"Learning What to Value" - Philosophy Colloquium

Sara Aronowitz, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, will join the Duke Philosophy Department for a colloquium talk on "Learning What to Value," from 3:00 - 5:00 p.m. on Friday, January 31.

ABSTRACT: In theories of rational decision-making, we often take an agent's preferences as given and criticize them only when they fail to be internally coherent. This raises a question: is there a possible critique of preferences beyond coherence? In particular, consider cases where intuitively, increased domain knowledge leads to new values, such as when being forced to look at a lot of Minimalist paintings for a course leads to a new interest and appreciation for those paintings. Likewise, across the lifespan, we change what we care about in ways that seem to reflect our experience. On their face, these cases look like descriptive knowledge about the world shaping preferences in a rational, or at least comprehensible, fashion. I will argue that we can indeed give a cogent account of this process using tools from reinforcement learning and the cognitive science of motivated behavior. The key is allowing descriptive facts to shape the state space, the division of the world and the agent's actions into coarse-grained possibilities.

Areas of Specialization: Epistemology, Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Areas of Interest: Decision Theory, Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence.