30th International Wittgenstein Symposium: Saturday

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Closing day, yesterday, more rain, less people.

I hoped my paper "Understanding Epistemic Relevance" went well. The topic was how we might understand the concept of relevant (semantic) information. The discussion was extremely enjoyable and fruitful, at least on this side of the dialogue. We managed to avoid the "veridicality" issue (should x be true in order to count as semantic information?) and concentrated on a number of interesting aspects of relevance and semantic information.

One of the best questions was asked by Fred Dretske. It addressed a crucial assumption in the paper, namely that in order to understand what relevance means, if one relies on an analysis in terms of questions+answers, then one has to assume that the agents involved are fully rational. Fred's concern was that this leaves out concrete applications to cases in which the agent is either unable (a child, a mentally handicapped person) or unwilling (e.g. for moral, religious or psychological reasons) to ask the question that would elicit the sort of information that would be considered relevant to that agent.

I tried to explain that the answer to this challenge is twofold:
  1. a model is an abstraction, and its specific implementations might require some adaptation
  2. the counterfactual analysis is there to take care of the "flexibility" required to adapt the model to the practical implications: Peter would have asked the right question if he had not been too shy, for example, and hence the information x, which constitutes an answer to his potential question, is relevant, insofar as he would have asked for it.
There were other interesting issues (when does an implementation of a model, which requires some adaptation, become an ad hoc solution? why do we provide advice, and hence what we consider relevant information, even when we are not been asked?).

The interested reader may wish to look at the full paper, which is forthcoming in Erkenntnis.

A final comment on the Symposium. All the people I spoke too were impressed by the program. The organisers Herbert Hrachovec and Alois Pichler, are to be congratulated for a very interesting and stimulating meeting. On the whole, it was great to be there (though I'm very happy to be finally back in Oxford).

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