Conditionals and Information Transfer

更新项目条件和信息转移的目标既是为了解决第一阶段尚未得到部分回答的两个问题(第一部分)，也是为了将答复与关于条件条件影响的信息转移的一系列问题联系起来(第二部分)。这第二个复杂的问题和问题在第一个项目阶段还没有被探索。第一部分的第一个子目标是检查关于条件句哲学上有争议的真值可估性的两个重要假设的准确性：条件条件的真值条件是由条件条件的接受所依据的背景假设给出的假设，以及进一步的假设，即条件关系本身在一定程度上是可真值评估的，其程度由排序函数的客观化理论所描述。第二个子目标与真值可估性问题密切相关。它包括研究条件句可以嵌入逻辑复杂句子的句法和语义条件(与语言项目P2和P8密切合作)。它让人回想起这样一种观察，即条件句不能恰当地嵌入到“或”之类的连接词中，甚至不能作为更复杂的条件句的前置条件句。在第二部分中，对第一阶段的这些开放问题的探索将得到一系列关于条件句“促进”信息传递的广泛问题的补充。这个数组将被组织如下：要解决的第一个问题是听者是否以与处理事实信息相同的方式处理条件信息。有证据表明，当输入是有条件的信念时，形成新的信念和改变现有信念的程度的动力学是不同的，但条件信念对给定的信念主体的影响的性质尚不清楚，还有待研究。第二，在先前调查结果的基础上，探索将条件信息的处理转化为算法的可能方法，希望这些知识可以用于人工智能代理的设计。理想情况下，人们可以制造机器人，向它们提供某些条件信息，并观察这如何影响它们执行任务的方式。第三，将研究条件信息对共同点的影响，共同点是对话各方为了对话而做出的假设空间。根据以前的结果，我们对共同点的概念将不得不改变或丰富。例如，共同点是否也应该包含概率信息是一个悬而未决的问题。微调一个哲学上更令人满意的共同点概念，并将该概念与条件句的动态或更新语义相结合，将构成该项目的结论。

The goal of the renewal project Conditionals and Information Transfer is both to address two questions from the first phase that have remained partially unanswered (Part 1) and to tie the responses with a complex of questions on the information transfer effected by conditionals (Part 2). This second complex of questions and issues has not yet been explored during the first project phase.The first sub-goal of Part 1 consists in checking the accuracy of two important hypotheses about the philosophically contested truth-evaluability of conditionals: the hypothesis that the truth conditions of conditionals are given by the background assumptions on which the acceptance of the conditional rests, and the further hypothesis that the conditional relation itself is truth-evaluable to the extent described by the objectification theory for ranking functions.The second sub-goal is closely related to the issue of truth-evaluablity. It consists in investigating the syntactic and semantic conditions under which conditionals can be embedded in logically complex sentences (in close cooperation with the linguistic projects P2 and P8). It harks back to the observation that conditionals cannot be felicitously embedded under connectives like "or" or even as the antecedent of a more complex conditional.The exploration of these open questions from the first phase will be complemented, in Part 2, by a broad array of questions concerning the information transfer "facilitated" by conditionals. This array will be organized as follows:The first question to be addressed is whether a hearer processes conditional information the same way in which she processes factual information. There is evidence that the dynamics of forming new beliefs and changing degrees of existing beliefs differs when the input is a conditional belief, but the nature of the impact of conditional beliefs on a given body of beliefs is unclear and yet to be investigated.Second, building on the result of this prior investigation possible ways of translating the processing of conditional information into an algorithm shall be explored, with the hope that this knowledge can be put to use in the design of artificially intelligent agents. Ideally, one could build robots, feed them certain bits of conditional information and observe how this affects the way in which they carry out their tasks.Third, there will be research on the impact conditional information has on the common ground, which is the space of assumptions the parties to a conversation make for the sake of their conversation. Depending on the previous results, our conception of the common ground will have to be altered or enriched. E.g., it is an open question whether the common ground should also contain probabilistic information. Fine-tuning a philosophically more satisfying conception of the common ground and integrating that conception with a dynamic or update semantics for conditionals is going to constitute the project`s conclusion.