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3Stable Voting and the Splitting of CyclesProceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 40 (20): 17040-17049. 2026.Algorithms for resolving majority cycles in preference aggregation have been studied extensively in computational social choice. Several sophisticated cycle-resolving methods, including Tideman’s Ranked Pairs, Schulze’s Beat Path, and Heitzig’s River, are refinements of the Split Cycle (SC) method that resolves majority cycles by discarding the weak- est majority victories in each cycle. Recently, Holliday and Pacuit proposed a new refinement of Split Cycle, dubbed Stable Voting, and a simplific…Read more
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2Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. LORI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 9394 (edited book)Springer. 2015.
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3Symposium on the Fixity of the PastIn John A. Keller (ed.), Being, Freedom, and Method: Themes From the Philosophy of Peter van Inwagen, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 149-156. 2017.This paper provides further motivation for a principle relating freedom and modality that appeared in ‘Freedom and the Fixity of the Past’ (_The Philosophical Review_, Vol. 121), where the principle was used to argue for incompatibilism about freedom and determinism. Roughly, the principle states that an agent cannot perform an action of a given type if there is no possible world in which an agent performs an action of that type. The paper also replies to objections to this principle from Tognaz…Read more
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19Fallibilism and Multiple Paths to KnowledgeIn Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Volume 5, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 97-144. 2015.This chapter argues that epistemologists should replace a “standard alternatives” picture of knowledge, assumed by many fallibilist theories of knowledge, with a new “multipath” picture of knowledge. The chapter first identifies a problem for the standard picture: fallibilists working with this picture cannot maintain even the most uncontroversial epistemic closure principles without making extreme assumptions about the ability of humans to know empirical truths without empirical investigation. …Read more
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42Information dynamics and uniform substitutionSynthese 190 (Suppl 1): 31-55. 2013.The picture of information acquisition as the elimination of possibilities has proven fruitful in many domains, serving as a foundation for formal models in philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and economics. While the picture appears simple, its formalization in dynamic epistemic logic reveals subtleties: given a valid principle of information dynamics in the language of dynamic epistemic logic, substituting complex epistemic sentences for its atomic sentences may result in an invalid pri…Read more
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94A Uniform Logic of Information DynamicsIn Marcus Kracht, Maarten de Rijke, Heinrich Wansing & Michael Zakharyaschev (eds.), Advances in Modal Logic, Csli Publications. pp. 348-367. 1998.Unlike standard modal logics, many dynamic epistemic logics are not closed under uniform substitution. A distinction therefore arises between the logic and its substitu- tion core, the set of formulas all of whose substitution instances are valid. The classic example of a non-uniform dynamic epistemic logic is Public Announcement Logic (PAL), and a well-known open problem is to axiomatize the substitution core of PAL. In this paper we solve this problem for PAL over the class of all relational m…Read more
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67Moorean Phenomena in Epistemic LogicIn Marcus Kracht, Maarten de Rijke, Heinrich Wansing & Michael Zakharyaschev (eds.), Advances in Modal Logic, Csli Publications. pp. 178-199. 1998.A well-known open problem in epistemic logic is to give a syntactic characterization of the successful formulas. Semantically, a formula is successful if and only if for any pointed model where it is true, it remains true after deleting all points where the formula was false. The classic example of a formula that is not successful in this sense is the “Moore sentence” p ∧ ¬ BOX p, read as “p is true but you do not know p.” Not only is the Moore sentence unsuccessful, it is self-refuting, for it …Read more
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67Possibility Frames and Forcing for Modal LogicAustralasian Journal of Logic 22 (2): 44-288. 2025.This paper develops the model theory of normal modal logics based on partial “possibilities” instead of total “worlds,” following Humberstone [1981] instead of Kripke [1963]. Possibility semantics can be seen as extending to modal logic the semantics for classical logic used in weak forcing in set theory, or as semanticizing a negative translation of classical modal logic into intuitionistic modal logic. Thus, possibility frames are based on posets with accessibility relations, like intuitionist…Read more
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71Challenges to classical logic have emerged from several sources. According to recent work, the behavior of epistemic modals in natural language motivates weakening classical logic to orthologic, a logic originally discovered by Birkhoff and von Neumann in the study of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we consider a different tradition of thinking that the behavior of vague predicates in natural language motivates weakening classical logic to intuitionistic logic or even giving up some intuitioni…Read more
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61In recent work, we introduced a new semantics for conditionals, covering a large class of what we call preconditionals. In this paper, we undertake an axiomatic study of preconditionals and subclasses of preconditionals. We then prove that any bounded lattice equipped with a preconditional can be represented by a relational structure, suitably topologized, yielding a single relational semantics for conditional logics normally treated by different semantics, as well as generalizing beyond those s…Read more
