Event Detail

Wed Feb 13, 2013
234 Moses Hall
6–8 PM
Working Group in the History and Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Science
Thomas Icard (Stanford University)
From Implicit to Explicit Belief

In this talk I will present a particular take on the computational theory of mind, focusing on the relationship between implicit and explicit belief. Drawing on recent ideas and results from cognitive science, I will argue that implicit belief is best understood in terms of higher-order logical representations governed by probabilistic – in particular Bayesian – dynamics. I will then explain how such representations give rise to explicit beliefs, whose qualitative dynamics need not be Bayesian, even ideally. Along the way, I will briefly discuss how this picture bears on some foundational questions about subjective probability.