On Monday, April 29th 2024, IDSIA will host the talk titled “A logic for reasoning about (negative) trust under uncertainty” by Francesca Doneda (University of Milan, Italy). Please find the abstract of the talk and her short biography below. The talk has been organized by Dr. Alessandro Facchini, member of the TAS group, and addresses relevant aspects related to the concept of negative trust applied to uncertain judgements.
Title: A logic for reasoning about (negative) trust under uncertainty
Abstract: The notion of trust is a major player, in many epistemic and computational contexts, among others. Such notion appears especially relevant in all those situations where verification or evaluation for knowledge is missing, not reachable or non-existent, and agents must rely on information received by others. This includes cases where expert knowers may not yet ground their claims, and the public has to build an opinion on the subject matter by considering the dynamic of the information exchange. Formal logic approaches to this aim have been increasingly important and diverse in the last decades. Recently, the notion of negative trust has been formalised in terms of a proof theory and semantics: this approach distinguishes between distrust as the epistemic act of rejecting incoming contradictory information considered unreliable; and mistrust as the epistemic act of updating one’s own information state by removing previously held data in order to accommodate newly received information, considered more reliable or up to date. A natural extension of such multi-agent contexts is where epistemic acts are performed under uncertainty, at several levels: the claims of the agents may be graded; information may reach agents with a certain degree of probability; and the degree of acceptance or rejection of the information received may not be binary. In this talk we present a logic of negative trust applied to uncertain judgements. We offer a proof theory and a relational semantics for which standard soundness and completeness results hold. This is a joint work with Francesco Antonio Genco and Giuseppe Primiero.
Bio: Francesca Doneda is a PhD-Student in the doctoral programme “The human mind and its explanations: Language, brain and reasoning” offered by Università degli studi di Milano, IUSS di Pavia and Scuola Normale di Pisa and she is a member of the Logic, Uncertainty, Computation and Information Lab (LUCI) in the Department of Philosophy at Università degli studi di Milano.
Her research interests include the development of logical models that have an impact on issues of social relevance: symbolic reasoning models for disinformation detection, sources trustworthiness assessment and strategies to analyse the use of logic in the recruitment procedures of the Italian public administration.
