EPISTEME@CMU Call for papers

The 2011 EPISTEME conference will focus on the intersection of formal and social epistemology. The use of formal models in social epistemology is not a new development. Many philosophers have modeled concepts and ideas in social epistemology by using formal tools of various types (e.g., game theory, Bayesian decision theory, the theory of judgment aggregation, the recently developed theory of networks, multi-agent epistemic logic, social choice theory, etc.). This conference intends to explore the many fertile relations between various branches of formal epistemology and many sub-areas of contemporary social epistemology.

The 2011 EPISTEME conference will be hosted by the Center for Formal Epistemology in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. The topic of the conference is:

"Social Epistemology meets Formal Epistemology: Recent developments and new trends"

A selection of the conference papers, including, potentially, papers from the open sessions, will be published in a special issue of the journal Episteme. For more information about the journal, look here.

Date: 24-26 June 2011

Possible topics: The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible questions that open session papers might address.

• Epistemic foundations of game theory.

• Peer disagreement.

• Aumann’s `Agreeing to disagree’.

• The modeling of testimony in Bayesian epistemology.

• Discrete pooling, judgment aggregation and social choice.

• Consensus of probabilities: limit theorems and applications.

• Dynamic logic meets game theory.

• Evolutionary game theory, morality and the social contract.

• The program of social software.

• Sociology of science.

• Diversity and pluralism.

• Social network structure.

• Learning in networks.

• Economic models of theory choice.

There will be a number of open sessions as part of this conference, and the organizers would like to invite submissions. Papers addressing any aspect of the conference theme, broadly conceived, are welcome. Submissions from graduate students are also welcome.

Length and format: Submissions should take the form of a detailed abstract of 500-1000 words. All submissions must be made electronically. The papers should be suitable for a presentation of around 30 minutes with a 15 minute question-and-answer session.

Submission procedure and important dates: All submissions should be sent directly to Horacio Arló-Costa (hcosta@andrew.cmu.edu). The deadline for submissions is February 15th 2011 with authors notified of the results of this process by April 20th 2011. All enquiries about the call for papers should be addressed to the main organizers: Horacio Arló-Costa (hcosta@andrew.cmu.edu ) and Christian List (C.List@lse.ac.uk).

Journal special issue: Please note that there will be a special issue of the journal Episteme arising out of this conference, and this issue may include some of the papers from the open sessions. It is thus essential that the papers for the open sessions are not already published, or due to be published. To be eligible for consideration for inclusion in the special issue, complete written versions of the papers will have to be ready by the time of the conference.

Main organizers:

Horacio Arló-Costa (CMU)
Christian List (LSE)

Program committee:

Alexandru Baltag (Oxford)
David Danks (CMU)
Igor Douven (Groningen)
Philip Kitcher (Columbia)
Klaus Nehring (UC Davis)
Eric Pacuit (Maryland and Tilburg)
Rohit Parikh (CUNY)
Gerhard Schurz (Dusseldorf)
Teddy Seidenfeld (CMU)
Brian Skyrms (CI)
Kai Spiekermann (LSE)
Johan van Benthem (Stanford, Amsterdam)
Kevin Zollman (CMU)



Local organizers:

Horacio Arló-Costa
Kevin Kelly

Workshop@CMU: Experience, heuristics, and choice: Prospects for bounded rationality

On December 1st there will be a workshop at CMU focusing on bounded rationality especially as applied to choice, featuring various central issues like the role of heuristics in choice and inference. The program, and other details can be found here. No registration is needed and attendance is welcomed. For details about organization you can contact me at my CMU email address. The workshop celebrates the work of Herb Simon in this area and features Ralph Hertwig as one of the main invitees. Ralph has made decisive contributions to bounded rationality in a series of recent papers. He is a student and a frequent collaborator of Gerd Gigerenzer.