February 17, 2023: Aybüke Özgün: Uncertainty about Evidence
Aybüke Özgün (University of Amsterdam)
Uncertainty about Evidence
February 17, 2023: on Zoom, h. 14:00-16:00 (Milan time).
In order to obtain the link for the webinar, please write to: logic.unimi@gmail.com
Abstract:
We develop a logical framework for reasoning about knowledge and evidence in which the agent may be uncertain about how to interpret their evidence. Rather than representing an evidential state as a fixed subset of the state space, our models allow the set of possible worlds that a piece of evidence corresponds to to vary from one possible world to another, and therefore itself be the subject of uncertainty. Such structures can be viewed as (epistemically motivated) generalizations of topological spaces. In this context, there arises a natural distinction between what is actually entailed by the evidence and what the agent knows is entailed by the evidence—with the latter, in general, being much weaker. We provide a sound and complete axiomatization of the corresponding bi-modal logic of knowledge and evidence entailment, and investigate some natural extensions of this core system, including the addition of a belief modality and its interaction with evidence interpretation and entailment, and the addition of a “knowability” modality interpreted via a (generalized) interior operator.
The meeting on line will be held in English.
Participation is strongly recommended to students of the Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences and to students of the Doctoral School “The Human Mind and its Explanations: Language, Brain, and Reasoning”.
Everyone interested is welcome to attend.