Logic List Mailing Archive

PhD student position and student research assistant position in philosophy / psychology / cognitive science, Munich (Germany)

Dr. Niki Pfeifer (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich) 
offers under the usual equal opportunity conditions one doctoral 
researcher position (65%, TV-L 13, up to 3 years) and one student research 
assistant to work in the intersection of philosophy, psychology and 
cognitive science. The doctoral researcher will focus on the empirical 
work (developing the research hypotheses, designing the experiments and 
running the data analysis). The student assistant will assist in 
constructing the experimental material, collect the data and prepare the 
data for analysis. Opportunities for the doctoral researcher to prepare a 
PhD thesis and for the student assistant to prepare a Masters' thesis 
within the project (see below) will be provided. Working language is 
English. The positions will be vacant until filled. For an application 
send an email including the following items to 
niki.pfeifer@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

1. a letter of motivation
2. a curriculum vitae
3. a scan of the most recent academic degrees
4. evidence of English and mathematical skills (e.g., school/university
grades)
5. additional requirement for the PhD position: two confidential letters
of reference addressing the applicant's qualifications for doctoral
research are required. These should be sent from the referees directly.

Selection criteria include

1. Academic excellence (publications are a plus)
2. Research ability and potential
3. Motivation
4. Knowledge of logic, probability, statistics, psychological
experimentation, and/or programming are a plus

Project Details

Title: Rational reasoning with conditionals and probabilities. Logical
foundations and empirical evaluation
Project leaders: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Kern-Isberner (TU Dortmund) & Dr. Niki
Pfeifer (LMU Munich)
Funding: German Research Foundation (Priority program "New Frameworks of
Rationality")
Duration: Three years
Start: TBA
Web: http://www.pfeifer-research.de/spp.html
Abstract: This project combines logic-based theories of rationality
provided by nonmonotonic logics and approaches to conditional reasoning,
and probabilistic theories of rationality based on coherence approaches
and the principle of maximum entropy. Conditionals will serve as a common
interface between all these approaches, since they encode crucial
guidelines for rational reasoning and can be used both in a qualitative
and in a probabilistic way. This provides a unifying perspective on
rationality that helps to overcome the limits of specific frameworks and
also allows for taking information from the environment into account. We
aim to extend axiomatic systems of nonmonotonic logics (like system P) to
better approximate rational reasoning. In particular, the theory of
conditional structures shall be used to develop formal models of rational
conditional reasoning, both in qualitative and probabilistic frameworks.
On the probabilistic side, the coherence approach will be utilized and
extended to investigate formally and empirically current psychological and
philosophical theories of conditionals. The descriptive value of the
formal models shall be evaluated with respect to people's understanding
and reasoning with uncertain conditionals. Moreover, the relevance of the
methods to be developed in this project to causal and counterfactual
reasoning and for belief revision shall be investigated.