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Riassunto: I problemi sollevati dall'argomento per il determinismo logico, secondo il quale "ogni evento futuro possibile si realizzerà", sono ben noti dal tempo di Aristotele e Diodoro Crono e ad essi è stato riservato un... more
Riassunto: I problemi sollevati dall'argomento per il determinismo logico, secondo il quale "ogni evento futuro possibile si realizzerà", sono ben noti dal tempo di Aristotele e Diodoro Crono e ad essi è stato riservato un posto importante nella storia della filosofia, soprattutto a causa delle conseguenze deterministe e fataliste che da questo argomento sembrano derivare. Un secondo argomento, formulato da Fitch nel ventesimo secolo come una sorta di reductio ad absurdum del verificazionismo, ha una struttura simile : "se ogni verità è conoscibile allora ogni verità è attualmente conosciuta". In entrambi i casi siamo di fronte ad un "collasso modale" della possibilità nella semplice attualità. In questo lavoro si chiarificano le nozioni di possibilità e di necessità che compaiono in entrambi questi problemi. Attraverso alcune assunzioni logiche addizionali, concernenti gli operatori che formalizzano tali nozioni modali, è possibile bloccare i parad...
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Exchange of arguments in a discussion often makes individuals more radical about their initial opinion. This phenomenon is known as Group-induced Attitude Polarization. A byproduct of it are bipolarization effects, where the distance... more
Exchange of arguments in a discussion often makes individuals more radical about their initial opinion. This phenomenon is known as Group-induced Attitude Polarization. A byproduct of it are bipolarization effects, where the distance between the attitudes of two groups of individuals increases after the discussion. This paper is a first attempt to analyse the building blocks of information exchange and information update that induce polarization. I use Argumentation Frameworks as a tool for encoding the information of agents in a debate relative to a given issue a. I then adapt a specific measure of the degree of acceptability of an opinion (Matt and Toni 2008). Changes in the degree of acceptability of a, prior and posterior to information exchange, serve here as an indicator of polarization. I finally show that the way agents transmit and update information has a decisive impact on polarization and bipolarization.
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Group polarization occurs when an initial attitude or belief of individuals becomes more radical after group discussion. Polarization often leads subgroups towards opposite directions. Since the 1960s this effect has been observed and... more
Group polarization occurs when an initial attitude or belief of individuals becomes more radical after group discussion. Polarization often leads subgroups towards opposite directions. Since the 1960s this effect has been observed and repeatedly confirmed in lab experiments by social psychologists. Persuasive Arguments Theory (PAT) emerged as the most convincing explanation for this phenomenon. This paper is a first attempt to frame the PAT explanation more formally by means of Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks (BAFs). In particular, I show that polarization may emerge in a BAF by simple and rational belief updates by participants.
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Discussion among individuals about a given issue often induces polarization and bipolarization effects, i.e. individuals radicalize their initial opinion towards either the same or opposite directions. Experimental psychologists have put... more
Discussion among individuals about a given issue often induces polarization and bipolarization effects, i.e. individuals radicalize their initial opinion towards either the same or opposite directions. Experimental psychologists have put forward Persuasive Arguments Theory (PAT) as a clue for explaining polarization. PAT claims that adding novel and persuasive arguments pro or contra the debated issue is the major cause for polarization. Recent developments in abstract argumentation provide the tools for capturing these intuitions on a formal basis. Here Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks (BAF) are employed as a tool for encoding the information of agents in a debate relative to a given issue a. A probabilistic extension of BAF allows to encode the likelihood of the opinions pro or contra a before and after information exchange. It is shown, by a straightforward example, how these measures provide the basis to capture the intuitions of PAT. (Less)
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In this paper, we show that a particular thin red line semantics introduced by Brauner, Ohrstrom, and Hasle makes the so-called Burgess' formula invalid, and we discuss some reasons why the failure can be considered a problem for the... more
In this paper, we show that a particular thin red line semantics introduced by Brauner, Ohrstrom, and Hasle makes the so-called Burgess' formula invalid, and we discuss some reasons why the failure can be considered a problem for the semantics.
