NWO organises information meetings for researchers who want to apply for a Veni, Vidi of Vici grant. Practical information is given and selection committee members, NWO secretaries and researchers who have already acquired a Veni, Vidi or Vici share their experiences during a question and answer session. The meetings are in English.

Please note that the joint DIP/Cognition@ILLC session with Rafal Urbaniak (Ghent University) scheduled for Friday 3 November has been cancelled.

Have you ever wondered whether it is really rational to learn new things? Well, if you plan on taking the Ramsey-test, you're in for a surprise. It is the only exam that one can only pass if one has learned nothing at all.

This is true at least if you believe the AGM-postulates for belief revision. In reality of course, we all know there is a serious possibility to fail an exam if one did not study. But no worries: according to AGM, serious possibilities are paradoxical. So just stop studying, you'll be fine. Unfortunately, in this talk we plan to burst this bubble by presenting an AGM-semantics which allows one to pass the Ramsey-Test by studying. Thus failing now is a serious possibility. Why would we do such a stupid thing? Well, we just know how much you all love studying logic.

Logic is about valid reasoning, which can be seen as a form of elucidating information from data already at our disposal. Logic can also deal with other forms of information flow, by observation or by communication. We will discuss how this can be done, and whether in the end there is just one or several notions of information involved in logic.

Abstract: “A small number of circles are blue” and “few circles are blue” seem to convey the same meaning – that the quantity of blue circles is below some contextual criterion. Moreover, both contain a negative degree element ("few" as the negative of "many"; "small" as the negative of "large"). However, "few" is downward monotone while "a small number" is not. Downward Monotonicity is a formal logical property of certain linguistic expressions, but is it also cognitively relevant for language processing? In this talk I will present evidence for cognitive correlates of downward monotonicity, by presenting results of RT and fMRI experiments that compare e.g. "few" to "a small number", and argue that the cognitive complexity of downward monotonicity is part of the mental representation of the sentence.

Have you ever wondered whether it is really rational to learn new things? Well, if you plan on taking the Ramsey-test, you're in for a surprise. It is the only exam that one can only pass if one has learned nothing at all.

This is true at least if you believe the AGM-postulates for belief revision. In reality of course, we all know there is a serious possibility to fail an exam if one did not study. But no worries: according to AGM, serious possibilities are paradoxical. So just stop studying, you'll be fine. Unfortunately, in this talk we plan to burst this bubble by presenting an AGM-semantics which allows one to pass the Ramsey-Test by studying. Thus failing now is a serious possibility. Why would we do such a stupid thing? Well, we just know how much you all love studying logic.