Talks by Antonis Bikakis and Elisa Paganini
Speaker: Antonis Bikakis (University College London, UK)
Title of talk: Exploring the Role of Formal Argumentation in Humanities Research (slides)
Abstract: The main purpose of research is to advance our knowledge in any given field of study. In the humanities, this could, for example, be knowledge about a historical event, the origin of a word or the meaning of a literary work. To obtain such knowledge, we often have to reason with ambiguous, incomplete or contradictory information. Formal argumentation, a field of Artificial Intelligence that studies argumentation, provides models and computational methods for representing and reasoning with such types of information. It can therefore play a significant role in advancing humanities research. This talk will introduce formal argumentation and present examples of how different models of argument can be employed as tools by humanities researchers in their endeavours to produce new knowledge based on imperfect information.
Bio: Antonis Bikakis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Studies at University College London (UCL), where he teaches and conducts research on computing and artificial intelligence subjects. He is also the Director of Research for his department and co-director of the Knowledge, Information, and Data Science research group. His main research interests are in knowledge representation, computational argumentation, knowledge graphs, and knowledge-based systems. He has participated in national and EU-funded interdisciplinary projects combining artificial intelligence with humanities research. He has published over 80 papers in leading artificial intelligence journals such as Artificial Intelligence, Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, as well as conferences such as IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, and KR. He has co-authored a chapter of the second volume of the Handbook of Formal Argumentation.
Suggested readings:
Handbook of Formal Argumentation (vol.1), Chapters 1-2 (pages 3-143), https://www.collegepublications.co.uk/downloads/handbooks00003.pdf
Speaker: Elisa Paganini (University of Milan)
Title of talk: Fiction as Non-Assertive Communication
Abstract: I propose to consider fiction as a communicative act in which conformity to truth (a fundamental commitment of assertion) is suspended. This proposal is compared with the main theories of fiction, including the debate between intentionalists (Currie, Davies, Stock), weak intentionalists (García-Carpintero, Abell), hypothetical intentionalists (Levinson) and anti-intentionalists (Searle, van Inwagen, Lewis, Thomasson, Walton) on imagined or pretended content. The main difference between my proposal and the others is that whereas in the others it is taken for granted that specified content is offered through fiction to be pretended or imagined (and the debate concerns the origin of such specified content), in my proposal the audience is presented with partially unspecified content, i.e. content without the links to background knowledge and context, and it is up to the audience to decide whether background knowledge or context or whatever else is useful to enrich and interpret the presented content. The proposal has many advantages: it accounts for the different equally reasonable interpretations that a work of fiction can take (i.e. different readers can interpret the content in different ways), and it explains phenomena that are problematic for other theories, such as alleged assertions within fiction, puzzling inferences, and silly questions. It will be shown how the non-committal nature of fiction with respect to certain constraints used in assertions allows for different interpretations of alleged assertions in fiction, it allows for a simple explanation of inferences that are puzzling to other theories, and it explains why the silly questions are really silly.
Bio: Elisa Paganini is a Full Professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of Milan. She has published books and articles on ontological issues such as vagueness and indeterminacy, the status of fiction and fictional characters and time. These include the books La vaghezza (Carocci, 2008), Oggetti e personaggi fittizi (Carocci, 2019) and Il paradosso del sorite (Pelago, 2023).
Suggested readings:
Abell, C. (2020), Fiction. A Philosophical Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press (especially ch. 3, 4)