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The problem of future contingents is one of the most ancient and debated puzzles in Western philosophy, and Supervaluationism is, today, one of the most prominent solutions to the problem. Recently, John MacFarlane has carried a... more
The problem of future contingents is one of the most ancient and debated puzzles in Western philosophy, and Supervaluationism is, today, one of the most prominent solutions to the problem. Recently, John MacFarlane has carried a well-known criticism to Supervaluationism (and all other standard approaches to future contingents) and put forward a new solution of the problem of future contingents, which is known as Double Time Reference Theory (DTRT). Here, we compare DTRT with Supervaluationist semantics, and we show that the success of MacFarlane's criticism crucially depends on the expressivity of the language adopted. Once a reasonable expressive power is granted, however, MacFarlane's criticism no longer applies.
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This paper introduces a multi-agent dynamic epistemic logic for abstract argumentation. Its main motivation is to build a general framework for modelling the dynamics of a debate, which entails reasoning about goals, beliefs, as well as... more
This paper introduces a multi-agent dynamic epistemic logic for abstract argumentation. Its main motivation is to build a general framework for modelling the dynamics of a debate, which entails reasoning about goals, beliefs, as well as policies of communication and information update by the participants. After locating our proposal and introducing the relevant tools from abstract argumentation, we proceed to build a three-tiered logical approach. At the first level, we use the language of propositional logic to encode states of a multi-agent debate. This language allows to specify which arguments any agent is aware of, as well as their subjective justification status. We then extend our language and semantics to that of epistemic logic, in order to model individuals’ beliefs about the state of the debate, which includes uncertainty about the information available to others. As a third step, we introduce a framework of dynamic epistemic logic and its semantics, which is essentially ...
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This paper presents two systems of temporal logic, \Lambda_{CPT} and \Lambda_{CPT@}, with ceteris paribus modalities. The principal aim is to show how this approach can be useful to give an ockhamist solution to the future contingents... more
This paper presents two systems of temporal logic, \Lambda_{CPT} and \Lambda_{CPT@}, with ceteris paribus modalities. The principal aim is to show how this approach can be useful to give an ockhamist solution to the future contingents problem along the same lines of A. Prior. The interest of this work lies also in the fact that \Lambda_{CPT@} represents an alternative modal account of supervaluationist and post-semantics approaches to temporal reasoning.
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The paper introduces a probabilistic semantics for the paraconsistent temporal logic Ab presented by the authors in a previ-ous work on future contingents. Probabilistic concepts help framing two possible interpretations of the logic in... more
The paper introduces a probabilistic semantics for the paraconsistent temporal logic Ab presented by the authors in a previ-ous work on future contingents. Probabilistic concepts help framing two possible interpretations of the logic in question àsubjective' and aobjective' one and explaining the rationale behind both of them. We also sketch a proof-method for Ab and address some considerations regarding the conceptual appeal of our proposal and its possible future developments.
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Knowledge, friendship and social announcements continues a research line inaugurated by the same authors with Logic in the community and carried on with a series of papers on Epistemic Friendship Logic (EFL) whose general aim is to foster... more
Knowledge, friendship and social announcements continues a research line inaugurated by the same authors with Logic in the community and carried on with a series of papers on Epistemic Friendship Logic (EFL) whose general aim is to foster the analysis of “reasoning about knowledge and communication defined implicitely in terms of social relationships, most simply the binary relation of friendship”. Friendship is intended here in its most general and abstract sense as any symmetric and irreflexive relation between agents building up a network – i.e. a graph where the latter are the points and the former constitute the edges. The formal framework on which the present paper builds upon is General Dynamic Dynamic Logic (GDDL), which consists of “a combination of epistemic logic, dynamic logic and hybrid-like logic” (p. 2) and is meant to enable to reason about a wide range of model tranformations induced by information exchange and communication in multi-agent systems. Reasoning about knowledge and social relationships is relevant for the analysis of security protocols of information exchange, which is one of the most significant applications for Dynamic Epistemic Logics (DEL) since [?]. The work provides interesting countributions to this agenda by disclosing some specific model-theoretic dynamics of information exchange, in particular by specifying the model tranformations induced by
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I would like to introduce this paper with some brief but necessary historical details. The controversy between Kerry and Frege on object and concept went down in posterity after Frege’s 1891 article Uber Begriff und Gegenstand, even if... more
