Causation, Explanation, Conditionals

Idea and Motivation

Causation, Explanation, Conditionals takes place on June 21 to 23, 2017 in Tutzing (at Lake Starnberg) and in Munich. The conference is financially supported by the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences (GSN) and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN).

The analysis of causation and explanation has served as a major motivation for investigating conditionals, developing conditional logics, Bayesian networks, ranking theory, Ramsey Tests, and possible worlds semantics. This analysis, consequently, has evolved into a very fruitful and proliferating research program employing various logical and probabilistic approaches. The overarching objective of this conference is to bring together people working on and with conditional analyses of causation and explanation. More specifically, we aim to address the following topics:

Explanatory conditionals, semantic foundations and conditional logics
Conditional, logical analyses of causation and explanation
Conditional probabilities in accounts of causation and explanation
Resolving problems of overdetermination, preemption, etc.
Cognition of conditionals, causal, and explanatory relations
Knowledge representation of causal and explanatory relations
The application of causal analyses and/or frameworks in Neuroscience
Expressivistic and computational limitations in the respective framework

The conference aims to address the topics (1)–(8) listed above in order

(i) to obtain a representative overview of the state of the art,
(ii) to give junior and senior researchers the opportunity to present and to discuss their work in greater detail, and
(iii) to come up with fresh ideas and facilitate future collaborations.

More details concerning the program could be found here.