Objective
In social interactions, where agents act together and exchange information, inefficiency in updating information and forming beliefs can have dramatic effects; as a consequence, individuals are often assessed on the ground of their reliability and care in getting new information and forming beliefs. In such situations, we need a clear understanding of the dynamics connecting information update and belief formation to conduct, on pain of producing unfair assessments. The analysis of such dynamics has followed two main alternative approaches: logics of agency, which study what agents can ensure with winning actions and its relation with the agents’ knowledge, and logics of information change, which study how information update may solve uncertainty and change what we believe about the world and about other agents’ beliefs. Each of the two traditions accounts for separate aspects of the connection between information and conduct, while neglecting others. The project Ways of Doxastic Agency: Information Update, Belief Formation and Assessment of Conduct (WADOXA) will provide a unified framework treating both information update and exertion of choices as complementary aspects of the entwinement between epistemic performance and conduct. Also, the project will result in a systematic theoretical framework consisting in a Conduct Assessment Theory. The theory will give a rigorous expressions to criteria for the assessment of the agents' conducts on the ground of the agents' epistemic performance. Also, it will propose a descriptively adequate model for the distribution of cognitive labor, that is the phenomenon at stake when belief is acquired by testimony. This will be done by delivering mathematical tools to analyze the logical properties of the new conceptual framework and the emerging notions.
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)Coordinator
1012WX Amsterdam
Netherlands