I would like to introduce this paper with some brief but necessary historical details. The controversy between Kerry and Frege on object and concept went down in posterity after Frege’s 1891 article Uber Begriff und Gegenstand, even if Kerry’s objections which sparked Frege’s explanation are dated 1887 as they appeared in the IV article of his series Uber Anschaung und ihre psychische Verarbeitung 1 . In truth a real debate between the two philosophers never took place because of Kerry’s premature death in 1889. This meant that Kerry could not reply to Frege and above all he could not define the presuppositions of his own positions, thus leaving room for a number of possible exegetic suppositions which I will analyse in this paper. The content of Kerry’s articles did not pass unnoticed at the time: besides the Austrian and German circles they were also eagerly read by Russell, in whose philosophical thought between 1903 and 1905 it is perhaps possible to find some trace of them. Kerry’s general positions may be roughly classified as a variant of logical psychologism, given the intellectual proximity, and friendship too, with Hfler and the proximity to the Brentano school (Kerry had studied in Vienna and Strasbourg in the 1870’s and 1880’s) 2 . But I believe that his criticism of Frege is independent from his psychologistic attitude, and furthermore shows another forceful influence, having a great deal of affinity with the Fregean thought. It is not by accident the fact that Frege’s article appears as a terminological clarification rather than a discussion:
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La Sintassi logica del linguaggio [1] rappresentava tra altre cose, nelle inten-zioni di Carnap, una spiegazione ed una giustificazione, alla luce degli allora recenti risultati di Gödel, di un punto di vista convenzionalista riguardo ai... more
La Sintassi logica del linguaggio [1] rappresentava tra altre cose, nelle inten-zioni di Carnap, una spiegazione ed una giustificazione, alla luce degli allora recenti risultati di Gödel, di un punto di vista convenzionalista riguardo ai fondamenti della matematica e del discorso scientifico in generale. L'im-magine di convenzionalismo che ne risultà e molto complessa e, per diversi aspetti, di difficile interpretazione. Una prima parte di questo lavorosa a dedicata all'elucidazione del pro-blema dei fondamenti per come si presentava a Carnap al momento della stesura del suo lavoro, nonché all'analisi delle posizioni filosofiche che de-terminano il contenuto della Sintassi e,pì u determinatamente, la scelta dell'opzione metalinguistica. Il metalinguaggio rappresenta infatti, nella vi-sione di Carnap, il corretto metodo della filosofia della scienza e,pì u in particolare, dell'analisi del problema dei fondamenti. Una seconda sezione sa a dedicata ad enucleare i mo...
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ABSTRACT A group is in a state of pluralistic ignorance (PI) if, roughly speak-ing, every member of the group thinks that his or her belief or desire is different from the beliefs or desires of the other members of the group. PI has been... more
ABSTRACT A group is in a state of pluralistic ignorance (PI) if, roughly speak-ing, every member of the group thinks that his or her belief or desire is different from the beliefs or desires of the other members of the group. PI has been invoked to explain many otherwise puzzling phenomena in social psychology. The main purpose of this article is to shed light on the nature of PI states -their structure, internal consistency and opacity -using the formal apparatus of Dynamic Doxastic Logic, and also to study the sense in which such states are "fragile", i.e. to iden-tify plausible conditions under which a PI state cascades into a state of shared belief as the result of announcement.
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Group polarization occurs when an initial attitude or belief of individuals becomes more radical after group discussion. Polarization often leads subgroups towards opposite directions. Since the 1960s this effect has been observed and... more
Group polarization occurs when an initial attitude or belief of individuals becomes more radical after group discussion. Polarization often leads subgroups towards opposite directions. Since the 1960s this effect has been observed and repeatedly confirmed in lab experiments by social psychologists. Persuasive Arguments Theory (PAT) emerged as the most convincing explanation for this phenomenon. This paper is a first attempt to frame the PAT explanation more formally by means of Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks (BAFs). In particular, I show that polarization may emerge in a BAF by simple and rational belief updates by participants.
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The history of reasoning about time is disseminated with paradoxes and conundra and contemporary physics does not make an exception. Logics in general, and more in particular temporal logics, represent a rigorous formal tool in order to... more
The history of reasoning about time is disseminated with paradoxes and conundra and contemporary physics does not make an exception. Logics in general, and more in particular temporal logics, represent a rigorous formal tool in order to solve or clarify problems of this kind. In what follows we will first explain, from the point of view of philosophical logic, what is a paradox and what should count as a solution for it. After that we will illustrate A.N. Prior's formalization of the traditional paradox of future contingency and determinism. Then we will focus on two modern paradoxes – the twin paradox and the time travel paradox – and show how an adequate temporal logic can help their framing and understanding.
