Tag Archives: Formal Methods

Dan Zeman on New Applications of the Assessment-Sensitivity Framework

29 Saturday Nov 2025

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We are pleased to host a guest talk by Dan Zeman (MLAG, University of Porto).

The talk is on campus only. Non-KCL attendees are welcome but should register in advance. Details below.

Date and Time

Tuesday Dec 2nd, 2025 at 13:30-15:00 UK Time (UTC)

Location

Room PB 508, Philosophy Building, Strand, London WC2B 4BG. Access via King’s Strand campus entrance and then King’s Building.

Accessibility. If you have special access needs, please send an email to julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk for us to ensure that you can reach the room.

Non-KCL attendees are welcome but must register by sending an email to julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk by Monday Dec 1st, 13:00 UTC and should check in as visitors upon arrival with the security desk at the Strand Building entrance (Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS).

Title and Abstract

Dan Zeman

New Applications of the Assessment-Sensitivity Framework

The idea that various expressions in natural language are assessment-sensitive (that is, their denotation depends not only on the context of utterance, but also on the context of assessment) is not new. Authors such as MacFarlane (2003, 2005, 2009, 2014), Egan, Hawthorne & Weatherson (2005), Lasersohn (2005, 2016), etc. have applied this idea to a large array of perspectival expressions such as predicates of taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral terms, epistemic modals, gradable adjectives, knowledge attributions, conditionals, future contingents, etc. In this presentation, I attempt to make a prima facie case that the framework can be extended to other natural language expressions, including some socially relevant ones. For example, the view is suitable as an ameliorative account of gender terms (“man”, “woman”, “non-binary”); it seems to offer a simple treatment of dogwhistles (“inner city”, “welfare”); and it can be applied to expressives (“jerk”, “asshole”) and perhaps slurs. To be sure, in order to apply to such expressions, various modifications of the core idea of the framework will have to be introduced. Although many details remain to be ironed out, I take the prospect of applying the assessment-sensitivity framework to such expressions to show both its fruitfulness and its capacity to illuminate important social phenomena.

Organization

The talk is hosted by the Formal Methods Research group, Department of Philosophy, King’s College London.

Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz on Higher-Order Tense Realism

24 Friday Oct 2025

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We are pleased to host a guest talk by Fabrice Correia (Professor of Analytic Philosophy, University of Geneva), presenting joint work with Sven Rosenkranz, LOGOS/University of Barcelona on Higher-Order Tense Realism.

The talk is on campus only. Non-KCL attendees are welcome but should register in advance. Details below.

Date and Time

Tuesday Oct 28th, 2025 at 17:30-19:00 UK Time (UTC)

Location

Room PB 508, Philosophy Building, Strand, London WC2B 4BG. Access via King’s Strand campus entrance and then King’s Building.

Accessibility. If you have special access needs, please send an email to julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk for us to ensure that you can reach the room.

Non-KCL attendees are welcome but must register by sending an email to julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk by Mondy 27th, 20:00 UTC and should check in as visitors upon arrival with the security desk at the Strand Building entrance (Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS).

Title and Abstract

Fabrice Correia & Sven Rosenkranz

Higher Order Tense Realism

Realism about tense comes in various forms. Kit Fine (“Tense and Reality”, 2005 and “The Reality of Tense”, 2006) offers a helpful taxonomy. In our paper “Eternal Facts in an Ageing Universe” (2012), we improve upon this taxonomy, identifying a further type of view that Fine leaves out: Dynamic Absolutism. Both these taxonomies construe the different versions of tense realism in terms of first-order quantification over facts or states of affairs. Our goal is to show that the logical space of these first-order tense-realist positions can be replicated using higher-order quantification instead. Along the way, we rebut an argument given by Lukas Skiba in his “Higher-Order Being and Time” (2025) to the effect that there is no coherent higher-order version of Dynamic Absolutism.

Organization

The talk is hosted by the Formal Methods Research group, Department of Philosophy, King’s College London.

Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen on AI Epistemology

31 Thursday Jul 2025

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We’re pleased to host a guest talk by Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (Underwood Professor of Philosophy, Yonsei University) on AI Epistemology.
The talk will take place on campus and streamed online. Non-KCL attendees are welcome but should register in advance. Details below.

Date and Time

Tuesday Aug 5th, 2025 11:00-12:30 UK Time (UTC)

Location

Room (S)2.01, Bush House South Building, Strand, London WC2B 4BG.

Non-KCL attendees are welcome but must register by sending an email to julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk by Monday 4th, 12:00 UTC and should check in as visitors upon arrival with the security desk at Bush House North Entrance Strand campus, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG.

Online access

We’ll stream the meeting via MS Teams and have a Q&A if feasible. To receive a meeting link, send an email to julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk by Tuesday 5th, 9:00 UTC. You’ll need a MS Teams client (2024 or later) installed on your device.

Title and Abstract

AI epistemology

How might the use of AI impact the epistemic status of beliefs acquired and held by humans? In investigating this question, considerations on AI errors are used as a platform for discussion of the question of what conditions must be satisfied in order for human AI-based belief to qualify as knowledge. Theoretical tools from mainstream epistemology are brought to bear on this question.

