Speaker: Anthia Solaki (ILLC, Amsterdam)
Date and Time: Thursday, November 30th 2017, 16:00-17:30
Venue: KdVI Seminar Room F3.20, Science Park 107.
Title: Not so lost in the Wild: logical systems for resource-bounded reasoning.
Abstract.
Standard epistemic logic is often criticized on the grounds of the problem of logical omniscience: its agents are perfect reasoners with unlimited inferential power. We argue that the appropriate (normative) notion to focus on is that of moderate logical competence and the boundedness of resources is the important feature that determines it. We therefore build a non-standard framework that does justice to both the fallibility and the bounded reasoning of an agent. The former is achieved via the inclusion of impossible worlds to the traditional possible-worlds models. The latter is achieved by imposing suitable connections among the worlds and introducing actions that capture the agent’s cognitively costly applications of inference rules. More specifically, it is shown that consequences of one’s knowledge cannot be automatically and effortlessly ascribed to her. However, provided that she can afford to follow the right reasoning path, she can eventually navigate in the Wild and get to know some of them. We also develop non-standard plausibility models to account for the interaction between internal deductive reasoning and the external information the agent receives. A reduction of models to awareness-like structures is devised so that standard modal logic techniques can be exploited to obtain sound and complete axiomatizations. Finally, we discuss connections of these logical systems to dual-process theories of reasoning and give a formal treatment to some of their real-life manifestations.