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 Carnegie Mellon University. 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.