Justine Jacot

GIRL special issue introduction

The Lund conference series on Games, Interaction, Reasoning, Learning and Semantics began in 2012. Two conferences were organized in 2012 and 2013, under the denomination of Lund Conference on Games, Interactive Rationality and Learning (GIRL@Lund), before it changed for the third, to become the Lund Conference on Games, Interaction, Reasoning, Learning and Semantics (GIRLS@Lund) in 2014, when it was also decided that the series would become bi-annual, and resume in 2016. A brief history of the conference series will illustrate its purpose and how it evolved over time, as well as serve as a first thematic introduction to the papers in this special issue. The idea of starting the conference series arose from discussions between research groups at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Lund and the Center for Formal Epistemology at Carnegie-Mellon University. The first call almost took the form of a manifesto. It insisted that the methods of formal philosophy, with their increasing reliance on simulations and empirical tests, brought the field closer to computer science, cognitive science and quantitative social sciences, and that the time was ripe for showcasing the cross-disciplinary potential inherent in this development. The first GIRL conference called for contributions in the areas of learning-theoretic models of inquiry, network-theoretic

The brain attics: the strategic role of memory in single and multi-agent inquiry

M. B. Hintikka (1939–1987) and J. Hintikka (1929–2016) claimed that their reconstruction of the ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ can “serve as an explication for the link between intelligence and memory” ( 1983 , p. 159). The claim is vindicated, first for the single-agent case, where the reconstruction captures strategies for accessing the content of a distributed and associative memory; then, for the multi-agent case, where the reconstruction captures strategies for accessing knowledge distributed in a community. Moreover, the reconstruction of the ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ allows to conceptualize those strategies as belonging to a continuum of behavioral strategies .