The Peter Principle states that employees tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. In a sophisticated simulation study, Pluchino et al (2010) confirmed a version of the principle. However, they also noted that... more
The Peter Principle states that employees tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. In a sophisticated simulation study, Pluchino et al (2010) confirmed a version of the principle. However, they also noted that their model has the counterintuitive consequence that "the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members". We argue that what promotion rule is used can in general influence employee productivity (which is here seen as part of competence). Accommodating this psychological aspect of promotion is noted as an open problem by Pluchino et al. Using an amended simulation model we verify that if the incentive induced by promoting the best is strong enough, then that strategy will be optimal. In a final simulation experiment we consider the effect on the efficiency of an organization of using "double standard" promotion ...
Research Interests: Philosophy and Erkenntnis
The philosophical inquiry of Arthur Prior (1914-1969) has involved topics ranging from formal logics to ethics, while giving crucial contributions in modal logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of time. Prior is considered the father of... more
The philosophical inquiry of Arthur Prior (1914-1969) has involved topics ranging from formal logics to ethics, while giving crucial contributions in modal logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of time. Prior is considered the father of temporal logic and a forerunner of both current hybrid logic and Kripke's possible worlds semantics; also, he has supported a refined and go-ahed version of actualism, that in turn he grounds on a specific view on the relation between existence, facts and truths. Prior's approach to philosophy has been highly sensitive to the traditional big questions in metaphysics and ontology, and at the same time has laid the grounds of new areas of research in modal logic. The present entry aims at presenting and discussing some of Prior's most important contributions to philosophy and their relevance. In particular, the entry presents and discuss branching-time semantics and their application to the problem of determinism, hybrid logics and the red...
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This paper builds on the logical model of opinion dynamics under social influence in networks proposed by Liu, Seligman, and Girard (2014) as well as on the generalization proposed by Christoff and Hansen (2013). While both accounts of... more
This paper builds on the logical model of opinion dynamics under social influence in networks proposed by Liu, Seligman, and Girard (2014) as well as on the generalization proposed by Christoff and Hansen (2013). While both accounts of social influence show interesting dynamics, they both assume that agents do not reflect on how they are affected by such influence. This paper shows that, if agents are allowed to reflect upon the very rules of social influence, they may come to know (or ``learn") other agents' private opinions, even though they can only observe their public behavior. To represent formally agents who are able to reason about social influence, a logic of social networks, knowledge, influence, and ``learning" is introduced.
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This work presents an overview of four different approaches to the problem of future contingency and determinism in temporal logics. All of them are bivalent, viz. they share the assumption that propositions concerning future contingent... more
This work presents an overview of four different approaches to the problem of future contingency and determinism in temporal logics. All of them are bivalent, viz. they share the assumption that propositions concerning future contingent facts have a determinate truth-value (true or false). We introduce Ockhamism, Peirceanism, Actualism and T x W semantics, the four most relevant bivalent alternatives in this area, and compare them from the point of view of their expressiveness and their underlying metaphysics of time.
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The paper introduces a probabilistic semantics for the paraconsistent temporal logic Ab presented by the authors in a previ-ous work on future contingents. Probabilistic concepts help framing two possible interpretations of the logic in... more
The paper introduces a probabilistic semantics for the paraconsistent temporal logic Ab presented by the authors in a previ-ous work on future contingents. Probabilistic concepts help framing two possible interpretations of the logic in question àsubjective' and aobjective' one and explaining the rationale behind both of them. We also sketch a proof-method for Ab and address some considerations regarding the conceptual appeal of our proposal and its possible future developments.
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This paper presents two systems of temporal logic, ΛCPT and ΛCPT@, with ceteris paribus modalities. The principal aim is to show how this approach can be useful to give an ockhamist solution to the future contingents problem along the... more
This paper presents two systems of temporal logic, ΛCPT and ΛCPT@, with ceteris paribus modalities. The principal aim is to show how this approach can be useful to give an ockhamist solution to the future contingents problem along the same lines of A. Prior in Prior (1967). The interest of this work lies also in the fact that ΛCPT@ represents an alternative modal account of supervaluationist and post-semantics approaches to temporal reasoning
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Supervaluationism holds that the future is undetermined, and as a consequence of this, statements about the future may be neither true nor false. In the present paper, we explore the novel and quite different view that the future is... more
Supervaluationism holds that the future is undetermined, and as a consequence of this, statements about the future may be neither true nor false. In the present paper, we explore the novel and quite different view that the future is abundant: statements about the future do not lack truth-value, but may instead be glutty, that is both true and false. We will show that (1) the logic resulting from this “abundance of the future” is a non-adjunctive paraconsistent formalism based on subvaluations, which has the virtue that all classical laws are valid in it, while no formula like ∅∧¬∅ is satisfiable (though both ∅ and ¬∅ may be true in a model); (2) The peculiar behaviour of abundant logical consequence has an illuminating analogy in probability logic; (3) abundance preserves some important features of classical logic (not preserved in supervaluationism) when it comes to express those important retrogradations of truth which are presupposed by the argument de praesenti ad praeteritum.
