scholarly journals Causal judgments about atypical actions are influenced by agents’ epistemic states

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Kirfel ◽  
David Lagnado
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Epistemic State ◽  
Bayesian Network Model ◽  
Abnormal Behaviour ◽  
Epistemic States ◽  
Causal Judgments ◽  
Causal Action ◽  
Acting Agent ◽  
Epistemic Asymmetry ◽  
Causal Cognition

A prominent finding in causal cognition research is people's tendency to attribute increased causality to atypical actions. If two agents jointly cause an outcome ("conjunctive causation’"), but differ in how frequently they have performed the causal action before, people judge the atypically acting agent to have caused the outcome to a greater extent than the normally acting agent. In this paper, we argue that it is the epistemic state of an abnormally acting agent, rather than the abnormality of their action, that is driving people's causal judgments. Given the predictability of the normally acting agent's behaviour, the abnormal agent is in a better position to foresee the consequences of their action. We put this hypothesis to test in four experiments. In Experiment 1, we show that people judge the atypical agent as more causal than the normally acting agent, but also perceive an epistemic advantage of the abnormal agent. In Experiment 2, we find that people do not judge a causal difference if there is no epistemic asymmetry between the agents. In Experiment 3, we replicate these findings for a scenario in which the abnormal agent's epistemic advantage generalises to a novel context. In Experiment 4, we extend these findings to mental states more broadly construed. We develop a Bayesian Network model that predicts the degree of mental states based on action normality and epistemic states, and find that people infer mental states like desire and intentions to a greater extent from abnormal behaviour. We discuss these results in light of current theories and research on people’s preference for atypical causes.

scholarly journals Changing Minds ― Epistemic Interventions in Causal Reasoning

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Kirfel ◽  
David Lagnado
Keyword(s):  
Allergic Reaction ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Epistemic State ◽  
Counterfactual Reasoning ◽  
Epistemic States ◽  
Epistemic Actions ◽  
Causal Action ◽  
Epistemic Context ◽  
Future Outcomes ◽  
Causal Cognition

Did Tom’s use of nuts in the dish cause Billy’s allergic reaction? According to counterfactual theories of causation, an agent is judged a cause to the extent that their action made a difference to the outcome (Gerstenberg, Goodman, Lagnado, & Tenenbaum, 2020; Gerstenberg, Halpern, & Tenenbaum, 2015; Halpern, 2016; Hitchcock & Knobe, 2009). In this paper, we argue for the integration of epistemic states into current counterfactual accounts of causation. In the case of ignorant causal agents, we demonstrate that people’s counterfactual reasoning primarily targets the agent’s epistemic state – what the agent doesn’t know –, and their epistemic actions – what they could have done to know – rather than the agent’s actual causal action. In four experiments, we show that people’s causal judgment as well as their reasoning about alternatives is sensitive to the epistemic conditions of a causal agent: Knowledge vs. ignorance (Experiment 1), self-caused vs. externally caused ignorance (Experiment 2), the number of epistemic actions (Experiment 3), and the epistemic context (Experiment 4). We see two advantages in integrating epistemic states into causal models and counterfactual frameworks. First, assuming the intervention on indirect, epistemic causes might allow us to explain why people attribute decreased causality to ignorant vs. knowing causal agents. Moreover, causal agents’ epistemic states pick out those factors that can be controlled or manipulated in order to achieve desirable future outcomes, reflecting the forward-looking dimension of causality. We discuss our findings in the broader context of moral and causal cognition.

scholarly journals Comparative standard in institutional epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 418-430
Author(s):  
Marko-Luka Zubcic
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Moral Conflict ◽  
Epistemic Value ◽  
Epistemic State ◽  
Epistemic States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Democratic Authority ◽  
Philosophical Framework ◽  
Lock In ◽  
Agent Development

Which epistemic value is the standard according to which we ought to compare, assess and design institutional arrangements in terms of their epistemic properties? Two main options are agent development (in terms of individual epistemic virtues or capabilities) and attainment of truth. The options are presented through two authoritative contemporary accounts-agent development by Robert Talisse?s understanding in Democracy and Moral Conflict (2009) and attainment of truth by David Estlund?s treatment, most prominently in Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (2008). Both options are shown to be unsatisfactory because they are subject to problematic risk of suboptimal epistemic state lock-in. The ability of the social epistemic system to revise suboptimal epistemic states is argued to be the best option for a comparative standard in institutional epistemology.

scholarly journals Managing Different Sources of Uncertainty in a BDI Framework in a Principled Way with Tractable Fragments

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 731-775
Author(s):  
Kim Bauters ◽  
Kevin McAreavey ◽  
Weiru Liu ◽  
Jun Hong ◽  
Lluís Godo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Intelligent Systems ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Operational Semantics ◽  
Epistemic State ◽  
Bdi Agents ◽  
Epistemic States ◽  
Interacting Agents ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Syntactic Approach ◽  
Different Sources

The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture is a practical approach for modelling large-scale intelligent systems. In the BDI setting, a complex system is represented as a network of interacting agents - or components - each one modelled based on its beliefs, desires and intentions. However, current BDI implementations are not well-suited for modelling more realistic intelligent systems which operate in environments pervaded by different types of uncertainty. Furthermore, existing approaches for dealing with uncertainty typically do not offer syntactical or tractable ways of reasoning about uncertainty. This complicates their integration with BDI implementations, which heavily rely on fast and reactive decisions. In this paper, we advance the state-of-the-art w.r.t. handling different types of uncertainty in BDI agents. The contributions of this paper are, first, a new way of modelling the beliefs of an agent as a set of epistemic states. Each epistemic state can use a distinct underlying uncertainty theory and revision strategy, and commensurability between epistemic states is achieved through a stratification approach. Second, we present a novel syntactic approach to revising beliefs given unreliable input. We prove that this syntactic approach agrees with the semantic definition, and we identify expressive fragments that are particularly useful for resource-bounded agents. Third, we introduce full operational semantics that extend CAN, a popular semantics for BDI, to establish how reasoning about uncertainty can be tightly integrated into the BDI framework. Fourth, we provide comprehensive experimental results to highlight the usefulness and feasibility of our approach, and explain how the generic epistemic state can be instantiated into various representations.

