•  22
    The Best of All Possible Worlds
    In Erik J. Olson Sebastian Enqvist (ed.), Belief Revision meets Philosophy of Science, Springer. 2011.
    Erik J. Olsson and David Westlund have recently argued that the standard belief revision representation of an epistemic state is defective. In order to adequately model an epistemic state one needs, in addition to a belief set K and an entrenchment relation E, a research agenda A, i.e. a set of questions satisfying certain corpus-relative preconditions the agent would like to have answers to. Informally, the preconditions guarantee that the set of potential answers represent a partition of possi…Read more
  •  10
    Instructions in Wason’s Selection Task underdetermine empirical subjects’ representation of the underlying problem, and its admissible solutions. We model the Selection Task as an interrogative learning problem, and reasoning to solutions as: selection of a representation of the problem; and: strategic planning from that representation. We argue that recovering Wason’s ‘normative’ selection is possible only if both stages are constrained further than they are by Wason’s formulation. We conclude …Read more
  •  7
    Reichenbach’s constraint is the methodological imperative formulated by Reichenbach in the following passage: “If we want to construct a philosophy of science, we have to distinguish carefully between two kinds of context in which scientific theories may be considered. The context of discovery is to be separated from the context of justification; the former belongs to the psychology of scientific discovery, the latter alone is to be the object of the logic of science.” Reichenbach’s constraint i…Read more
  •  6
    We apply an algorithmic learning model of inquiry to model reasoning carried by experimental subjects in Wason's _Selection Task_ that represents reasoning in the task as computation of a decision tree that supervenes on semantic representations. We argue that the resulting model improves on previous probabilistic and pragmatic models of the task. In particular, it suggests that subjects' selection could in fact be guided by sophisticated patterns of argumentative reasoning.
  •  7
    If semantic consequence is analyzed with extensive games, logical reasoning can be accounted for by looking at how players solve entailment games. However, earlier approaches to game semantics cannot achieve this reduction, by want of explicitly dened preferences for players. Moreover, although entailment games can naturally translate the idea of argumentation about a common ground, a cognitive interpretation is undermined by the complexity of strategic reasoning. We thus describe a class of sem…Read more
  •  13
    We describe a class of semantic extensive entailment game with algorithmic players, related to game-theoretic semantics, and generalized to classical first-order semantic entailment. Players have preferences for parsimonious spending of computational resources, and compute partial strategies, under qualitative uncertainty about future histories. We prove the existence of local preferences for moves, and strategic fixpoints, that allow to map eeg game-tree to the building rules and closure rules …Read more
  •  6
    In Wason’s Selection Task, subjects: process information from the instructions and build a mental representation of the problem, then: select a course of action to solve the problem,under the constraints imposed by the instructions. We analyze both aspects as part of a constraint satisfaction problem without assuming Wason’s ‘logical’ solution to be the correct one. We show that outcome of step may induce mutually inconsistent constraints, causing subjects to select at step solutions that violat…Read more
  •  41
    The Dissemination of Fake Science : On the Ranking of Retracted Articles in Google
    In Sven Bernecker, Amy K. Flowerree & Thomas Grundmann (eds.), The Epistemology of Fake News, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    Fake news can originate from an ordinary person carelessly posting what turns out to be false information orfrom the intentional actions of fake news factory workers,but broadly speaking it can also originate from scientific fraud. In the latter case, the article can be retracted upon discovery of the fraud. A case study shows, however, that such fake sciencecan be visible in Google even after the article was retracted, in fact more visible thanthe retraction notice. We hypothesize that the reas…Read more
  •  64
    The Dissemination of Scientific Fake News
    In Sven Bernecker, Amy K. Flowerree & Thomas Grundmann (eds.), The Epistemology of Fake News, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    Fake news can originate from an ordinary person carelessly posting what turns out to be false information or from the intentional actions of fake news factory workers, but broadly speaking it can also originate from scientific fraud. In the latter case, the article can be retracted upon discovery of the fraud. A case study shows, however, that such fake science can be visible in Google even after the article was retracted, in fact more visible than the retraction notice. We hypothesize that the …Read more
  •  22
