Two Articles on Formal Epistemology

September 20, 2011

An entry on Formal Epistemology by Vincent F. Hendricks and Jeffrey Helzner in now available at Oxford Bibliographies Online. The entry is an online guide to the essential literature in subjects related to formal epistemology, such as epistemic logic, probability theory, belief revision, decision theory, interactive epistemology and formal learning theory.

INTRODUCTION

Formal epistemology is a fairly recent field of study in philosophy dating back to the end of the 20th century. This is not to say that formal epistemological studies have not been conducted prior to the late 1990s, but rather that the term introduced to cover the philosophical enterprise was coined around this time. Formal epistemology denotes the formal study of crucial concepts in general or mainstream epistemology, including knowledge, belief and belief-change, certainty, rationality, reasoning, decision, justification, learning, agent interaction, and information processing. The formal tools may be drawn from a wide variety of areas, including logic, probability theory, game theory, decision theory, formal learning theory, and distributed computing, and is thus not simply a purely philosophical province. Its practitioners include philosophers, computer scientists, social scientists, cognitive psychologists, theoretical economists, mathematicians, and theoretical linguists

A draft of my Formal Epistemology entry, to appear in The Continuum Companion to Epistemology, is in the PhilSci-Archive.

ABSTRACT

Narrowly construed, formal epistemology is a methodological approach to traditional analytic epistemology. According to this view, the aim of formal epistemology is to harness the power of formal methods to bring rigor and clarity to philosophical analysis. Yet, in broader terms, formal epistemology is not merely a methodological tool for epistemologists, but a discipline in its own right. On this programmatic view, formal epistemology is an interdisciplinary research program that covers work by philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, psychologists, operations researchers, and economists who aim to give mathematical and sometimes computational representations of, along with sound strategies for reasoning about, knowledge, belief, judgment and decision making. This essay presents a two-pronged argument for formal epistemology. The first part addresses the general question of why anyone should bother with formal methods by illustrating, through a historical example, the role that formal models can play in inquiry. The second part describes two specific examples of recent work within formal epistemology, one that addresses a longstanding issue within traditional epistemology—namely, what to make of coherentist justification—and another addressing a fallacy of probabilistic reasoning which has implications across a wide range of disciplines, and thereby making a case for a broader, programmatic view. Finally, we close with a methodological proposal for epistemology, one that incorporates formal, experimental, and traditional approaches into one program.

2 Comments | Formal meets Mainstream, Formal Philosophy, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Gregory Wheeler

A proposal for a non-traditional dynamic logic

September 12, 2011

In Modeling of Phenomena and Dynamic Logic of Phenomena, a new paper to appear in Logica Universalis, Boris Kovalerchuk, Leonid Perlovsky and I propose a system to match the level of uncertainty of a problem to a corresponding level of uncertainty of the criterion used to evaluate the model.

Abstract: Modeling a complex phenomenon such as the mind presents tremendous computational complexity challenges. Modeling field theory (MFT) addresses these challenges in a non-traditional way. The main idea behind MFT is to match levels of uncertainty of the model (also, a problem or some theory) with levels of uncertainty of the evaluation criterion used to identify that model. When a model becomes more certain, then the evaluation criterion is adjusted dynamically to match that change to the model. This process is called the Dynamic Logic of Phenomena (DLP) for model construction and it mimics processes of the mind and natural evolution. This paper provides a formal description of DLP by specifying its syntax, semantics, and reasoning system. We also outline links between DLP and other logical approaches. Computational complexity issues that motivate this work are presented using an example of polynomial models.

Leave a Comment » | Formal Philosophy, Uncategorized | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Gregory Wheeler

In defence of objective Bayesianism

May 17, 2010

Here’s a plug for my new book!

In defence of objective Bayesianism

How strongly should you believe the various propositions that you can express?

That is the key question facing Bayesian epistemology. Subjective Bayesians hold that it is largely (though not entirely) up to the agent as to which degrees of belief to adopt. Objective Bayesians, on the other hand, maintain that appropriate degrees of belief are largely (though not entirely) determined by the agent’s evidence. This book states and defends a version of objective Bayesian epistemology. According to this version, objective Bayesianism is characterized by three norms:

  • Probability – degrees of belief should be probabilities
  • Calibration – they should be calibrated with evidence
  • Equivocation – they should otherwise equivocate between basic outcomes

Objective Bayesianism has been challenged on a number of different fronts. For example, some claim it is poorly motivated, or fails to handle qualitative evidence, or yields counter-intuitive degrees of belief after updating, or suffers from a failure to learn from experience. It has also been accused of being computationally intractable, susceptible to paradox, language dependent, and of not being objective enough.

Especially suitable for graduates or researchers in philosophy of science, foundations of statistics and artificial intelligence, the book argues that these criticisms can be met and that objective Bayesianism is a promising theory with an exciting agenda for further research.

