Jeremy Seligman (The University of Auckland)
– Home page: http://auckland.academia.edu/JeremySeligman
– Projects involved: Logic and Agency, History of Logic in China.
– Interests: The main focus of my recent research is social epistemic logic: the application of logical methods for studying rational activity among socially related groups of agents. This includes the provision of general logical tools for use in a two-dimensional setting in which the cognitive structures of individual agents (belief ,knowledge, preference, etc) interact with social structures present in individual epistemic states (friendship, epistemic trust, authority, and even epistemically relevant relations such as `seeing’ and “following”, e.g. in social media networks), but also the modelling of phenomena from social psychology such as peer pressure,opinion dynamics, pluralistic ignorance and the bystander effect. A secondary research interest is the history of logical thought in China. My main interest here is in applying ideas from contemporary research in logic to modelling ancient conceptions of logically-relevant topics such as 名 (names) and 辩 (distinction marking/debating), in a way that makes minimal assumptions about whether or not familiar Westerns logical concepts (entailment, logical laws, truth, etc) played any role in the thoughts of the ancients themselves.
– Most relevant publications:
[1] SELIGMAN, J.; LIU, F.; GIRARD, P, ‘Facebook and the epistemic logic of friendship’, in the Proceeding of the 14th conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK).
[2] LIU, F.; SELIGMAN, J.; VAN BENTHEM, J. ‘Models of Reasoning in Ancient China’, Studies in Logic, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2011): 57–81 PII: 1674-3202(2011)-03-0057-25.