This project is based in Munich (PF 740/2-2, project leader: Dr. Dr. Niki Pfeifer).

Project description

Title: Coherence-based probability logic: Rationality under uncertainty

Abstract: This project is located in the intersection of formal epistemology and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning. It will further develop "coherence based probability logic" (CPL) as a new rationality framework for formal and empirical studies on reasoning under uncertainty. In the coherence framework, probabilities are conceived as subjective degrees of belief and conditional probability is defined as a primitive concept. The coherence approach is especially suitable for dealing with zero antecedent probabilities.
Three working packages (WP1-WP3) shall be accomplished to establish new answers to the following key questions of the SPP1516: How useful are qualitative (logic-based) and quantitative (probability-based) approaches for modeling human thinking? What is rationality under uncertainty?
In WP1, we will develop a coherence-based probability semantics for categorical syllogisms. Philosophically, we will develop new probabilistic interpretations of central syllogistic concepts (like quantifiers, existential import, the square of opposition). Psychologically, we will run experiments on the new semantics. The psychological plausibility will be empirically investigated. The new semantics will be critically discussed in the light of current psychological theories of categorical syllogisms.
In WP2, we will philosophically analyze various rationality principles of nonmonotonic conditional logics in their qualitative and quantitative versions within the framework of CPL. Furthermore, we will test experimentally which of the rationality principles are actually endorsed by people, and hence which system explains best how people reason under incomplete probabilistic knowledge.
In WP3, we will develop a philosophical account of iterated conditionals and test the empirical adequacy of our theory in a series of experiments. In particular, we will study, both theoretically and experimentally, the relationship between learning a conditional information, which is associated with interpreting left-nested conditionals, and explanatory reasoning. Additionally—in the context of right-nested conditionals—we will investigate the psychological plausibility of the Import-Export Principle, which is frequently assumed by philosophers, yet it does not hold in CPL.
The ultimate (bold) goal is to develop CPL as an unified rationality framework for uncertain reasoning and to construct Mental Probability Logic as a philosophically informed and descriptively adequate competence theory of human uncertain inference. WP1-WP3 describe important steps towards this goal.

Association: This project is also an associated project within the Priority Programme SPP 1727 "New Pragmatic Theories based on Experimental Evidence" (XPRAG)

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First funding period

This project is based in Munich (PF 740/2-1, project leader: Dr. Dr. Niki Pfeifer) and in Dortmund (KE 1413/5-1, project leader: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Kern-Isberner).

Project description

Title: Rational reasoning with conditionals and probabilities. Logical foundations and empirical evaluation

Project part Dortmund: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Kern-Isberner (project leader), Christian Eichhorn
Project part Munich: Dr. Dr. Niki Pfeifer (project leader)

Abstract: This project combines logic-based theories of rationality provided by nonmonotonic logics and approaches to conditional reasoning, and probabilistic theories of rationality based on coherence approaches and the principle of maximum entropy. Conditionals will serve as a common interface between all these approaches, since they encode crucial guidelines for rational reasoning and can be used both in a qualitative and in a probabilistic way. This provides a unifying perspective on rationality that helps to overcome the limits of specific frameworks and also allows for taking information from the environment into account. We aim to extend axiomatic systems of nonmonotonic logics (like system P) to better approximate rational reasoning. In particular, the theory of conditional structures shall be used to develop formal models of rational conditional reasoning, both in qualitative and probabilistic frameworks. On the probabilistic side, the coherence approach will be utilized and extended to investigate formally and empirically current psychological and philosophical theories of conditionals. The descriptive value of the formal models shall be evaluated with respect to people's understanding and reasoning with uncertain conditionals. Moreover, the relevance of the methods to be developed in this project to causal and counterfactual reasoning and for belief revision shall be investigated.

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Selected project activities

• May 2015: Niki Pfeifer participates at the Dagstuhl Seminar 15221: Multi-disciplinary approaches to reasoning with imperfect information and knowledge—A synthesis and a roadmap of challenges and presents joint work with Sanfilippo, G., & Gilio, A. at the Schloss Dagstuhl (Germany), 25.-29.5.2015.
  
  
• September 2014: Niki Pfeifer and Gerhard Schurz organized the Symposium "Rationality Frameworks for Reasoning in Uncertain Environments" at the 22nd Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP 2014), Noto (Italy).
  Symposium speakers: Jonathan Nelson, Björn Meder, Christine Szalay, Vincenzo Crupi & Katya Tentori; Paul Thorn & Gerhard Schurz; Hans Rott; Niki Pfeifer.


