IARPA is currently recruiting thousands of participants to test the analytic methods developed for its CREATE (Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation) program. IARPA is the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. CREATE is a multi-million-dollar, multi-year R&D effort to improve the core process of intelligence analysis: making well-reasoned inferences from incomplete information. If effective, CREATE analytic tools could greatly assist many other disciplines that depend on good reasoning, including, law, medicine, and public policy. CREATE is a basic research program; it does not involve any security restrictions, and its research outputs will be freely available.
Participating might be interesting for anyone working in applied epistemology, critical thinking, informal reasoning, or probabilistic reasoning. It might also be helpful for students wishing to develop their analytical reasoning skills.
What’s the relationship between presumptions and presumptive inferences? Does the making of a presumption involves the making of a presumptive inference?
Is it possible to provide a speech-act account of presumptions?
How should we deal with the semantics of an epistemic modal such as “presumably”?
What’s the difference between presumptions and other linguistic and argumentative phenomena such as presuppositions and assumptions?
What are the argumentative conditions and consequences of making a presumption? What are the possible roles of presumptions in argumentative discourse?
What are the correctness conditions for presumptions and for presumptive inferences?
Applications are invited for two SNF doctoral students (100%). Candidates will be working on their PhD within the SNF research project “Biased Communication: The Cognitive Pragmatics of Fallacies”. The project is closely connected to the activities and doctoral tuition offered by the CRUS doctoral programme ‘Language & Cognition’ based at the University of Fribourg and the Cognitive Sciences Centre based at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland. Both PhDs will be jointly registered at both institutions (co-tutelle).