Adam Bjorndahl
Associate Professor, Philosophy
Director of Graduate Studies, Philosophy
- Baker Hall 145K
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Bio
Adam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Â鶹¹ÙÍø. He works primarily with epistemic modal logics and topology, and their applications in game theory and decision theory.
The "language-based games" project initiated in his dissertation generalizes classical game theory by formalizing each agent's (imperfect) mental model of the world as a kind of "language", and then analyzing the impact of this language on the formation of preferences. Of special interest are "coarse" languages, which systematically collapse certain real-world distinctions and can thereby serve to implement a notion of bounded rationality.
In recent, joint work with Alex John London and Kevin Zollman, a similar kind of "coarseness" is leveraged to produce a non-trivial analysis of Kantian decision making under uncertainty. More generally, the gap between real, human decision makers and "perfect" reasoners is a topic of deep interest and broad relevance.