Student Research Assistant (EXPIRED)

Dr. Niki Pfeifer (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich) offers under the usual equal opportunity conditions one doctoral researcher position (65%, TV-L 13, up to 3 years) and one student research assistant to work in the intersection of philosophy, psychology and cognitive science. The doctoral researcher will focus on the empirical work (developing the research hypotheses, designing the experiments and running the data analysis). The student assistant will assist in constructing the experimental material, collect the data and prepare the data for analysis. Opportunities for the doctoral researcher to prepare a PhD thesis and for the student assistant to prepare a Masters' thesis within the project (see below) will be provided. Working language is English. 

Deadline for applications: extended -- until filled. 

For an application send an email including the following items to [email protected]

1. a letter of motivation
2. a curriculum vitae
3. a scan of the most recent academic degrees
4. evidence of English and mathematical skills (e.g., school/university grades)
5. additional requirement for the PhD position: two confidential letters of reference addressing the applicant's qualifications for doctoral research are required. These should be sent from the referees directly.

Selection criteria include

1. Academic excellence (publications are a plus)
2. Research ability and potential
3. Motivation
4. Knowledge of logic, probability, statistics, psychological experimentation, and/or programming are a plus

Project Details Title: Rational reasoning with conditionals and probabilities. Logical foundations and empirical evaluation 
Project leaders: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Kern-Isberner (TU Dortmund) & Dr. Niki Pfeifer (LMU Munich) 
Funding: German Research Foundation (Priority program "New Frameworks of Rationality") 
Duration: Three years 
Start: TBA 
Web: http://www.pfeifer-research.de/spp.html
Abstract: This project combines logic-based theories of rationality provided by nonmonotonic logics and approaches to conditional reasoning, and probabilistic theories of rationality based on coherence approaches and the principle of maximum entropy. Conditionals will serve as a common interface between all these approaches, since they encode crucial guidelines for rational reasoning and can be used both in a qualitative and in a probabilistic way. This provides a unifying perspective on rationality that helps to overcome the limits of specific frameworks and also allows for taking information from the environment into account. We aim to extend axiomatic systems of nonmonotonic logics (like system P) to better approximate rational reasoning. In particular, the theory of conditional structures shall be used to develop formal models of rational conditional reasoning, both in qualitative and probabilistic frameworks. On the probabilistic side, the coherence approach will be utilized and extended to investigate formally and empirically current psychological and philosophical theories of conditionals. The descriptive value of the formal models shall be evaluated with respect to people's understanding and reasoning with uncertain conditionals. Moreover, the relevance of the methods to be developed in this project to causal and counterfactual reasoning and for belief revision shall be investigated.
(The successful candidates will be supplied with the detailed project description. You will find more on the scientific context of the project in my publications.)