Available now through all good bookshops, or direct from Oxford University
Press at:
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199228003.do

I give a quick sketch of the justification of objective Bayesianism that I favour in a book review, available here or here.

3 Comments | de Finetti, Epistemic Coherence, Formal Philosophy, Objective Probability | Permalink
Posted by Jon Williamson

John Pollock, 1940-2009

October 3, 2009

Certain Doubts and Leiter have announced that John Pollock has died.  We had the fortune of having him as a speaker at CMU during the last FEW. He presented then a controversial paper on probable probabilities and Jay Kadane commented.  The discussion was quite interesting.  Echoes of Henry Kyburg’s philosophy of probability were clear in this recent work.

Pollock’s work on defeasible logic is deep and interesting and to some extent still not fully understood.  During the 90′s most of the work in the field that today is called formal epistemology was carried out in computer science (centrally in Artificial Intelligence).  Some philosophers took the main ideas of AI seriously and produced work that was both philosophically innovative and computationally tractable.  John Pollock was one of them (others in the states were our own Clark Glymour and associates, Henry Kyburg, and Donald Nute).  But it is quite clear that Pollock’s formal work in all cases illuminates simultaneous work in epistemology and related fields (and vice versa).

The work on defeasibility is intimately connected with contemporary work in belief change.  But in a way Pollock’s work is difficult to relate to the work of philosophers like Levi, Spohn  or the AGM trio.  In spite of the fact that defeasible logics were inspired by almost the same set of problems that motivated the work in belief change, the two accounts grew apart both formally and conceptually.  To my knowledge there is only one serious attempt to relate the two approaches:  Wolfgang Spohn tries to bridge the gap in a still unpublished book.  I am sure though that Spohn’s essay only reveals some partial connections between the two views.  A more detailed analysis of the program in formal epistemology that Pollock produced (and its relations to other, more mainstream, views) is necessary to fully understand his contributions to epistemology, probability and philosophical logic.  Pollock was a very original and interesting philosopher.  As Kvanvig says in Certain Doubts he will be missed both personally and professionally.

Leave a Comment » | Formal Philosophy, News | Permalink
Posted by Horacio Arló-Costa

The Epistemological Significance of Bayes’s Theorem

July 20, 2009

A quick heads up: there is an interesting discussion going on at It’s Only a Theory pertaining to the question of whether Bayes’s Theorem has any “special epistemological significance.”

1 Comment | Formal Philosophy, Tidbits | Permalink
Posted by Jonah N. Schupbach

Formal Philosophy and Science (a Follow-up Post)

June 5, 2009

I have been thinking a bit more about my last post in which I presented a short version of an argument that recurs throughout this book. Quoting myself,

[This argument] goes something like this: formal philosophers, by and large, have become much too comfortable with a limited set of formal tools. Such formal tools have proven too simple in many important domains – thus, “one often finds a clash between imagined properties of a subject and the bad behavior of those properties within some structure.” The upshot is that formal philosophers for the most part offer results that have little to no applicability to science but instead are only of interest to formal philosophers themselves – “results that only a philosopher could love.”

As I also pointed out in that post, this argument rests on a pragmatic premise; namely, that “The philosophy of science should work to advance the sciences.” Now it occurs to me, however, that in order for this pragmatic tenet to ground the argument above, it needs to be read in a rather stronger way. Something like: “The work of philosophers of science itself ought to be applicable in science.” Given this stronger version, it makes good sense to say that the formal tools in use by philosophers are too simple to give us results that scientists can use (that scientists find interesting); the formal tools are just too clumsy to represent accurately the concepts that scientists are after. Consequently, philosophers are only speaking to themselves.

But if this is right, I am no longer so sure that, in some cases, it is such a bad thing that philosophers are giving “results that only a philosopher could love.” Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments | Formal Philosophy | Permalink
Posted by Jonah N. Schupbach

Formal Philosophy’s Relevance to Science

May 20, 2009

This morning, I read through (and very much enjoyed) Greg’s quick book review of Hendricks and Symon’s collection, Formal Philosophy: Aim, Scope, Direction – the review is hot off the presses in the new issue of Philosophy of science. Greg does a marvelous job of highlighting some of the most interesting ideas developed by the book’s contributors in a small amount of space. Here is one idea, which I found particularly fascinating, expressed by several of the contributors and – it seems – most emphatically by Clark Glymour. Quoting from Greg’s review:

The philosophy of science should work to advance the sciences … Real mathematical work with philosophical motivations is largely ignored, and a consequence is that many of what should be core concerns within contemporary philosophy of science have moved out of philosophy proper and into statistics and machine learning … [Consequently] much of philosophy of science is now occurring outside of the professional boundaries of philosophy.

This unfortunate point seems to be the result of another key idea found throughout this book:

Read the rest of this entry »

9 Comments | Formal Philosophy | Permalink
Posted by Jonah N. Schupbach

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