11 May 2015, AUC Logic Guest Lectures, Sonja Smets (ILLC)

Abstract:
In this presentation I focus on the 'epistemic potential' of a group of agents, i.e. the knowledge (or beliefs) that the group may come to possess if all its members join their forces and share their individual information. Among the different notions of group knowledge studied in the literature, which one can give us a good measure of a group'sepistemic potential? Hence, when exactly is the group's ability to track the truth higher than that of each of its members? I will answer these questions by paying attention to a number of different factors that may play a role, including: the group's dynamics, the structure of the social network, the individuals' different epistemic interests and agendas, etc. When we take these realistic conditions into account, an accurate formalization of a group's potential knowledge can be developed. I will illustrate the setting with examples from interrogative scenarios in which we allow inter-agent communication as the group's main knowledge-aggregation method.The results reported on in this lecture are based on on-going joint work with A. Baltag and R. Boddy.

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