1,450 research outputs found
Naming the largest number: Exploring the boundary between mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics
What is the largest number accessible to the human imagination? The question
is neither entirely mathematical nor entirely philosophical. Mathematical
formulations of the problem fall into two classes: those that fail to fully
capture the spirit of the problem, and those that turn it back into a
philosophical problem
Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently
it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical
importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In
particular, I argue that computational complexity theory---the field that
studies the resources (such as time, space, and randomness) needed to solve
computational problems---leads to new perspectives on the nature of
mathematical knowledge, the strong AI debate, computationalism, the problem of
logical omniscience, Hume's problem of induction, Goodman's grue riddle, the
foundations of quantum mechanics, economic rationality, closed timelike curves,
and several other topics of philosophical interest. I end by discussing aspects
of complexity theory itself that could benefit from philosophical analysis.Comment: 58 pages, to appear in "Computability: G\"odel, Turing, Church, and
beyond," MIT Press, 2012. Some minor clarifications and corrections; new
references adde
Dynamic Epistemic Logic and Logical Omniscience
Epistemic logics based on the possible worlds semantics suffer from the problem of logical omniscience, whereby agents are described as knowing all logical consequences of what they know, including all tautologies. This problem is doubly challenging: on the one hand, agents should be treated as logically non-omniscient, and on the other hand, as moderately logically competent. Many responses to logical omniscience fail to meet this double challenge because the concepts of knowledge and reasoning are not properly separated. In this paper, I present a dynamic logic of knowledge that models an agent’s epistemic state as it evolves over the course of reasoning. I show that the logic does not sacrifice logical competence on the altar of logical non- omniscience
Homo Sapiens Sapiens Meets Homo Strategicus at the Laboratory
Homo Strategicus populates the vast plains of Game Theory. He knows all logical implications of his knowledge (logical omniscience) and chooses optimal strategies given his knowledge and beliefs (rationality). This paper investigates the extent to which the logical capabilities of Homo Sapiens Sapiens resemble those possessed by Homo Strategicus. Controlling for other-regarding preferences and beliefs about the rationality of others, we show, in the laboratory, that the ability of Homo Sapiens Sapiens to perform complex chains of iterative reasoning is much better than previously thought. Subjects were able to perform about two to three iterations of reasoning on average.iterative reasoning; depth of reasoning; logical omniscience; rationality; experiments; other-regarding preferences
Intensional Models for the Theory of Types
In this paper we define intensional models for the classical theory of types,
thus arriving at an intensional type logic ITL. Intensional models generalize
Henkin's general models and have a natural definition. As a class they do not
validate the axiom of Extensionality. We give a cut-free sequent calculus for
type theory and show completeness of this calculus with respect to the class of
intensional models via a model existence theorem. After this we turn our
attention to applications. Firstly, it is argued that, since ITL is truly
intensional, it can be used to model ascriptions of propositional attitude
without predicting logical omniscience. In order to illustrate this a small
fragment of English is defined and provided with an ITL semantics. Secondly, it
is shown that ITL models contain certain objects that can be identified with
possible worlds. Essential elements of modal logic become available within
classical type theory once the axiom of Extensionality is given up.Comment: 25 page
The myth of domain-independent persistence
The frame problem can be reduced to the problem of inferring the non-existence of causes for change. This paper concerns how these non-existence inferences are made, and shows how many popular approaches lack generality because they rely on a domain-independent assumption of occurrence omniscience. Also, this paper shows how to represent and use appropriate domain-dependent knowledge in three successively more expressive versions, where the causal theories are deductive, non-monotonic, and statistical
Reasoning about Rational, but not Logically Omniscient Agents
We propose in the paper a new solution to the so-called Logical Omniscience Problem of epistemic logic. Almost all attempts in the literature to solve this problem consist in weakening the standard epistemic systems: weaker systems are considered where the agents do not possess the full reasoning capacities of ideal reasoners. We shall argue that this solution is not satisfactory: in this way omniscience can be avoided, but many intuitions about the concepts of knowledge and belief get lost. We shall show that axioms for epistemic logics must have the following form: if the agent knows all premises of a valid inference
rule, and if she thinks hard enough, then she will know the conclusion. To formalize such an idea, we propose to \dynamize' epistemic logic, that is, to introduce a dynamic component into the language. We develop a logic based on this idea and show that it is suitable for formalizing the notion of actual, or explicit knowledge
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