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51Modal logic, fundamentallyIn Agata Ciabattoni, David Gabelaia & Igor Sedlár (eds.), Advances in Modal Logic, Vol. 15, College Publications. 2024.Non-classical generalizations of classical modal logic have been developed in the contexts of constructive mathematics and natural language semantics. In this paper, we discuss a general approach to the semantics of non-classical modal logics via algebraic representation theorems. We begin with complete lattices L equipped with an antitone operation ¬ sending 1 to 0, a completely multiplicative operation ◻, and a completely additive operation ◊. Such lattice expansions can be represented by mean…Read more
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71An axiomatic characterization of Split CycleSocial Choice and Welfare. forthcoming.A number of rules for resolving majority cycles in elections have been proposed in the literature. Recently, Holliday and Pacuit (Journal of Theoretical Politics 33 (2021) 475-524) axiomatically characterized the class of rules refined by one such cycle-resolving rule, dubbed Split Cycle: in each majority cycle, discard the majority preferences with the smallest majority margin. They showed that any rule satisfying five standard axioms plus a weakening of Arrow’s Independence of Irrelevant Alter…Read more
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53A partial-state space model of unawarenessJournal of Mathematical Economics 116 103081. 2025.We propose a model of unawareness that remains close to the paradigm of Aumann’s model for knowledge [R. J. Aumann, International Journal of Game Theory 28 (1999) 263-300]: just as Aumann uses a correspondence on a state space to define an agent’s knowledge operator on events, we use a correspondence on a state space to define an agent’s awareness operator on events. This is made possible by three ideas. First, like the model of [A. Heifetz, M. Meier, and B. Schipper, Journal of Economic Theory …Read more
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146The Orthologic of Epistemic ModalsJournal of Philosophical Logic 53 (4): 831-907. 2024.Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form $$p\wedge \Diamond \lnot p$$ (‘p, but it might be that not p’) appears to be a contradiction, $$\Diamond \lnot p$$ does not entail $$\lnot p$$, which would follow in classical logic. Likewise, the classical laws of distributivity and disjunctive syllogism fail for epistemic modals. Existing attempts to account for these facts generally e…Read more
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127Social Choice Should Guide AI Alignment in Dealing with Diverse Human FeedbackProceedings of the 41St International Conference on Machine Learning 41 9346-9360. 2024.Foundation models such as GPT-4 are fine-tuned to avoid unsafe or otherwise problematic behavior, such as helping to commit crimes or producing racist text. One approach to fine-tuning, called reinforcement learning from human feedback, learns from humans' expressed preferences over multiple outputs. Another approach is constitutional AI, in which the input from humans is a list of high-level principles. But how do we deal with potentially diverging input from humans? How can we aggregate the in…Read more
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36May's Theorem [K. O. May, Econometrica 20 (1952) 680-684] characterizes majority voting on two alternatives as the unique preferential voting method satisfying several simple axioms. Here we show that by adding some desirable axioms to May's axioms, we can uniquely determine how to vote on three alternatives. In particular, we add two axioms stating that the voting method should mitigate spoiler effects and avoid the so-called strong no show paradox. We prove a theorem stating that any preferent…Read more
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52An impossibility theorem concerning positive involvement in votingEconomics Letters 236 111589. 2024.In social choice theory with ordinal preferences, a voting method satisfies the axiom of positive involvement if adding to a preference profile a voter who ranks an alternative uniquely first cannot cause that alternative to go from winning to losing. In this note, we prove a new impossibility theorem concerning this axiom: there is no ordinal voting method satisfying positive involvement that also satisfies the Condorcet winner and loser criteria, resolvability, and a common invariance property…Read more
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52Learning to Manipulate under Limited InformationProceedings of the 39Th Annual Aaai Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Aaai-25). forthcoming.By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to such strategic manipulation has become a key consideration for comparing voting methods. Here we measure resistance to manipulation by whether neural networks of various sizes can learn to profitably manipulate a given voting method in expectation, given differen…Read more
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195Conditional and Modal Reasoning in Large Language ModelsProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Emnlp 2024)The reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) are the topic of a growing body of research in AI and cognitive science. In this paper, we probe the extent to which twenty-nine LLMs are able to distinguish logically correct inferences from logically fallacious ones. We focus on inference patterns involving conditionals (e.g., 'If Ann has a queen, then Bob has a jack') and epistemic modals (e.g., 'Ann might have an ace', 'Bob must have a king'). These inferences have been of special inter…Read more
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64Split Cycle: a new Condorcet-consistent voting method independent of clones and immune to spoilersPublic Choice 197 1-62. 2023.We propose a Condorcet-consistent voting method that we call Split Cycle. Split Cycle belongs to the small family of known voting methods satisfying the anti-vote-splitting criterion of independence of clones. In this family, only Split Cycle satisfies a new criterion we call immunity to spoilers, which concerns adding candidates to elections, as well as the known criteria of positive involvement and negative involvement, which concern adding voters to elections. Thus, in contrast to other clone…Read more
