Duke University Philosophy Colloquium

[Nancy Pfeiffer]

Hello everyone,

 

Our next Colloquium will be Friday, January 31, 2025. The speaker is Sara Aronowitz, Associate Professor – Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto. Their title and abstract follows:

 

“Learning What to Value”

 

In theories of rational decision-making, we often take an agent's preferences as given and criticize them only when they fail to be internally coherent. This raises a question: is there a possible critique of preferences beyond coherence? In particular, consider cases where intuitively, increased domain knowledge leads to new values, such as when being forced to look at a lot of Minimalist paintings for a course leads to a new interest and appreciation for those paintings. Likewise, across the lifespan, we change what we care about in ways that seem to reflect our experience. On their face, these cases look like descriptive knowledge about the world shaping preferences in a rational, or at least comprehensible, fashion. I will argue that we can indeed give a cogent account of this process using tools from reinforcement learning and the cognitive science of motivated behavior. The key is allowing descriptive facts to shape the state space, the division of the world and the agent's actions into coarse-grained possibilities.

 

The Colloquium schedule is as follows:

 

12:30 pm                        Grad student lunch with speaker

2:00-2:45 pm               Coffee & Cookies in the Philosophy Lounge

2:45-3:00 pm               Colloquium Set Up

3:00-5:00 pm               Colloquium, West Duke Building, Room 202

5:00-6:00 pm               Reception in the Philosophy Lounge

 

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

Duke Philosophy Department