session on Thursday, 24 February 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: Hannes Leitgeb (LMU Munich)
Date and Time: Thursday, February 24th 2022, 16:30-18:00,
Amsterdam time.
Venue: online.
Title: A Finitistic Semantics for Mathematics
Abstract.
Is mathematics (arithmetic, analysis, set theory,...) committed to the
existence of infinitely many objects? The aim of my talk will be to
argue the answer is: No.
For that purpose, I will introduce a new semantics ("role
semantics“) according to which mathematical statements can be
understood as having only finite ontological commitments. I will
assess the semantics, show that its properties are similar to those of
standard Tarskian semantics, and hence conclude that there is not much
disadvantage in interpreting mathematics by the new semantics. At the
same time, the finitistic role semantics does not come with any
epistemological benefit: if anything, our epistemic access to
finitistic models of mathematics is mediated by standard infinitary
ones.
Hope to see you there!
The LIRa team
Dear all,
We will have our next LIRa session tomorrow, on Thursday, 17 February 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: Torben Braüner (Roskilde University)
Date and Time: Thursday, February 17th 2022, 16:30-18:00,
Amsterdam time.
Venue: online.
Title: Understanding responses of people with ASD in diverse reasoning
tasks: A formal study
Abstract.
Recent studies have shown that in some reasoning tasks people with
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) perform better than typically
developing people. In this talk, I compare three such tasks, namely a
syllogistic task, a decision-making task from behavioral economics,
and a task from the heuristics and biases literature (the Linda task),
the aim being to identify common structure as well as differences.
In the terminology of David Marr's three levels of cognitive systems,
the tasks show commonalities on the computational level in terms of
the effect of contextual stimuli, though an in-depth analysis of such
contexts provides certain distinguishing features in the algorithmic
level. I also make some general remarks on the approach, so as to set
the stage for further studies in the area which could provide a better
understanding of the reasoning process of ASD individuals.
Joint work with Aishwarya Ghosh (University of Utah, USA) and Sujata
Ghosh (Indian Statistical Institute, Chennai, India).
Hope to see you there!
The LIRa team
Dear all,
The following virtual event might be of interest to the LIRa audience:
This Friday, Feb 18, 14.00-15.00 (Amsterdam time), Anthia Solaki will be discussing "Stereotypes in Language & Computational Language Models" with Katrin Schulz and Robert van Rooij. You can find the details and the registration form here:
https://humane-ai.nl/events_report/10-humane-conversation-stereotypes-in-la…
The LIRa team
Dear all,
We will have our next LIRa session on Thursday, 17 February 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: Torben Braüner (Roskilde University)
Date and Time: Thursday, February 17th 2022, 16:30-18:00,
Amsterdam time.
Venue: online.
Title: Understanding responses of people with ASD in diverse reasoning
tasks: A formal study
Abstract.
Recent studies have shown that in some reasoning tasks people with
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) perform better than typically
developing people. In this talk, I compare three such tasks, namely a
syllogistic task, a decision-making task from behavioral economics,
and a task from the heuristics and biases literature (the Linda task),
the aim being to identify common structure as well as differences.
In the terminology of David Marr's three levels of cognitive systems,
the tasks show commonalities on the computational level in terms of
the effect of contextual stimuli, though an in-depth analysis of such
contexts provides certain distinguishing features in the algorithmic
level. I also make some general remarks on the approach, so as to set
the stage for further studies in the area which could provide a better
understanding of the reasoning process of ASD individuals.
Joint work with Aishwarya Ghosh (University of Utah, USA) and Sujata
Ghosh (Indian Statistical Institute, Chennai, India).
Hope to see you there!
The LIRa team
Dear all,
We will have our next LIRa session tomorrow, on Thursday, 10 February 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: Salvador Mascarenhas (Institut Jean-Nicod, Department of
Cognitive Studies, Ecole Normale Supérieure)
Date and Time: Thursday, February 10th 2022, 16:30-18:00,
Amsterdam time.
Venue: online.
Title: Question-answer dynamics and confirmation theory in reasoning
with alternatives
Abstract.
