NOL Seminar with Sven Ove Hansson
published: 2023-02-06
event date:
2023-02-27
The Nordic Online Logic Seminar is organised monthly over Zoom, with expository talks on topics of interest for the broader logic community. The seminar is open for professional or aspiring logicians and logic aficionados worldwide. If you wish to receive the Zoom ID and password for it, as well as further announcements, please subscribe here: https://listserv.gu.se/sympa/subscribe/nordiclogic.
Date Monday, 27 February 2023 at 16:00 (CET), over Zoom
Speaker Sven Ove Hansson (Professor of Philosophy, KTH)
Title How to combine probabilities and full beliefs in a formal system
Abstract One of the major problems in formal epistemology is the difficulty
of combining probabilistic and full (dichotomous, all-or-nothing) beliefs in one
and the same formal framework. Major properties of actual human belief systems,
including how they are impacted by our cognitive limitations, are used to
introduce a series of desiderata for realistic models of such belief systems.
This leads to a criticism of previous attempts to combine representations of
both probabilistic and full beliefs in one and the same formal model.
Furthermore, a formal model is presented in which this is done differently. One
of its major features is that contingent propositions can be transferred in both
directions between full beliefs and lower degrees of belief, in a way that
mirrors real-life acquisitions and losses of full beliefs. The subsystem
consisting of full beliefs has a pattern of change that constitutes a credible
system of dichotomous belief change.