A Logic of Belief Revision in Simplicial Complexes
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Talks and Presentations
A list of all the talks I have given, both contributed and invited. Click on each for details about venue and topic!
Contributed Talks
Invited Talks
Philosophy Then and Now: A Re-Evaluation of Rorty’s Philosophical Pessimism
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This was a talk I was invited to give at a special session of the Richard Rorty Society by Dr. David Rondel. The main goal of the talk was to compare and contrast the metaphilosphies of Richard Rorty and Philip Kitcher, with the ultimate goal of showing that each has something to inform the other. In particular, each misses something of value the other catches. Rorty is ultimately overly skeptical of both formal philosophy, and both are overly skeptical of various politically motivated philosophical projects. However, Rorty’s views on this latter topic notably evolved in complex ways over time.
Modal Logic Without Possible Worlds
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Joint talk with Brittany Gelb. We presented a semantics for modal logic based on simplicial complexes that instead of possible worlds uses an “Agent Perspective”. Philip explained the details of the formalism, including a novel soundness and completeness proof. Brittany followed up with some applications of these models to a distributed setting. Additionally, she showed how we can use tools from algebraic topology to show a variety of things including the nonexistence of bisimulations.
Modal Logic Without Possible Worlds
Published:
Joint talk with Brittany Gelb. We presented a semantics for modal logic based on simplicial complexes that instead of possible worlds uses an “Agent Perspective”. Philip explained the details of the formalism, including a novel soundness and completeness proof. Brittany followed up with some applications of these models to a distributed setting. Additionally, she showed how we can use tools from algebraic topology to show a variety of things including the nonexistence of bisimulations.
A Logical Model of Pluralistic Ignorance
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Much of the existing literature on pluralistic ignorance suggests that agents who find themselves in such a situation must consider themselves “special” in one way or another (Grosz 2018, Bjerring et al. 2014). Agents have to recognize their own dishonesty, but believe everyone around them is perfectly honest. This argument is taken to show that pluralistic ignorance is irrational. Modifying work from Christoff 2016, we use a simple logical model to show that these arguments for the irrationality of pluralistic ignorance depend on various introspection assumptions. We will finish by putting forth various scenarios where agents can be honest, headstrong, or something similar (generally taken to be impossible under pluralistic ignorance) but are nonetheless consistent if one relaxes introspection assumptions. This shows that agents can see themselves as no different from their friends and still be in a situation of pluralistic ignorance with sufficiently weak introspection assumptions.