On April 15, 16:00–18:00 UTC (18:00–20:00 CEST), Franz Berto and Aybüke Özgün will give a talk titled “I wasn’t thinking about that!” as part of the PhiLang Seminars on Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the University of Lodz. The session can be accessed via Teams after registration via the online form. The abstract reads:
Framing effects occur when someone believes only one of two necessarily equivalent propositions, P and Q. Framing is well known and widely studied in economics, the social sciences, cognitive psychology, etc. We want a logic of framing.
Of course, we often find ourselves framed because of the guise under which propositional contents are presented to us. But if one has a hyperintensional conception of propositions – one according to which P can sometimes differ from Q even if they are true in the same possible worlds – then one can think that sometimes we are framed because of a difference in content.
In this paper we argue that this kind of framing is structural and pervasive. It depends on the distinction between working memory and long-term memory – a structural one, accepted in psychology for decades. The basic idea: sometimes we believe P without believing a necessarily equivalent Q because, whereas P concerns a topic we have activated in working memory, Q concerns something else: a topic that we have left dormant in long-term memory.
We then introduce a simple propositional modal language with belief operators, a class of possible-worlds models supplemented with topics, and a sound and complete axiomatization with respect to this class, in order to represent reasoners who can be framed in the way described above.