Hykel Hosni and Costanza Larese will present their work at the Workshop Logic and Bounded Rationality, to be held entirely online on 25-27 February 2026.
Speaker: Hykel Hosni
Title: Depth-bounded Belief Functions in retrospect
Abstract: I welcome the opportunity to celebrate the first milestone of the Depth-Bounded Logic programme to revisit the motivation and results of Baldi and Hosni 2020 in light of data-driven reasoning. There we showed that Dempster–Shafer belief functions are recovered as the limit of depth-bounded belief functions as logical depth grows. Moreover, we identified the conditions under which (additive) probability functions emerge as the limit of a sequence of (non-additive) depth-bounded belief functions. The purpose of my presentation is to elaborate on the role of depth-bounded logic in posing a sharp conceptual distinction between evidence, i.e. the uncertainty-resolving information an agent has, and their degrees of belief, i.e. what the agent uses in reasoning and decision-making. In particular I will speculate on the applicability of this distinction to the problem of analysing expert disagreement in scientific reasoning.
Speaker: Costanza Larese
Title: The Depth-Bounded Approach in the Philosophy of Logic: Normativity and Pluralism
Abstract: Logic is traditionally taken to be normative for rational thought: logical consequence is supposed to determine what agents ought to believe or infer. Yet classical accounts face a tension. Combined with logical monism, they impose excessive demands on finite agents; combined with logical pluralism, those demands remain and incompatible logics threaten the determinacy of rational requirements. The depth-bounded approach to logic sheds new light on these traditional debates in the philosophy of logic. On this view, a logic is the limit of a hierarchy of tractable, resource-sensitive systems ordered by inferential depth, each modelling reasoning feasible for bounded agents. This framework yields, first, a revised account of logical normativity: depth-bounded normativity. Logical obligations apply only to inferences within an agent’s feasible reach. Classical normativity is reformulated through resource-sensitive bridge principles linking consequence, inferential difficulty, and cognitive capacity. Second, it supports resource-based logical pluralism. Here plurality arises not from rival logics, as in traditional forms of pluralism, but from differences in agents’ inferential resources within a shared framework. Agents at different depths may issue incompatible yet systematically related verdicts about consequence.The depth-bounded approach thus shows how logic can remain genuinely normative without presupposing logical omniscience, while accommodating a novel form of pluralism.