scholarly journals Evidence of Evidence as Higher-Order Evidence

2019 ◽  
pp. 62-83
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria A. Eder ◽  
Peter Brössel
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Epistemic State ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Epistemic States ◽  
Model Evidence ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

In everyday life and in science we acquire evidence of evidence and based on this new evidence we often change our epistemic states. An assumption underlying such practice is that the following EEE Slogan is correct: ‘evidence of evidence is evidence’. We suggest that evidence of evidence is best understood as higher-order evidence about the epistemic state of agents. In order to model evidence of evidence the chapter introduces a new powerful framework for modelling epistemic states, Dyadic Bayesianism. Based on this framework, it then discusses characterizations of evidence of evidence and argues for one of them. Finally, the chapter shows that whether the EEE Slogan holds, depends on the specific kind of evidence of evidence.

scholarly journals The interplay between covariation, temporal, and mechanism information in singular causation judgments

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Stephan ◽  
Michael R. Waldmann
Keyword(s):  
Computational Model ◽  
Causal Attribution ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Spatiotemporal Location ◽  
The Past ◽  
Singular Causation ◽  
Causal Judgments ◽  
Causal Strength ◽  
Causal Cognition ◽  
Psychological Studies

Most psychological studies on causal cognition have focused on how people make predictions from causes to effects or how they assess causal strength for general causal relationships (e.g., “smoking causes cancer”). In the past years, there has been a surge of interest in other types of causal judgments, such as diagnostic inferences or causal selection. Our focus here is on how people assess singular causation relations between cause and effect events that occurred at a particular spatiotemporal location (e.g., “Mary’s having taking this pill caused her sickness.”). The analysis of singular causation has received much attention in philosophy, but relatively few psychological studies have investigated how lay people assess these relations. Based on the power PC model of causal attribution proposed by Cheng and Novick (2005), we have developed and tested a new computational model of singular causation judgments integrating covariation, temporal, and mechanism information. We provide an overview of this research and outline important questions for future research.

scholarly journals Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Agents' Minds: The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs as Phenomenological Boundary

2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Bering
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Current Experiment ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Epistemic States ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Intuitive Conceptions ◽  
Personal Consciousness ◽  
Afterlife Beliefs

AbstractLittle is known about how the minds of dead agents are represented. In the current experiment, individuals with different types of explicit afterlife beliefs were asked in an implicit interview task whether various mental state types, as well as pure biological imperatives, continue after death. The results suggest that, regardless of one's explicit reports about personal consciousness after death, those who believe in some form of life after death (and, to a certain extent, even those who do not) implicitly represent dead agents' minds in the same way: psychobiological and perceptual states cease while emotional, desire, and epistemic states continue. The findings are interpreted according to simulation constraints — because it is epistemologically impossible to know what it is like to be dead, individuals will be most likely to attribute to dead agents those types of mental states that they cannot imagine being without. Such a model argues that it is natural to believe in life after death and social transmission serves principally to conceptually enrich (or degrade) intuitive conceptions of the afterlife.

scholarly journals A Categorical Characterization of a ①-Iteratively De ned State of Common Knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 329-341
Author(s):  
Fernando Tohmé ◽  
◽  
Gianluca Caterina ◽  
Rocco Gangle ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Fixed Point ◽  
Category Theory ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Epistemic State ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Epistemic States ◽  
Novel Approach

We present here a novel approach to the analysis of common knowledge based on category theory. In particular, we model the global epistemic state for a given set of agents through a hierarchy of beliefs represented by a presheaf construction. Then, by employing the properties of a categorical monad, we prove the existence of a state, obtained in an iterative fashion, in which all agents acquire common knowledge of some underlying statement. In order to guarantee the existence of a fixed point under certain suitable conditions, we make use of the properties entailed by Sergeyev's numeral system called grossone, which allows a finer control on the relevant structure of the infinitely nested epistemic states.

scholarly journals Doubt as a mechanism of the change of epistemic states (on the materials of the philosophy of pragmatism and neuropsychology)

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-371
Author(s):  
Anastasia V. Golubinskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Process ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
The State ◽  
Epistemic State ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Epistemic States ◽  
Material Substance ◽  
Neuropsychological Factors

Science has not yet found a solution to the question of how cognitive mechanisms, which are crucial for the subjective processes of evaluating the reliability of information and doubt, are arranged. This ability is usually associated with both the pragmatic consequences of accepting a belief and the material substance of consciousness. In this article, the author proposes to compare one of the largest conceptions of doubt in philosophy, the pragmatic conception, with the theory of false tags, which was presented in the last decade by the neuropsychologist E. Asp in order to explain the phenomena of doubt. The article presents the theoretical aspects of both conceptions, which allows to derive the properties of doubt as an epistemic state, that is, the state of the subject’s cognitive reality, formed under the influence of external (situational, pragmatic) and internal (neuropsychological) factors. The results of the study presented in the article allow us to conclude the possibility of an interdisciplinary approach in further studies of human cognitive activity as a mechanism of various epistemic states. It is concluded that doubt itself is not one of these states, but is a secondary psychological act that ensures the transition from one epistemic state to another. This offers an alternative view to the approach established in philosophy, in which doubt precedes the fact of accepting knowledge and is an essential stage of the cognitive process.

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