• September 2013: Gabriele Kern-Isberner organized and co-chaired the 4th Workshop of Dynamics of Knowledge and Belief (DKB-2013).


• May 2013: Research stay (Christian Eichhorn) with the project group of Gerhard Schurz and Paul Thorn (project The Role of Meta-Induction in Human Reasoning at Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf).


• February-April 2013: Research stay (Niki Pfeifer) at the Center for Formal Epistemology (Carnegie Mellon University; Pittsburgh, USA). Purpose: Two talks and collaborations with philosophers and psychologists. Conducting empirical investigations at the Laboratory for Empirical Approaches to Philosophy (LEAP).
  
  
• August 2012: Niki Pfeifer organized the Rationality frameworks for conditionals workshop at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. Six individual projects of the Priority Program 1516 participated in the workshop. This workshop aimed to discuss first project results and to foster collaborations among the project participants.
  
  Workshop summary:
  Pfeifer, N. (2012). Rationality frameworks for conditionals (Workshop Report). The Reasoner, 6(10), 158-159.  
  
  
• September 2012: Research stay (Niki Pfeifer) at Maastricht University. Purpose: Project presentation and collaboration with external project member Prof. Igor Douven.
  
  
• September 2012: Niki Pfeifer defended his second PhD in philosophy (with distinction) at the Graduate School for Humanities, Tilburg University (The Netherlands). Parts of his cumulative PhD thesis consist of project results.
  
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Project publications

1. Gilio, A., Pfeifer, N. & Sanfilippo, G. (in press). Transitivity in coherence-based probability logic. Journal of Applied Logic.  
   
   
2. Gilio, A., Pfeifer, N. & Sanfilippo, G. (2015). Transitive reasoning with imprecise probabilities. In Destercke, S. & Denoeux, T. (Eds), Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty (ECSQARU 2015) (p. 95-105). Dordrecht: Springer LNAI 9161 (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence).
   
   
3. Pfeifer, N. & Stöckle-Schobel, R. (in press). Uncertain conditionals and counterfactuals in (non-)causal settings. In Proceedings of the EuroAsianPacific Joint Conference on Cognitive Science (4th European Conference on Cognitive Science; 10th International Conference on Cognitive Science). Torino, Italy.  
   
   
4. Kern-Isberner, G. & Eichhorn, C. (2014). Structural inference from conditional knowledge bases. Studia Logica (Unterhuber, M. & Schurz, G. (Eds.): Special Issue on Logic and Probability: Reasoning in Uncertain Environments 102) (4), 751-669.
   
   
5. Pfeifer, N. (2014). Reasoning about uncertain conditionals. Studia Logica (Unterhuber, M. & Schurz, G. (Eds.): Special Issue on Logic and Probability: Reasoning in Uncertain Environments 102) (4), 849-866.  
   
   
6. Pfeifer, N. & Douven, I. (2014). Formal epistemology and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning. The Review of Philosophy and Psychology5(2), 199-221.  
   
   
7. Pfeifer, N., Sanfilippo, G. & Gilio, A. (2014). Probabilistic interpretations of the square of opposition. In Béziau, J. Y. & Gan-Krzywoszyńska (Eds.), Handbook of the World Congress on the Square of Opposition IV (pp. 88-89). Poznań: Kontekst.
   
   
8. Grundmann, T., Beierle, C., Kern-Isberner, G. & Pfeifer, N. (2013). Wissen. In Stephan, A. & Walter, S. (Hrsg.), Handbuch Kognitionswissenschaft (pp. 488-500). Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler.
   
   
9. Kern-Isberner, G. & Eichhorn, C. (2013). Intensional combination of rankings for OCF-networks. In Boonthum-Denecke, C. and Youngblood, M. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-2013) (pp. 615-620). AAAI Press.  
   
   
10. Kern-Isberner, G. & Eichhorn, C. (2013). OCF-Networks with missing values. In Beierle, C. & Kern-Isberner, G. (eds.): Proceedings of th 4th Workshop on Dynamics of Knowledge and Belief (DKB-2013), 2013.  
    
    
11. Pfeifer, N. (2013). The new psychology of reasoning: A mental probability logical perspective. Thinking & Reasoning, 19(3-4), 329-345.  
    
    
12. Pfeifer, N. (2013). On argument strength. In F. Zenker (Ed.), Bayesian argumentation. The practical side of probability (pp. 185-193). Dordrecht: Synthese Library Vol. 362 (Springer).  
    
