The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on November 22nd from 4:15-6:15 (NY time) via Zoom for a talk by Konstantinos Georgatos (John Jay).

Title: Similarity through indistinguishability: the geodesic reasoning on Kripke models

Abstract: Several logical operators, such as conditionals, revision, and merge, are often understood through the selection of most similar worlds. In applications, similarity is expressed with distance and “most similar” translates to “closest” using a distance metric. We shall argue that similarity may arise through an indistinguishability relation between possible worlds and employ the geodesic distance of such a model to measure closeness. This understanding allows us to define a variety of operators that correspond to merging and revising. I will present a few systems and representation results and will show that revision, merging, and conditioning are interdefinable thus, in effect, satisfying the Ramsey test.

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