Keywords : Future contingents; supervaluationism; gluts; subvaluations; retrogradation of truth
Keywords : Future contingents; supervaluationism; gluts; subvaluations; retrogradation of truth
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A group is in a state of pluralistic ignorance (PI) if, roughly speak-ing, every member of the group thinks that his or her belief or desire is different from the beliefs or desires of the other members of the group. PI has been invoked... more
A group is in a state of pluralistic ignorance (PI) if, roughly speak-ing, every member of the group thinks that his or her belief or desire is different from the beliefs or desires of the other members of the group. PI has been invoked to explain many otherwise puzzling phenomena in social psychology. The main purpose of this article is to shed light on the nature of PI states -their structure, internal consistency and opacity -using the formal apparatus of Dynamic Doxastic Logic, and also to study the sense in which such states are "fragile", i.e. to iden-tify plausible conditions under which a PI state cascades into a state of shared belief as the result of announcement.
La Sintassi logica del linguaggio [1] rappresentava tra altre cose, nelle inten-zioni di Carnap, una spiegazione ed una giustificazione, alla luce degli allora recenti risultati di Gödel, di un punto di vista convenzionalista riguardo ai... more
La Sintassi logica del linguaggio [1] rappresentava tra altre cose, nelle inten-zioni di Carnap, una spiegazione ed una giustificazione, alla luce degli allora recenti risultati di Gödel, di un punto di vista convenzionalista riguardo ai fondamenti della matematica e del discorso scientifico in generale. L'im-magine di convenzionalismo che ne risultà e molto complessa e, per diversi aspetti, di difficile interpretazione. Una prima parte di questo lavorosa a dedicata all'elucidazione del pro-blema dei fondamenti per come si presentava a Carnap al momento della stesura del suo lavoro, nonché all'analisi delle posizioni filosofiche che de-terminano il contenuto della Sintassi e,pì u determinatamente, la scelta dell'opzione metalinguistica. Il metalinguaggio rappresenta infatti, nella vi-sione di Carnap, il corretto metodo della filosofia della scienza e,pì u in particolare, dell'analisi del problema dei fondamenti. Una seconda sezione sa a dedicata ad enucleare i motivi per cui l'atteggiamento convenzionalista si adatta al punto di vista di un empirista, quale era Carnap, nello spiegare la nozione dianalitici a onecessi a logico-matematica 1 . Le basi e le ragioni della spiegazione di tale concetto da parte di un logico neo-empirista sono chiaramente molto diverse da quelle che avrebbe fornito un empirista tra-dizionale. L'ultima sezione mette a confronto la posizione di Carnap, per come sì e venuta delineando, con la "refutazione", da parte di Gödel, del punto di vista fondazionale espresso dalla Sintassi e del convenzionalismo in generale. La refutazionè e argomentata da Gödel proprio sulla base del significato filosofico dei suoi due celebri risultati metamatematici 2 , e e pro-prio sul terreno del metalinguaggio che si gioca il confronto possibile tra le motivazioni dei due. 1 I due termini saranno, nel seguito, usati alternativamente come sinonimi. 2 Le critiche di Gödel sono svolte all'interno di alcuni saggi ([8] e [7]) rimasti non pubblicati fino all'edizione del terzo volume delle Opere Complete di Gödel, avvenuta nel 1995. La pubblicazione di questi saggi ha dato nuovo impulso alla discussione di questo aspetto problematico del convenzionalismo carnapiano (ad esempio, l'intera terza parte di Reconsidering logical Positivism di M. Friedman [6 e dedicata alla nozione carnapiana di "Veri a logico-matematica" e, in buona parte, alle obiezioni di Gödel).
