Sonja Smets

Tutorial on Belief dynamics in a social context

This tutorial is addressed to researchers and students who are
interested in the logical/philosophical study of notions of belief and
knowledge, including group beliefs and collective ``knowledge''. We
are interested both in the representation of these different types of
attitudes as well as in their dynamics, i.e. how these attitudes
change in communities of interconnected agents capable of reflection,
communication, reasoning, argumentation etc. The tutorial will consist
of three parts: In the first session I will introduce the basic
concepts and models, using techniques from Dynamic Epistemic Logic and
their adaptations for dealing with belief revision. In the second
session I will focus on characterizing a group's ``epistemic
potential" and deal further with cases in which a group's ability to
track the truth is higher than that of each of its members. In the
last session I will focus on situations in which the group's dynamics
leads to informational distortions (i.e. the ``madness of the crowds":
informational cascades, ``groupthink", the curse of the committee,
pluralistic ignorance, group polarization, doxastic cycles etc). I
will informally summarize a number of recent papers that use a variety
of formal tools ranging from dynamic epistemic logics and
probabilistic logics, as well as tools from game theory and network
theory.

Tutorial on 18/05/15, 10h00: slides

Tutorial on 19/05/15, 14h00: slides

Talk on 20/05/15, 14h00: slides