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REASON & INQUIRY

THE EROTETIC THEORY
Reason & Inquiry book cover

"Reason and Inquiry is a major contribution to the philosophy of mind, the psychology of reasoning, and cognitive science, with implications for linguistics, epistemology, and decision theory. The erotetic theory looks set to be a key player in future debates on the nature of rationality."

TIMOTHY WILLIAMSON

Wykeham Professor of Logic

 University of Oxford

"An insightful treatment of reason and rationality, explaining many puzzles and integrating many viewpoints."

STEVEN PINKER

Johnstone Professor of Psychology

Harvard University

"It is easy for researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to get excited with our technical achievements and lose track of the big questions: what is intelligence, and how does it work? This thought provoking and wide-ranging book prompts us to look again at our field: to revisit the most basic questions surrounding our endeavour, and, perhaps most importantly, to consider new directions for the future."

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE

Co-Director for AI

The Alan Turing Institute

My Books
About
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ABOUT 

McCord Professor of Philosophy and AI

Director, HAI Lab

Institute for Ethics in AI

University of Oxford

 

Ph.D. (Philosophy and Neuroscience) Princeton University 

B.A. Pomona College 

I work on the human capacity for reasoning and decision-making, and how it relates to artificial agents and large language models like GPT. My recent book Reason and Inquiry presents a theory of this capacity and its two-faced nature: On the one hand, we are subject to systematic fallacies and framing effects, empirically documented in psychology and behavioural economics. On the other hand, we largely get things right and are capable of incredible feats of rationality. AI that is trained on humans shows similar patterns and I believe that both AI and human psychology require us to look beyond probability theory and logic. I argue that reason aims at resolving issues or answering questions as directly as possible, and if we are inquisitive enough in the process, we can get the kind of rationality required for science, philosophy, and classical economic agents as a special case. I am also interested moral judgment and in definitions of intelligence, both in humans and in AI. I regularly collaborate with computer scientists on these topics. I have also had many past collaborations with colleagues from psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and environmental systems. Many of these themes will be central to the new Human-Centered AI Lab (HAI Lab) which I will direct in Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI, launching Fall 2024.

 

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Events
Updates

August 24-25, 2024 - PyETR Hackathon

 

May-June 2024 - Philosophy, AI, and Innovation Graduate Seminar with Brendan McCord

"Socrates and the Machine." in WIRED Italia (link to English version)

Paper on hearing the patient's voice in AI-enhanced healthcare is out in British Medical Journal

Interview with Forbes Italia, July 7, 2023

May 4, 2023 - Lunch talk at Imbue (Generally Intelligent) in San Francisco.

May 4, 2023 - Talk with Vincent Wang-Maścianica at Thomas Icard's Language Group at Stanford.

April 25, 2023 - First meeting of grad seminar with Will Davies, "Topics in Minds and Machines: Perception, Cognition, and ChatGPT." 11am Ryle Room.

March 30, 2023 - New Paper (with Vincent Wang-Maścianica): We found production of human-like fallacious judgments to increase from GPT-3 to GPT-4, even as it got much better at human-like correct judgments too. Perhaps no surprise, since GPT is trained on human text. #HumansInHumansOut    https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17276

January 17, 2023 - First meeting of "A Theory of Reason" graduate seminar with Sean Moss (Computer Science) 

Research

AI, Reasoning and Decision-Making

Womersley, K., Koralus, P., Fulford, B., Handa, A., Peile, E. (2023). “Hearing the Patient’s Voice in AI-enhanced Healthcare.” British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Koralus, P., Wang-Maścianica, V. (2023). "Humans in Humans Out: On GPT Converging Toward Common Sense in both Success and Failure." https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17276 

Koralus, P. (2023). Reason and Inquiry: The Erotetic Theory. Oxford University Press.

 

Madsen, J., Carrella, E., Bailey, R., Koralus, P. (2020). “From reactive toward anticipatory fishing agents.” Journal of Simulation.

 

Burgess, M. Drexler, M., Axtell, R., et al., Koralus, P., et al. (2020). “Opportunities for agent-based modeling in human dimensions of fisheries.” Fish and Fisheries. 21(3), p.570-587.

Madsen, J., Bailey, R., Carrella, E., Koralus, P. (2019). “Analytic versus computational cognitive models: Agent-based modeling as a tool in cognitive sciences.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28(3), pp. 299-305.

Koralus, P. and Mascarenhas, S. (2018). “Illusory inferences in a question-based theory of reasoning.” In: Horn, L. and Turner, K. (Eds.) An Atlas of Meaning (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface). Brill.

Mascarenhas, S., Koralus, P. (2017). “Illusory inferences with quantifiers.” Thinking & Reasoning, 23(1), pp. 33-48.

Mascarenhas, S. and Koralus, P. (2015). “Illusory inferences: disjunctions, indefinites, and the erotetic theory of reasoning.” In: Noelle, D. C., et al. (Eds.). Proc. 37th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society.

Koralus, P. and Mascarenhas, S. (2013). “The erotetic theory of reasoning: Bridges between formal semantics and the psychology of propositional deductive inference.” Philosophical Perspectives, 27, pp. 312-365.

Moral judgment and Delusional thinking

Attention and Perception

Language

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Teaching

I regularly offer the following graduate seminars:

  • Philosophy, AI, and Innovation (Trinity Term)

  • Building the Philosophy to Code Pipeline (starting Michaelmas Term 2025)

I have offered doctoral supervision in both philosophy and computer science in a variety of topics.

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