Deontic Reasoning: From Ancient Texts to Artificial Intelligence
| DATE: | Monday, June 11, 2018 – Wednesday, June 13, 2018 |
Normative statements are enormously important in a variety of fields—from law and ethics to artificial intelligence. Reasoning with and about them requires deontic logic, which represents a quite recent area of research. By contrast, for more than two millennia, Mīmāṃsā, one of the most important schools of Indian philosophy, focused on the analysis of normative statements.
The workshop will bring together experts from the fields of Logic, Sanskrit, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Law for talks and brainstorming discussions. Central questions that will function as guiding threads will be:
(i) How can formal tools, such as mathematical logic or argumentation framework, enhance our understanding of ancient texts?
(ii) And vice versa, what can we learn from ancient analyses with respect to the present quest for reasoning about laws or ethical machines (e.g. self-driving cars)?
The event is organized by Agata Ciabattoni (TU Wien), Elisa Freschi (ÖAW), Francesca Gulisano (Scuola Normale Superiore), Björn Lellmann (TU Wien), Matteo Pascucci (TU Wien), Kees van Berkel (LogiCS at TU Wien). This event is funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), Universität Wien, VCLA and the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia (IKGA).
Invited Speakers from Artificial Intelligence, Indology, Law, and Logic
- Matthias Baaz, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien)
- David Brick, Yale University
- Thomas Eiter, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien)
- Dov Gabbay, King’s College London
- Eberhard Guhe, Fudan University
- Lawrence McCrea, Cornell University
- Sanjay Modgil, King’s College London
- Andrew Ollett, University of Chicago
- Xavier Parent, University of Luxembourg
- Parimal Patil, Harvard University
- Giovanni Sartor, University of Bologna
WWTF funded project: Reasoning Tools for Deontic Logic and Applications to the Indian Sacred Texts
The workshop `Deontic Reasoning: From Ancient Texts to Artificial Intelligence’ is part of the project Reasoning Tools for Deontic Logic and Applications to Indian Sacred Texts. Within the project funded by Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), the team around the principal investigator Agata Ciabattoni closely collaborates with Sanskritists around Elisa Fresci, Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) to translate the Mīmāṃsā rules and the Vedic laws into mathematical formulae.
More information
The program and the titles of the talks are available here.
