Review of Hans Rott’s Change, Choice and Inference

We are currently witnessing a revival in formal approaches to epistemology. Researchers from several fields—philosophy, artificial intelligence, statistics, economics, and other branches of applied logic & mathematics—seem to be, in growing numbers, taking up core questions in epistemology. This interest in formal epistemology from researchers in various fields appears to be more than a passing trend, evidenced by an increasingly interdisciplinary make-up of the editorial boards of some prominent, longstanding journals, such as The Journal of Philosophical Logic and the new special section of Synthese, Knowledge, Rationality and Action, edited by Wiebe van der Hoek, along with several relatively young interdisciplinary journals that are having a growing impact on the field, such as The Journal of Applied Logic and Logic, Language and Information. The last few years have also witnessed an increasing number of genuinely interdisciplinary workshops and conferences, including the Computation and Philosophy conferences in Europe and North America organized by the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP), Computational Models of Scientific Reasoning and Applications (CMSRA), which targets formal epistemology and computation, and Progic and the ISIPTA Imprecise Probabilities workshops, each addressing themselves to logic and probability. The link between Artificial Intelligence and formal epistemology in this network is particularly strong and has, in a certain sense, matured. Research of highlevel cognitive reasoning is currently being driven both by practical concerns and by purely theoretical concerns. From a practical point of view, distributed computing and autonomous robotic agents offer two examples of research areas where there is increasing interest in improving the capabilities of agents (or distributed processes) to reason about what each ‘knows’. From a theoretical point of view, the natural emphasis on formal semantics and syntax that computational modeling demands is generating new formal studies of concepts and relations that have been traditionally studied by philosophical logics. The result is an exciting breakdown of the barrier between applied and philosophical logic—a form of ‘computational naturalism’—that is opening promising new lines of research.