CSH Talk by Borut Trpin: “Belief updating in untrustworthy circumstances”

CSH Talk by Borut Trpin: “Belief updating in untrustworthy circumstances”

Location: Salon

Abstract:

Lying is traditionally defined as stating something that is believed to be false with the intention that the other person believes it to be true. However, there are cases where we believe something to be false only to an extent and we can nevertheless lie about it. We call this partial lying. We provide an epistemological analysis of these situations and investigate how the severity of partial lying may be determined, and how partial lies can be classified. To make the investigation more realistic, we also study how much epistemic damage an agent suffers depending on her level of trust that she invests in the liar and the degree of belief in the falsehood of the liar’s statements. The results are demonstrated through computer simulations of an arguably rational Bayesian agent who is trying to determine how biased a coin is while observing the coin tosses and listening to an (un)trustworthy person’s misleading predictions about the outcomes. Our results provide an interesting insight at the intersection of epistemology and ethics, namely that in the longer term partial lies lead to more epistemic damage than outright lies. However, if the liar only lies sometimes, then categorical lies are more epistemically damaging as the liar is considered to be more trustworthy.

Note: The paper is based on joint work with Anna Dobrosovestnova and Sebastian Götzendorfer.