We live in a world of facts and truth, and traditionally, logic has helped us steer a course attuned to that grand independent reality. But logic is also about ourselves as rational agents, the ways in which we are attuned to the information available in the world, the epistemic attitudes we can have in that process, and the dynamic events that produce information, change attitudes, and eventually result in our physical actions that change the world.
The Dynamics project puts these actions in focus along several dimensions. The Group studies the step-by-step dynamics of a wide spectrum of informational events, from hard to soft information, and from changes in agents’ knowledge to belief changes, and preference change. But also it studies transitions of single update steps to the long-term dynamics of learning mechanisms and strategies in games over time, as well as all these things in single agents, but also in multi-agent interactions, including both private and public communication, and from there on, the Group is also moving to the higher aggregation level of truly social entities like groups.
A project like this sits at the interface of many disciplines. Logic is the Group’s main methodology, whether one thinks of it as applied to new territories, or as pure, since a focus on social interaction also affects our very conception of what logic is. But the Group also find it easy to make alliances with other exact disciplines, such as mathematics, computer science, probability theory, or theoretical physics. And also, while this project connects to other academic disciplines, it also connects increasingly to empirical reality, from the social to the cognitive sciences.