Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University
Adam Bjorndahl
Adam Bjorndahl is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. His research lies at the intersection of game/decision theory and logic. The "language-based games" project initiated in his dissertation generalizes classical game theory by formalizing each agent's (imperfect) mental model of the world as a kind of "language", and then analyzing the impact of this language on the formation of preferences. Of special interest are "coarse" languages, which systematically collapse certain real-world distinctions and can thereby serve to implement a notion of bounded rationality.
In recent, joint work with Alex John London and Kevin Zollman, a similar kind of "coarseness" is leveraged to produce a non-trivial analysis of Kantian decision making under uncertainty. More generally, the gap between real, human decision makers and "perfect" reasoners is a topic of deep interest and broad relevance.
Recent Publications
Logic and Topology for Knowledge, Knowability, and Belief. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK), forthcoming (with A. Özgün).
Kantian Decision Making Under Uncertainty. Philosophers’ Imprint, 2017, 17(7), 1–22 (with A. J. London and K. Zollman).
Reasoning About Rationality. Games and Economic Behavior, 2017, 104(3), 146–164 (with J. Y. Halpern and R. Pass).
Topological Subset Space Models for Public Announcements. Jaakko Hintikka Volume in Outstanding Contributions to Logic, forthcoming.