Hosea von Hauff, M.A.

PhD project

My PhD project is in formal epistemology. I am interested in how beliefs are modeled. Traditionally, the contents of beliefs are simply modeled as propositions, which solves but also causes a whole lot of problems. New developments suggest that beliefs are more suitably represented as something more fine-grained, which can be thought of as a proposition in a specific context, which makes belief (of a proposition) relative to a context. Another way to look at it is as belief being an "answer to a question," e.g., the "question under discussion". Yet another way to think of these contexts is as "subject matters". Such a modeling of belief raises the question of how beliefs relate across changes in context/subject matter/question under discussion.

My research focuses on developing an epistemic logic to express belief relative to these contexts and how beliefs change as the context shifts. This line of research sheds light on an underexplored dynamical dimension of belief systems. Key references include "Aboutness" by Stephen Yablo and "The Stability Theory of Belief" by Hannes Leitgeb.