Organization

The talk is hosted by the Formal Methods Research group, Department of Philosophy, King’s College London. Organised by Julien Dutant and chaired by Monica Z. X. Ding.

Rationality and Formal methods research seminars 2019

10 Thursday Jan 2019

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The Rationality and Formal Methods Group run guest speakers series at the same time slot. The guest speakers for winter and spring 2019 are as follows. (“FM” and “R” indicate talks organised by the formal methods and rationality groups, respectively.)

Winter 2019

Fri Jan 18th Georgi Gardiner (Oxford) (R)
Fri Feb 1st Johannes Stern (Bristol) (FM)
Fri March 1st Corinne Besson (Sussex) (FM)
Fri March 8th Lavinia Picollo (UCL) (FM)
Fri March 15th Michael Hannon (Nottingham) (R)
Fri March 22st Nick Hughes (Durham / Oxford) (R)
Fri March 29th Louise Hanson (Durham) (R)

Spring 2019

Fri May 17th James Studd (Oxford) (FM)
Fri May 24th Balthasar Grabmayr (Jerusalem) (FM)

The talks take place on Fridays 3:00-5:00, in room 508, Philosophy Building, KCL Strand Campus. Everyone is welcome, but if you come from outside King’s you need to email Julien Dutant at julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk in advance to be included in the visitor list.

Masterclass on Higher-Order Metaphysics with Andrew Bacon

20 Thursday Dec 2018

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Prof. Andrew Bacon (USC) will give a masterclass on Higher-Order Metaphysics at King’s College London on May 8th-10th, 2019. The masterclass will include guest talks by Nick Jones (Birmingham), Jessica Leech (KCL), and Timothy Williamson (Oxford).

The event is open to graduate students and researchers from any institution. Attendance is free but registration is required. To register fill in the form below.

You can download a pdf version of the programme.

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Nilanjan Das at the Formal Methods seminar this Friday

12 Monday Nov 2018

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Nilanjan Das (University College London) will present at the Formal Methods this Friday, November 16th, on:

Externalism and Exploitability

Abstract: According to Bayesian orthodoxy, an agent should update – or at least should plan to update – her credences by conditionalization. Some have defended this claim by means of a diachronic Dutch book argument. They say: an agent who doesn’t plan to update her credences by conditionalization makes herself vulnerable (by her own lights) to a diachronic Dutch book, i.e., a sequence of bets which, when accepted, pose a risk of monetary loss without any possibility of monetary gain. Here, I will argue that this argument is in tension with an attractive conception of evidence: namely, evidence externalism, i.e., the view that an agent’s evidence can entail non-trivial propositions about the external world.

Room 508, Philosophy Building, Strand Campus
14:00 – 16:00

Weng Hong Tang at the Formal Methods seminar this Friday

05 Monday Nov 2018

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Weng Hong Tang (National University of Singapore) will present at the Formal Methods this Friday, November 9th, on:

Reliabilism and Imprecise Credences

Abstract: According to the process reliabilist, a belief is justified if and only if it is produced (or sustained) by a reliable process or system of processes—that is, one that tends to produce a high ratio of true to false beliefs. Given, however, that beliefs are not merely all-or-nothing—given that they come in degrees—a natural question arises as to how the reliabilist may account for justified degrees of belief or credences. Unlike all-or-nothing beliefs, credences do not in general admit of truth or falsity. But like all-or-nothing beliefs, they may be justified or unjustified. Recently, reliabilist accounts of justified credences have been put forward by Dunn (2015), Tang (2016), and Pettigrew (forthcoming). But such accounts focus on precise credences. In this talk, I explore how the reliabilist may deal with imprecise credences.

Room 508, Philosophy Building, Strand Campus
14:00 – 16:00

Formal methods research seminar 2018-19

03 Saturday Nov 2018

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The Formal Methods Group runs a guest speaker series. The guest speakers for 2017-18 are as follows:

Autumn 2018

Fri Oct 12th – Seamus Bradley (Leeds): “Belief models, aggregation and impossibility”
Fri Nov 9th – Weng Hong Tang (NUS): “Reliabilism and Imprecise Credences”
Fri Nov 16th – Nilanjan Das (UCL): “Externalism and Exploitability”

Winter 2019

Fri Feb 1st Johannes Stern (Bristol)
Fri March 1st Corinne Besson (Sussex)
Fri March 8th Lavinia Picollo (UCL)

Spring 2019

Fri May 17th James Studd (Oxford)

The talks take place on Fridays 14:00-16:00, in room 508, Philosophy Building, KCL Strand Campus. Everyone is welcome, but if you come from outside King’s you need to email Julien Dutant at julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk in advance to be included in the visitor list.

Seamus Bradley (Leeds) at King’s Formal Methods seminar

10 Wednesday Oct 2018

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“Belief models, aggregation and impossibility”

Friday Oct 12th – 14:00-16:00
Room 508, Philosophy Building

Abstract:
The “Belief Models” framework is a very general formal theory of rational belief. It encompasses propositional logic belief sets, but also ranking functions and lower previsions (i.e. lower probabilities). De Cooman (2005) shows that AGM-style expansion and revision operators can be defined in this framework. In this paper I will discuss aggregation of belief models, and draw some connections to various well-known impossibility results for aggregation.