RAIL

Announcement and Call for Participation

WORKSHOP ON BAYESIAN ARGUMENTATION

Fri-Sat, October 22 & 23, 2010
Department of Philosophy & Cognitive Science
Lund University, Sweden
http://www.fil.lu.se/conferences/conference.asp?id=38&lang=se

Treatments of natural language argumentation by means of Bayes theorem (BT) are a compartively recent phenomenon. The basic idea behind (BT) is that the probability of a hypothesis increases to the extent that evidence is more likely if the hypothesis were true than if it were false. To fit this idea to natural language arguments (and episodes of reasoning thus suggested), the term ‘evidence’ is interpreted as reason or ground, and the term ‘hypothesis’ as conclusion or proposal. The choice always depends also on particular ways of drawing the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning.

Amongst others, (BT) can be used as a measure for the rational assignment of degrees of belief in the face of new evidence. It also provides expression for qualitative demands such as the significance of the likelihood-difference between mutually exclusive, but equally data-fitting hypotheses or – in the non hypothesis-testing context – equally grounds-covering proposals. In principle, then, agreement and disagreement may be rationally constrained both within and across agents (including epistemic peers) by what effectively is a quantitative measure of relative argument strength.

Further applications of (BT) pertain, for example, to statistical fallacies and decision making under uncertainty. This international workshops seeks to collect recent results in this area, collect participant’s papers in a special issue of an international journal, and to explore avenues for future cooperation.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS (preliminary titles)

Gregor Betz, Junior Professor, Philosophy, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Degrees of Justification, Robustness, and Bayes’ rule: On a Gradual Assessment of Argumentation Frameworks with Bivalence

Hilmi Demir, Assistant Professor, Philosophy, University of Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey,
Representation and Information: A Bayesian Connection

Luciano Floridi, Research Chair in Philosophy of Information, Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, UK
The Informational Goals of Arguments: Enforcement, Foundation and Extraction

Ulrike Hahn, Professor, Psychology, University of Cardiff, UK
Fallacies of Argumentation: the Bayesian Approach

Mike Oaksford, Head of School, Psychology, Birbeck University of London, UK
Bayesian Argumentation: Beyond the Fallacies

Erik J. Olsson, Chair of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Lund, Sweden
Trust, Inquiry and Information Exchange: Lessons from a Bayesian Computational Model

Niki Pfeifer, Postdoctoral Researcher, Psychology, University of Salzburg, Austria
Rational Argumentation under Uncertainty: A Probability Logical Approach

Tomoji Shogenji, Professor, Philosophy, Rhode Island College, USA
Circularity, Coherence, and Belief Revision: A Bayesian Analysis

Erich Witte, Head of the Institute of Social Psychology, University of Hamburg, Germany
Biases in Statistical Inference and Some Alternatives

Frank Zenker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Lund, Sweden
Beyond the Priors: Modeling Framing Effects in Pro/Con Argument

PARTICIPATION

To present your work (ca. 30 minutes plus 20 minute discussion), please send a 500 word abstract prepared for blind reviewing plus separate author information to frank.zenker[AT]fil.lu.se by MAY 1st. Allow four weeks for decisions.

The workshop is free and open to everyone. Please communicate your attendance to frank.zenker[AT]fil.lu.se by OCTOBER 1st, firmly indicating if you plan to attend lunches on Fri & Sat and dinner on Fri.

Other than for active participants, we cannot offer reimbursements of cost incurred on occasion of attending the workshop.