    This paper examines whether Sherlock Holmes’ “Science of Deduction and Analysis,” as reconstructed by Hintikka and Hintikka The sign of three: Peirce, Dupin, Holmes, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1983), exemplifies a logic of discovery. While the Hintikkas claimed it does, their approach remained largely programmatic, and ultimately unsuccessful. Their reconstruction must thus be expanded, in particular to account for the role of memory in inquiry. Pending this expansion, the Hintikkas’…Read more
  •  61
    I. Levi has advocated a decision-theoretic account of belief revision. We argue that the game-theoretic framework of Interrogative Inquiry Games, proposed by J. Hintikka, can extend and clarify this account. We show that some strategic use of the game rules generate Expansions, Contractions and Revisions, and we give representation results. We then extend the framework to represent explicitly sources of answers, and apply it to discuss the Recovery Postulate. We conclude with some remarks about …Read more
  •  16
    M. B. Hintikka and J. Hintikka claimed that their reconstruction of the ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ can “serve as an explication for the link between intelligence and memory”. The claim is vindicated, first for the single-agent case, where the reconstruction captures strategies for accessing the content of a distributed and associative memory; then, for the multi-agent case, where the reconstruction captures strategies for accessing knowledge distributed in a community. Moreover, the re…Read more
  •  39
    This paper examines critically the reconstruction of the ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ proposed jointly by M.B. Hintikka and J. Hintikka in the 1980s, and its successor, the interrogative model of inquiry developed by J. Hintikka and his collaborators in the 1990s. The Hintikkas’ model explicitly used game theory in order to formalize a naturalistic approach to inquiry, but the imi abandoned both the game-theoretic formalism, and the naturalistic approach. It is argued that the latter bet…Read more
  •  14
    Logical Dialogues with Explicit Preference Profiles and Strategy Selection
    Journal of Logic, Language and Information 26 (3): 261-291. 2017.
    The Barth–Krabbe–Hintikka–Hintikka Problem, independently raised by Barth and Krabbe and Hintikka and Hintikka Sherlock Holmes confronts modern logic: Toward a theory of information-seeking through questioning. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1983), is the problem of characterizing the strategic reasoning of the players of dialogical logic and game-theoretic semantics games from rational preferences rather than rules. We solve the problem by providing a set of preferences for players with…Read more
  •  27
    Extensive Questions
    Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5378 131--145. 2009.
    Olsson and his collaborators have proposed an extension of Belief Revision Theory where an epistemic state is modeled as a triple S=⟨K_,E,A_⟩ , where A_ is a research agenda, i.e. a set of research questions. Contraction and expansion apply to states, and affect the agenda. We propose an alternative characterization of the problem of agenda updating, where research questions are viewed as blueprints for research strategies. We offer a unified solution to this problem, and prove it equivalent to …Read more
  •  8
    Do we Trust Blindly on the Web?
    Societé Editrice Il Mulino 1 87-106. 2017.
  •  10
    From reasonable preferences, via argumentation, to logic
    Journal of Applied Logic 18 105-128. 2016.
    This article demonstrates that typical restrictions which are imposed in dialogical logic in order to recover first-order logical consequence from a fragment of natural language argumentation are also forthcoming from preference profiles of boundedly rational players, provided that these players instantiate a specific player type and compute partial strategies. We present two structural rules, which are formulated similarly to closure rules for tableaux proofs that restrict players' strategies t…Read more
  •  10
    We examine a special case of inquiry games and give an account of the informational import of asking questions. We focus on yes-or-no questions, which always carry information about the questioner's strategy, but never about the state of Nature, and show how strategic information reduces uncertainty through inferences about other players' goals and strategies. This uncertainty cannot always be captured by information structures of classical game theory. We conclude by discussing the connection w…Read more
  •  54
    Erik J. Olsson and David Westlund have recently argued that the standard belief revision representation of an epistemic state is defective. In order to adequately model an epistemic state one needs, in addition to a belief set K and an entrenchment relation E, a research agenda A, i.e. a set of questions satisfying certain corpus-relative preconditions the agent would like to have answers to. Informally, the preconditions guarantee that the set of potential answers represent a partition of possi…Read more
  •  70
    This volume includes a target paper, taking up the challenge to revive, within a modern (formal) framework, a medieval solution to the Liar Paradox which did ...