We have the pleasure to invite you to another research seminar. Lara Kirfel will deliver a talk "Thinking about what's possible". The meeting will take place on October 23 at 6:15 PM in room 25 at 52 Grodzka Street and via the MS Teams platform.

Abstract

As humans, we think not only about what is, but also what could be. These representations of alternative possibilities are involved in many important cognitive functions. For example, holding another morally responsible requires assessing what other actions were available to them. But how do our representations of what's possible shape our higher-level judgments?
In the first part of the talk, I will argue that representations of what is possible are shaped by others’ epistemic states. I will present two studies demonstrating that epistemic constraints systematically shift representations of possible actions and, consequently, influence high-level force judgments. In the second part of the talk, I will explore whether the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into human reasoning similarly affects representations of modal space. I will present initial evidence suggesting that LLMs can expand the range of possible actions we consider available to an agent, thereby increasing the blame we attribute to them.