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The present work is motivated by two questions. (1) What should an intuitionistic epistemic logic look like? (2) How should one interpret the knowledge operator in a Kripke-model for it? In what follows we outline an answer to (2) and... more
The present work is motivated by two questions. (1) What should an intuitionistic epistemic logic look like? (2) How should one interpret the knowledge operator in a Kripke-model for it? In what follows we outline an answer to (2) and give a model-theoretic definition of the operator K. This will shed some light also on (1), since it turns out that K, defined as we do, fulfills the properties of a necessity operator for a normal modal logic. The interest of our construction also lies in a better insight into the intuitionistic solution to Fitch’s paradox, which is discussed in the third section. In particular we examine, in the light of our definition, DeVidi and Solomon’s proposal of formulating the verification thesis as \(\phi \rightarrow \neg \neg K\phi\) . We show, as our main result, that this definition excapes the paradox, though it is validated only under restrictive conditions on the models.
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The paper attempts to give a solution to the Fitch’s paradox though the strategy of the reformulation of the paradox in temporal logic, and a notion of knowledge which is a kind of ceteris paribus modality. An analogous solution has been... more
The paper attempts to give a solution to the Fitch’s paradox though the strategy of the reformulation of the paradox in temporal logic, and a notion of knowledge which is a kind of ceteris paribus modality. An analogous solution has been offered in a different context to solve the problem of metaphysical determinism.
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Ignorance is a neglected issue in philosophy. For at least two reasons, this is surprising. First, contrary to what one might expect, it is not clear what ignorance is. Some philosophers say or assume that it is lack of knowledge, whereas... more
Ignorance is a neglected issue in philosophy. For at least two reasons, this is surprising. First, contrary to what one might expect, it is not clear what ignorance is. Some philosophers say or assume that it is lack of knowledge, whereas others claim or presuppose that it is absence of true belief. What is one ignorant of when one is ignorant? And how does ignorance of a specific fact relate to ignorance on some topic or to being an ignorant person (an ignoramus)?
Second, ignorance is of crucial importance in several domains of life, but the roles it plays in those domains have mostly received little attention. In the epistemic realm, ignorance might unexpectedly have some epistemic value, focusing on ignorance sheds new light on knowledge and epistemic justification, and the concept of culpable ignorance returns time and again in religious epistemology. In the moral realm, ignorance is sometimes considered as an excuse, some specific kind of ignorance seems to be implied by a moral character, and ignorance is closely related to moral risk. Finally, ignorance has certain social dimensions: it has been claimed to be the engine of science, it seems to be entailed by privacy and secrecy, and it is widely thought to constitute a legal excuse in certain circumstances. But if the nature of ignorance is more elusive than one would initially think and if ignorance plays a pivotal role in such important realms of life as the epistemic, the moral, and the social domains, then one could hardly wish for a better object of philosophical analysis and discussion.
The focus of this edited collection is on the epistemic dimension of ignorance. This volume addresses such issues as the nature of ignorance, the contextual dimension of ignorance, the epistemic value of ignorance, and social epistemological issues pertaining to ignorance. Together, these topics will add depth and insight into the question of how ignorance should be understood epistemologically. It will be the first in its kind in having as its focus exactly those problems associated with this dimension. It will draw together twelve commissioned chapters that are written by leading philosophers in the field and that represent diverse reflections on a rich topic.
Editors: Martijn Blaauw, Rik Peels
Second, ignorance is of crucial importance in several domains of life, but the roles it plays in those domains have mostly received little attention. In the epistemic realm, ignorance might unexpectedly have some epistemic value, focusing on ignorance sheds new light on knowledge and epistemic justification, and the concept of culpable ignorance returns time and again in religious epistemology. In the moral realm, ignorance is sometimes considered as an excuse, some specific kind of ignorance seems to be implied by a moral character, and ignorance is closely related to moral risk. Finally, ignorance has certain social dimensions: it has been claimed to be the engine of science, it seems to be entailed by privacy and secrecy, and it is widely thought to constitute a legal excuse in certain circumstances. But if the nature of ignorance is more elusive than one would initially think and if ignorance plays a pivotal role in such important realms of life as the epistemic, the moral, and the social domains, then one could hardly wish for a better object of philosophical analysis and discussion.
The focus of this edited collection is on the epistemic dimension of ignorance. This volume addresses such issues as the nature of ignorance, the contextual dimension of ignorance, the epistemic value of ignorance, and social epistemological issues pertaining to ignorance. Together, these topics will add depth and insight into the question of how ignorance should be understood epistemologically. It will be the first in its kind in having as its focus exactly those problems associated with this dimension. It will draw together twelve commissioned chapters that are written by leading philosophers in the field and that represent diverse reflections on a rich topic.
Editors: Martijn Blaauw, Rik Peels
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We provide a brief introduction to this special issue on social dynamics and collective rationality, and summarize the gist of the papers collected therein.