    
13. Kern-Isberner, G. & Eichhorn, C. (2012) A structural base for conditional reasoning. In: Human Reasoning and Automated Deduction (HRAD) – KI 2012 Workshop Proceedings.  
    
    
14. Pfeifer, N. (2012). Naturalized formal epistemology of uncertain reasoning. Second doctoral dissertation (with distinction), The Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Tilburg University.
    The abstract will be published in The Knowledge Engineering Review.
    
    
15. Pfeifer, N. (2012). Experiments on Aristotle's Thesis: Towards an experimental philosophy of conditionals. The Monist, 95(2), 223-240.  
    The abstract is published in The Review of Metaphysics, 2012, 65(4), p. 938.
    
    
16. Pfeifer, N. (2012). Rationality frameworks for conditionals (Workshop Report). The Reasoner, 6(10), 158-159.  
    
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Presentations of project results

1. Pfeifer, N. & Stöckle-Schobel, R. Uncertain conditionals and counterfactuals in (non-)causal settings. EuroAsianPacific Joint Conference on Cognitive Science (4th European Conference on Cognitive Science; 10th International Conference on Cognitive Science). Torino (Italy), 25.-27.9.2015.
   
   
2. Pfeifer, N. Cognitive foundations of defeasible reasoning. 15th Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. (CLMPS 2015). Helsinki (Finland), 3.-8.8.2015.
   
   
3. Gilio, A., Pfeifer, N. & Sanfilippo, G. Transitive reasoning with imprecise probabilities. 13th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty (ECSQARU 2015). Université de Technologie de Compiègne, Compiègne (France), 15.-17.7.2015
   
   
4. Pfeifer, N. & Stöckle-Schobel, R. The probability of indicative and counterfactual conditionals in causal and non-causal settings. Causal and Probabilistic Reasoning Conference. Munich (Germany), 18.-20.6.2015.
   
   
5. Pfeifer, N., Sanfilippo, G., & Gilio, A. Coherence under uncertainty: Philosophical and psychological applications. Dagstuhl Seminar 15221: Multi-disciplinary approaches to reasoning with imperfect information and knowledge—A synthesis and a roadmap of challenges. Schloss Dagstuhl (Germany), 25.-29.5.2015.
   
   
6. Sanfilippo, G., Pfeifer, N. & Gilio, A. Probabilistic interpretations of the square of opposition. Seminario di Logica e Filosofia della Scienza. Universitá di Palermo (Italy), 1.4.2015.
   
   
7. Pfeifer, N., Sanfilippo, G. & Gilio, A. Probability semantics for categorical syllogisms. Seminario di Logica e Filosofia della Scienza. Universitá di Palermo (Italy), 25.3.2015.
   
   
8. Pfeifer, N. Coherence-based probability logic: Rationality under uncertainty. Fourth Conference of the Priority Program "New Frameworks of Rationality". Schloss Etelsen (Germany), 15.-18.3.2015.
   
   
9. Pfeifer, N. & Stöckle-Schobel, R. Exploring counterfactual and causal conditionals. Fourth Conference of the Priority Program "New Frameworks of Rationality". Schloss Etelsen (Germany), 15.-18.3.2015.
   
   
10. Sanfilippo, G., Pfeifer, N. & Gilio, A. Probabilistic inference and syllogisms. 7th International Conference of the ERCIM WG on Computational and Methodological Statistics (ERCIM 2014), Pisa (Italy), 6.-8.12.2014.
    
    
11. Pfeifer, N. The coherence perspective on reasoning about uncertainty. Reasoning and Making Decisions Workshop, Ludwigsburg (Germany), 17.-18.11.2014.
    
    
12. Stöckle-Schobel, R. On the evidence for prelinguistic concept learning. iCog conference 2014: Perspectives on learning, University of Edinburgh (UK), 15.-16.10.2014.
    
    
13. Pfeifer, N. Transitivity, uncertain conditionals & cognition. Symposium "Rationality Frameworks for Reasoning in Uncertain Environments" (Symposium organizers: Niki Pfeifer & Gerhard Schurz) at the 22nd Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP 2014), Noto (Italy), 16.-19.09.2014.
    
    
14. Pfeifer, N. Mental probability logic: Conditionals and quantification. Department of Psychology, University of Freiburg (Germany), 18.06.2014.
    
    
15. Pfeifer, N., Sanfilippo, G. & Gilio, A. Probabilistic interpretations of the square of opposition. 4th World Congress on the Square of Opposition (Vatican), 5.-9.05.2014.
    
