Ignorance about listeria.

Epistemic Indefinites: Are We Ignorant About Ignorance?

Epistemic indefinites make an existential claim and convey that the speaker does not know which individual makes this claim true. The account put forward by Aloni and Port [3, 2] —which we will dub ‘the Lack of Relevant Identification Approach’— defends that ‘not knowing who’ means that the speaker cannot identify the individual that satisfies the existential claim in a contextually relevant wa...

The Value of Ignorance about the Number of Players

In the game known as the El-Farol bar, each player decides whether to come to the bar or stay at home (Arthur 1994). Normally, every player prefers to enjoy the party, however if the bar becomes congested beyond its capacity, the police closes the place, inflicting severe trauma on all party-goers. A variant of the problem (which is perhaps more realistic) is where the discomfort of the party-g...

Reasoning about ignorance: a note on the Bush-Gorbachev problem

Learning about a Categorical Latent Variable under Prior Near-Ignorance

It is well known that complete prior ignorance is not compatible with learning, at least in a coherent theory of (epistemic) uncertainty. What is less widely known, is that there is a state similar to full ignorance, that Walley calls near-ignorance, that permits learning to take place. In this paper we provide new and substantial evidence that also near-ignorance cannot be really regarded as a...

Reasoning about Uncertainty and Explicit Ignorance in Generalized Possibilistic Logic

Generalized possibilistic logic (GPL) is a logic for reasoning about the revealed beliefs of another agent. It is a two-tier propositional logic, in which propositional formulas are encapsulated by modal operators that are interpreted in terms of uncertainty measures from possibility theory. Models of a GPL theory represent weighted epistemic states and are encoded as possibility distributions....