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41The Dissemination of Fake Science : On the Ranking of Retracted Articles in GoogleIn 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 A case study shows, however, that such fake sciencecan be visible in Google even after the article was retracted, in fact more visible thanthe retraction notice.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
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59The Dissemination of Scientific Fake NewsIn 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 A case study shows, however, that such fake science can be visible in Google even after the article was retracted, in fact more visible than the retraction notice.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
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21The Holmesian logician: Sherlock Holmes’ “Science of Deduction and Analysis” and the logic of discoverySynthese 198 (11): 1-18. 2020.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
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129The game of inquiry: the interrogative approach to inquiry and belief revision theorySynthese 171 (2): 271-289. 2009.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
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16The brain attics: the strategic role of memory in single and multi-agent inquirySynthese 197 (3): 1203-1224. 2020.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
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38Strategies of inquiry : The ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ revisitedSynthese 195 (5): 2065-2088. 2018.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
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14Logical Dialogues with Explicit Preference Profiles and Strategy SelectionJournal 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
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25Extensive QuestionsLecture 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
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9From reasonable preferences, via argumentation, to logicJournal 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
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70Unity, truth and the liar: the modern relevance of medieval solutions to the liar paradox (edited book)Springer. 2008.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 ...
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9How can yes-or-no questions be informative before they are answered?Episteme 9 (2): 189-204. 2012.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
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87The Best of All PossibleWorlds: Where Interrogative Games Meet Research AgendasIn Erik J. Olson Sebastian Enqvist (ed.), Belief Revision Meets Philosophy of Science, Springer. pp. 225--252. 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
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