    
16. Kern-Isberner, G., Pfeifer, N., & Eichhorn, C. Experiments on uncertain conditionals and network approaches to reasoning.Third Conference of the Priority Program "New Frameworks of Rationality". Schloss Etelsen (Germany), 9.-12.03.2014.
    
    
17. Eichhorn, C. (joint work with Kern-Isberner, G.) Inductive generation of OCF-LEG networks using System Z. 35th Linz Seminar on Fuzzy Set Theory "Graded logical approaches and their applications", Linz (Austria), (invited) 18.-22.02.2014.


18. Eichhorn, C. (joint work with Fey, M. and Kern-Isberner, G.) CP- and OCF-networks - a comparison. 35th Linz Seminar on Fuzzy Set Theory "Graded logical approaches and their applications", Linz (Austria), (invited) 18.-22.02.2014.


19. Pfeifer, N. Coherence based probability logic: Rationality under uncertainty. Institut für Philosophie (Lehrstuhl für Theoretische Philosophie), Universität Regensburg (Germany), 17.02.2014.
    
    
20. Kern-Isberner, G. Multiple and iterated belief revision. Gießener Symposium on Belief Revision an Non-Monotonic Reasoning, Gießen (Germany), 10.-11.12.2013.


21. Pfeifer, N. Mathematical philosophy meets mathematical psychology. 46th Annual Meeting of the Society of Mathematical Psychology, Potsdam (Germany), 4.-7.08.2013.
    
    
22. Pfeifer, N. Conditionals under incomplete knowledge. 7th London Reasoning Workshop (LRW2013), London (UK), 25.-26.07.2013.
    
    
23. Pfeifer, N. Incomplete probabilistic knowledge and cognition. 21st Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP 2013), Granada (Spain), 9.-12.07.2013.
    
    
24. Pfeifer, N. How people (ought to) reason under uncertainty. CFE Workshop on Cognition and Formal Theories of Reasoning, Carnegie Mellon University (USA), 30.03.2013.
    
    
25. Pfeifer, N. Probability logic and human reasoning. Center for Philosophy of Science (Lunchtime talk), University of Pittsburgh (USA), 05.03.2013.
    
    
26. Kern-Isberner, G. (joint work with Thimm, M.) A Ranking Semantics for First-Order Conditional Reasoning Research Seminar Theoretical Philosophy Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf (Germany), 18.12.2012.


27. Pfeifer, N. Formal and cognitive foundations of probabilistic justification. Judgment and Justification (conference), University of Tampere (Finland), 24.-26.09.2012.
    
    
28. Pfeifer, N. Modeling uncertain inference: Formal and cognitive foundations. Department Methodology & Statistics. Maastricht University (The Netherlands), 13.09.2012.
    
    
29. Pfeifer, N. Naturalized formal epistemology of uncertain reasoning. Graduate School for Humanities, Tilburg University (The Netherlands), 10.09.2012.
    
    
30. Pfeifer, N. Introduction to rationality frameworks for conditionals. Rationality frameworks for conditionals (workshop). Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (Germany), 17.08.2012.
    
    
31. Kern-Isberner, G. (joint work with Eichhorn, C.) Understanding conditionals through conditional structures. Workshop Rationality frameworks for conditionals. Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (Germany), 17.08.2012.


32. Pfeifer, N. Measuring argument strength. 5th eColloq on Argumentation, The World Wide Web, 19.07.2012.
    
    
33. Pfeifer, N. The mental probability logical perspective on the new psychology of reasoning. 7th International Conference on Thinking, Birkbeck College and University College London (UK), 04.-06.07.2012.
    
    
34. Kern-Isberner, G. (joint work with Krümpelmann, P.) A Constructive Approach to Independent and Evidence Retaining Belief Revision by General Information Sets. Mini-Workshop Theoretical Computer Science, Technische Universität Dortmund, Dortmund (Germany), 20.06.2012.


35. Kern-Isberner, G. & Eichhorn, C. Rational reasoning with conditionals and probabilities. Logical foundations and empirical evaluation. SPP 1516 "New frameworks of rationality" kickoff workshop, Tutzing (Germany), 20.-23.03.2012.
    
    
36. Pfeifer, N. Rational reasoning with conditionals and probabilities. Logical foundations and empirical evaluation. SPP 1516 "New frameworks of rationality" kickoff workshop, Tutzing (Germany), 20.-23.03.2012.
    
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