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55Epistemic Logic and EpistemologyIn Sven Ove Hansson & Vincent F. Hendricks (eds.), Introduction to Formal Philosophy, Springer. pp. 351-369. 2012.This chapter provides a brief introduction to propositional epistemic logic and its applications to epistemology. No previous exposure to epistemic logic is assumed. Epistemic-logical topics discussed include the language and semantics of basic epistemic logic, multi-agent epistemic logic, combined epistemic-doxastic logic, and a glimpse of dynamic epistemic logic. Epistemological topics discussed include Moore-paradoxical phenomena, the surprise exam paradox, logical omniscience and epistemic c…Read more
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204A Note on Algebraic Semantics for $mathsf{S5}$ with Propositional QuantifiersNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 60 (2): 311-332. 2019.In two of the earliest papers on extending modal logic with propositional quantifiers, R. A. Bull and K. Fine studied a modal logic S5Π extending S5 with axioms and rules for propositional quantification. Surprisingly, there seems to have been no proof in the literature of the completeness of S5Π with respect to its most natural algebraic semantics, with propositional quantifiers interpreted by meets and joins over all elements in a complete Boolean algebra. In this note, we give such a proof. T…Read more
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78Stable VotingConstitutional Political Economy. forthcoming.We propose a new single-winner voting system using ranked ballots: Stable Voting. The motivating principle of Stable Voting is that if a candidate A would win without another candidate B in the election, and A beats B in a head-to-head majority comparison, then A should still win in the election with B included (unless there is another candidate A' who has the same kind of claim to winning, in which case a tiebreaker may choose between such candidates). We call this principle Stability for Winne…Read more
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296Compatibility, compossibility, and epistemic modalityProceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium. forthcoming.We give a theory of epistemic modals in the framework of possibility semantics and axiomatize the corresponding logic, arguing that it aptly characterizes the ways in which reasoning with epistemic modals does, and does not, diverge from classical modal logic.
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158A fundamental non-classical logicLogics 1 (1): 36-79. 2023.We give a proof-theoretic as well as a semantic characterization of a logic in the signature with conjunction, disjunction, negation, and the universal and existential quantifiers that we suggest has a certain fundamental status. We present a Fitch-style natural deduction system for the logic that contains only the introduction and elimination rules for the logical constants. From this starting point, if one adds the rule that Fitch called Reiteration, one obtains a proof system for intuitionist…Read more
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103Compatibility and accessibility: lattice representations for semantics of non-classical and modal logicsIn David Fernández Duque & Alessandra Palmigiano (eds.), Advances in Modal Logic, Vol. 14, College Publications. pp. 507-529. 2022.In this paper, we study three representations of lattices by means of a set with a binary relation of compatibility in the tradition of Ploščica. The standard representations of complete ortholattices and complete perfect Heyting algebras drop out as special cases of the first representation, while the second covers arbitrary complete lattices, as well as complete lattices equipped with a negation we call a protocomplementation. The third topological representation is a variant of that of Craig,…Read more
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66Voting Theory in the Lean Theorem ProverIn Sujata Ghosh & Thomas Icard (eds.), Logic, Rationality, and Interaction: 8th International Workshop, LORI 2021, Xi'an, China, October 16-18, 2021, Proceedings, Springer Verlag. pp. 111-127. 2021.There is a long tradition of fruitful interaction between logic and social choice theory. In recent years, much of this interaction has focused on computer-aided methods such as SAT solving and interactive theorem proving. In this paper, we report on the development of a framework for formalizing voting theory in the Lean theorem prover, which we have applied to verify properties of a recently studied voting method. While previous applications of interactive theorem proving to social choice have…Read more
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213Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form ‘p, but it might be that not p’ appears to be a contradiction, 'might not p' does not entail 'not p', which would follow in classical logic. Likewise, the classical laws of distributivity and disjunctive syllogism fail for epistemic modals. Existing attempts to account for these facts generally either under- or over-correct. Some theorie…Read more
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195Possibility SemanticsIn Melvin Fitting (ed.), Selected Topics From Contemporary Logics, College Publications. pp. 363-476. 2021.In traditional semantics for classical logic and its extensions, such as modal logic, propositions are interpreted as subsets of a set, as in discrete duality, or as clopen sets of a Stone space, as in topological duality. A point in such a set can be viewed as a "possible world," with the key property of a world being primeness—a world makes a disjunction true only if it makes one of the disjuncts true—which classically implies totality—for each proposition, a world either makes the proposition…Read more
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82One Modal Logic to Rule Them All?In Guram Bezhanishvili, Giovanna D'Agostino, George Metcalfe & Thomas Studer (eds.), Advances in Modal Logic, Vol. 12, College Publications. pp. 367-386. 2018.In this paper, we introduce an extension of the modal language with what we call the global quantificational modality [∀p]. In essence, this modality combines the propositional quantifier ∀p with the global modality A: [∀p] plays the same role as the compound modality ∀pA. Unlike the propositional quantifier by itself, the global quantificational modality can be straightforwardly interpreted in any Boolean Algebra Expansion (BAE). We present a logic GQM for this language…Read more
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University of California, BerkeleyDepartment of Philosophy
Group in Logic and the Methodology of ScienceProfessor
Berkeley, California, United States of America