Università Roma Tre

We live in an information network and in an exchange of opinions that is ubiquitous and constant – a net of epistemic acts that we exchange with other agents and affect what we end up believing and deciding. Working with information implies more and more that we face the social effects of this – and these are today faster and faster, and we get a glimpse of them in real time. However, the more agents we have involved, the harder to understand the dynamics of information release turn to be.

This course introduces a formal toolkit that helps in this enterprise.
In particular, the course aims at securing: (1) the understanding of the problems of reasoning that can be triggered by the release of information; (2) the understanding of models that capture the dynamic effects of information release, and the conceptual problems they raise; (3) the problems connected to the representation of belief-merging and, in general, the relations between individual and collective notions of epistemic attitudes;
(4) the understanding of the conditions at which consensus is possible, the role it can play, and the relation between the information release policies, the connection of the epistemic network, and the hierarchies and trust distribution in epistemic communities.

(3) e (4) presuppose (1) and (2). In turn, the last two objectives come with a view on the social impact that the information release policies have on a community of epistemic agents. The course employs a varied package of methods and tools, especially those from Epistemic Logic and Dynamic Epistemic Logic, but also, to a lesser extent, notions and methods from Judgement Aggregation and Network Epistemology, which the course will briefly introduce.