Informally, confirmation-theoretic approaches to reasoning propose
that humans often do not compute posterior probabilities, as the usual
norms for rationality recommend, but instead ask themselves to what
extent a piece of information (the evidence) supports a particular
conclusion (the hypothesis). This family of theories yields our best
accounts of the conjunction fallacy and related reasoning problems.
Yet from an empirical standpoint, its full scope is still unknown:
just how pervasive is this decision-making strategy in human inference
making? Additionally, the computational-level justification for
confirmation-theoretic reasoning is still an open question: why would
humans deploy a mode of reasoning that so often fails to maximize the
probability that the conclusions we draw are true?
This talk tries to contribute to answering these two questions. I show
that illusory inferences with alternatives, a broad paradigm of
deductive fallacies, require confirmation-theoretic tools and cannot
be accounted for within traditional deductive theories or with
probabilistic theories that exclusively use posterior probabilities as
the standard for rationality. Additionally, I present two experiments
on the lawyers-and-engineers paradigm from Kahneman and Tversky
(1973), showing that errors in variants of this probabilistic task
also require confirmation-theoretic notions. One of the experiments
applies a simplified version of Kahneman and Tversky's original
paradigm to carefully normed materials, allowing for more fine-grained
theory testing. The other is a visual version of the task, using ad
hoc concepts where the underlying probabilistic distributions are
completely transparent to participants. I then outline a theory that
combines confirmation-theoretic tools with the erotetic theory of
reasoning (Koralus and Mascarenhas, 2013, 2018), an account of naive
deduction where question-answer dynamics are at the root of failures
of reasoning in the cases at hand. I argue that confirmation-theoretic
reasoning plausibly arises from the semantics and pragmatics of
questions and answers, and I propose that this fact offers the
beginning of an explanation for the pervasiveness of
confirmation-theoretic reasoning.
Hope to see you there!
The LIRa team
Dear all,
We would like to draw your attention to the following LIRa-related event.
- - - - -
Call for Abstracts - Deadline Extended
https://easychair.org/cfp/CELT2022
Haifa, Israel, July 31-August 1, 2022
Extended Submission deadline: February 14, 2022
The link between epistemic logic and topology has its roots, on the one hand, in the topological semantics of modal logic, and on the other hand, in the intimate relations between topology and concurrency, and between topology and distributed computing. Recent years have witnessed an explosion of new work in this area, from the development of more expressive logics capable of capturing fine topological structure, to the leveraging of topological tools to represent concepts such as observations, questions, and dependence relations, and encoding deep connections with distributed computing. The richness of this area has spawned a thriving, interdisciplinary research program with applications in learning theory, network epistemology, public and private communication, inquisitive semantics, philosophy of science, and knowledge representation in distributed computing, among others.
This workshop aims at bringing together scholars working on various ways of connecting logic and topology to showcase a variety of recent developments and applications in the area, and to foster new research collaborations.
The workshop will take place as a part of FLoC 2022<https://floc2022.org>—the Federated Logic Conference— in Haifa, Israel, affiliated with LICS<https://lics.siglog.org/lics22/>. Our workshop will be held in the 2-day, pre-FLoC workshop block (July 31st - August 1st).
Invited Speakers:
David Fernandez Duque (Ghent University, Belgium)
Nina Gierasimczuk (Danish Techinal University)
Eric Goubault (École Polytechnique, France)
Sophia Knight (University of Minnesota Duluth, USA)
Tamar Lando (Columbia University, USA)
Jeremy Ledent (University of Strathclyde, UK)
Susumu Nishimura (Kyoto University, Japan)
Sonja Smets (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Submissions: We invite submissions for presentations. To apply, please submit an extended abstract of up to 3 pages (excluding bibliography) in PDF format. Abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=celt2022
Important dates:
• Extended Abstract submission: February 14th, 2022
• Notification for acceptance: March 7th, 2022
• Workshop: July 31st - August 1st, 2022
Organizers:
Alexandru Baltag (ILLC, University of Amsterdam)
Adam Bjorndahl (Carnegie Mellon University)
Aybüke Özgün (ILLC, University of Amsterdam)
Sergio Rajsbaum (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
- - - - -
kind regards,
The LIRa team