Misleading higher-order evidence, conflicting ideals, and defeasible logic

Thinking about misleading higher-order evidence naturally leads to a puzzle about epistemic rationality: If one’s total evidence can be radically misleading regarding itself, then two widely-accepted requirements of rationality come into conflict, suggesting that there are rational dilemmas. This paper focuses on an often misunderstood and underexplored response to this (and similar) puzzles, the so-called conflicting-ideals view. Drawing on work from defeasible logic, I propose understanding this view as a move away from the default metaepistemological position according to which rationality requirements are strict and governed by a strong, but never explicitly stated logic, toward the more unconventional view, according to which requirements are defeasible and governed by a comparatively weak logic. When understood this way, the response is not committed to dilemmas

Conciliatory reasoning, self-defeat, and abstract argumentation

According to conciliatory views on the significance of disagreement, it’s rational for you to become less confident in your take on an issue in case your epistemic peer’s take on it is different. These views are intuitively appealing, but they also face a powerful objection: in scenarios that involve disagreements over their own correctness, conciliatory views appear to self-defeat and, thereby, issue inconsistent recommendations. This paper provides a response to this objection. Drawing on the work from defeasible logics paradigm and abstract argumentation, it develops a formal model of conciliatory reasoning and explores its behavior in the troubling scenarios. The model suggests that the recommendations that conciliatory views issue in such scenarios are perfectly reasonable—even if outwardly they may look odd

Conciliatory reasoning, self-defeat, and abstract argumentation

According to conciliatory views on the significance of disagreement, it’s rational for you to become less confident in your take on an issue in case your epistemic peer’s take on it is different. These views are intuitively appealing, but they also face a powerful objection: in scenarios that involve disagreements over their own correctness, conciliatory views appear to self-defeat and, thereby, issue inconsistent recommendations. This paper provides a response to this objection. Drawing on the work from defeasible logics paradigm and abstract argumentation, it develops a formal model of conciliatory reasoning and explores its behavior in the troubling scenarios. The model suggests that the recommendations that conciliatory views issue in such scenarios are perfectly reasonable---even if outwardly they may look odd

Conciliatory views, higher-order disagreements, and defeasible logic

Conciliatory views of disagreement say, roughly, that it’s rational for you to become less confident in your take on an issue in case you find out that an epistemic peer’s take on it is the opposite. Their intuitive appeal notwithstanding, there are well-known worries about the behavior of conciliatory views in scenarios involving higher-order disagreements, which include disagreements over these views themselves and disagreements over the peer status of alleged epistemic peers. This paper does two things. First, it explains how the core idea behind conciliatory views can be expressed in a defeasible logic framework. The result is a formal model that’s particularly useful for thinking about the behavior of conciliatory views in cases involving higher-order disagreements. And second, the paper uses this model to resolve three paradoxes associated with disagreements over epistemic peerhood

Defeasibility in Epistemology

This dissertation explores some ways in which logics for defeasible reasoning can be applied to questions in epistemology. It's naturally thought of as developing four applications: The first is concerned with simple epistemic rules, such as ``If you perceives that X, then you ought to believe that X'' and ``If you have outstanding testimony that X, then you ought to believe that X.'' Anyone who thinks that such rules have a place in our accounts of epistemic normativity must explain what happens in cases where they come into conflict —such as one where you perceive a red object and are told that it is blue. The literature has gone in two directions: The first suggests that rules have built-in unless-clauses specifying the circumstances under which they fail to apply; the second that rules do not specify what attitudes you ought to have, but only what counts in favor or against having those attitudes. I express these two different ideas in a defeasible logic framework and demonstrate that there's a clear sense in which they are equivalent. The second application uses a defeasible logic to solve an important puzzle about epistemic rationality, involving higher-order evidence, or, roughly, evidence about our capacities for evaluating evidence. My solution has some affinities with a certain popular view on epistemic dilemmas. The third application, then, is a characterization of this conflicting-ideals view in logical terms: I suggest that it should be thought of as an unconventional metaepistemological view, according to which epistemic requirements are not exceptionless, but defeasible and governed by a comparatively weak logic. Finally, the fourth application is in the burgeoning debate about the epistemic significance of disagreement. The intuitive conciliatory views say, roughly, that you ought to become less confident in your take on some question X, if you learn that an epistemic equal disagrees with you about X. I propose to think of conciliationism as a defeasible reasoning policy, develop a mathematically precise model of it, and use it to solve one of the most pressing problems for conciliatory views: Given that there are disagreements about these views themselves, they can self-defeat and issue inconsistent recommendations

XAI and philosophical work on explanation: A roadmap

What Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) can do is impressive, yet they are notoriously opaque. Responding to the worries associated with this opacity, the field of XAI has produced a plethora of methods purporting to explain the workings of DNNs. Unsurprisingly, a whole host of questions revolves around the notion of explanation central to this field. This note provides a roadmap of the recent work that tackles these questions from the perspective of philosophical ideas on explanations and models in science

A Curious Dialogical Logic and Its Composition Problem

Dialogue semantics for logic are two-player logic games between a Proponent who puts forward a logical formula φ as valid or true and an Opponent who disputes this. An advantage of the dialogical approach is that it is a uniform framework from which different logics can be obtained through only small variations of the basic rules. We introduce the composition problem for dialogue games as the problem of resolving, for a set S of rules for dialogue games, whether the set of S-dialogically valid formulas is closed under modus ponens. Solving the composition problem is fundamental for the dialogical approach to logic; despite its simplicity, it often requires an indirect solution with the help of significant logical machinery such as cut-elimination. Direct solutions to the composition problem can, however, sometimes be had. As an example, we give a set N of dialogue rules which is well-justified from the dialogical point of view, but whose set N of dialogically valid formulas is both non-trivial and non-standard. We prove that the composition problem for N can be solved directly, and introduce a tableaux system for N

Conceivability and Possibility within the Framework of Two-Dimensional Semantics

Mēs labi pazīstam argumentus, kas vēršas pie iedomājamības, lai izdarītu secinājumus par iespējamību, un savukārt no tās – par reālās pasaules raksturu. Tādi ir, piemēram, Dekarta duālisma arguments un Deivida Čalmersa zombiju arguments. Tomēr, lai šie argumenti būtu pamatoti, mums ir vajadzīgs kāds vispārīgs princips, kas attaisnotu soli no iedomājamības pie iespējamības, tas ir, iedomājamībai būtu jāietver iespējamība. Šajā pētījumā, sekojot Čalmersam, es parādu, kā mēs varam nodibināt ticamu un aizstāvamu iedomājamības-iespējamības tēzi (minēto principu), izmantojot noteiktu divdimensionālās modālās semantikas interpretāciju.We are fairly familiar with arguments that appeal to conceivability to draw conclusions about possibility and therefrom about the character of the real world. Descarts’ argument for dualism and Chalmers’ zombie argument are such. However, if these arguments are to be sound, we need a general principle that would justify the step from conceivability to possibility, that is, conceivability would have to entail possibility. In this paper, following Chalmers, I attempt to show that we can establish a plausible and defensible conceivability-possibility thesis with the help of a particular interpretation of two-dimensional modal semantics