Projects

Current Projects

• SCoLA (Simulating Collective Agency): The project, in collaboration with the University of Bamberg, analyzes mechanisms underlying the emergence and stability of autonomy in horizontal collective actors. In this context, it pursues two goals, namely (i) to investigate the role of shared beliefs and intentions for the emergence of horizontal collective actors and (ii) to study how these shared attitudes contribute to the emergence and stability of autonomy in such actors. The Principal Investigators are Prof. Dr. Olivier Roy and Prof.Dr. Johannes Marx (Bamberg).

• Explainable Intelligent Systems (EIS): This highly interdisciplinary project brings together experts from informatics, law, philosophy, and psychology to investigate how intelligent systems can and should be designed to provide explainable recommendations and thus meet important societal desiderata. It is based at Bayreuth University, Saarland University, and TU Dortmund University and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation in the Artificial Intelligence and the Society of the Future track. The project is led by Prof. Dr. Lena Kästner.
  Our research focuses on what society can appropriately desire from intelligent systems, how precisely understandability contributes to meeting the various challenges raised by the increasing use of AI in a modern society, and how explainability enables this much-needed understandability. Given that both the adequacy of a given explanation and its success in evoking understanding varies depending on a range of factors, we believe that the answers to our research questions will vary with the specific case or context under consideration. Therefore, a major goal of EIS is to develop a context-sensitive framework for explainability.

• Beyond the typical: authority among diverse and playful minds: This project is funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung "Original Isn't it?" program. First-person authority is a phenomenon that governs how we deal with people’s expressions of their minds: we attribute first-person authority to others when we accept them as being in a privileged position to communicate their thoughts, fears, wishes and the like. Increasingly, practices of inclusive, responsive parenting ascribe first-person authority to very young children. Despite this tendency, philosophy seems to be one step behind. The accepted view is one according to which first-person authority has its locus in linguistic expressions of one’s self-knowledge. This is an over-intellectualized conception, however, that consequently excludes children (and other people) from the scope of application of the phenomenon.
  This project aims to develop a non-intellectualized conception of first-person authority that includes those who do not fall under the category of the typical adult. It focuses on infants and children as paradigmatic examples of ‘non-typical’ people who have been overlooked by our traditional theories but also explores other groups such as neurodiverse people (e.g. those with autism) and people with mental disorders (e.g. schizophrenia). Focusing on children allows for the surprising possibility of combining ethics and playfulness: fully attributing authority to young minds may require engaging in their favorite mode of interpersonal interaction. The Principal Investigator is Prof. Dr. Cristina Borgoni.

• CELIA (Coalition and Epistemic Logic: and Intensional Approach to Groups): The goal of the CELIA project is to study the consequences of lifting a significant, but until now, largely overlooked idealization in logical models of group knowledge, beliefs, and action: what we call the “extensional” view of groups. In most contributions to epistemic, doxastic, and coalition logic, a group is reduced to its extension, i.e., the set of its members. To lift this idealization, CELIA studies the “intensional” view of groups, which loosens the relationship between group membership and group identity, and applies it to questions in epistemic, doxastic, and coalition logic where collectives play a crucial role. .

Former Projects

• Collective Attitudes Formation (ColaForm): This project is supported by the ANR-DFG (France) cooperation program. It studies how public deliberation and opinion pooling can be better aligned. The Principal Investigator is Prof. Dr. Olivier Roy. More information here.

• From Shared Evidence to Group Attitudes (SEGA): This project is supported by the DFG-GACR (Czech Republic) cooperation program. It studies the relation between pooled and common attitudes in groups. The Principal Investigator is Prof. Dr. Olivier Roy. More information here.

• Permissions, Information and Institutional Dynamics, Obligations and Rights (PIOTR): This project is supported by the DFG-NCN (Poland) program "Beethoven". It studies the generation of obligations and duties from permissions and rights in deontic logic and law. The Principal Investigator is Prof. Dr. Olivier Roy. More information here. 

• The Dynamics of Constructive Deliberation (DYCODE): This project is funded by the European Commission (attached to the Marie Sklodowksa-Curie Fellowship of Dr. Frederik Van De Putte). It concerns the way individuals and groups construct a collective decision problem (i.e. a set of alternatives and individual preferences on them). The ultimate aim of this project is to complement the social choice theoretic picture of collective decision-making with a solid and mathematically precise theory of collective deliberation.

• Social Freedom and Unfreedom: This project is funded by the Bayreuth Humboldt Centre. It is hosted by Prof. Dr. Cristina Borgoni Gonçalves and Prof. Dr. Gabriel Wollner. Dr. Yannig Luthra from University of Essex critically examines a liberal tradition that casts social freedom as a matter of limitations on an individual's option space. I explore a contrasting idea that unfreedom lies in the enactment of instrumentalized social roles. Unfreedom exists where it is fundamental to one’s role as a participant in a social formation that one is to act as an instrument set to the purposes of power holders. Social freedom, in turn, lies in a social form of agency, a kind of living together, that is precluded by the instrumentalizing power relations of domination.