Reasoning in social settings
Fenrong Liu, Beishui Liao · Journal of Logic and Computation · 2021
New perspectives keep emerging in the logical study of social interactions, witnessed by yet another collection of research papers. Once our focus of reasoning shifts from an individual to a social setting, interesting issues naturally arise. The central question is the following: how is an individual’s attitude related to that of others and that of a group, especially when we take into account the informative communication between agents, as well as the structures of a group? This has been studied to various extent in social epistemology, social choice theory, social norms theory, etc. In this context, our main concern is logic: how can a logical approach shed light on our reasoning about these scenarios? We are not giving a comprehensive overview but just to mention some research that is mostly relevant. Communication between agents, public or private, has been extensively studied in dynamic epistemic logic (e.g. [1, 9, 10]) and dynamic epistemic logic has become a standard methodology in modelling dynamical changes of agent’s attitudes. Social network logics have been developed recently, adding social structures of a group as a core component to logic models and formal languages [2, 5–8, 11]. The papers included in this special issue provide us with further new insights about our understanding of social settings. In what follows, we briefly summarize their ideas and some main results.