The Causal Inference Lab's reading group will meet to discuss Lee's paper,

'Motivating the Causal Modeling Semantics of Counterfactuals, or, Why We Should Favor the Causal Modeling Semantics over the Possible-Worlds Semantics' (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48357-2_5).

Anyone interested in discussing the above paper, and causality more generally, is very welcome to join.

On Saturday, 11 May 2019, Professor Joel David Hamkins, the Sir Peter Strawson Fellow at University College Oxford, is visiting Amsterdam to speak at the Wijsgerig Festival DRIFT on the topic of Het zijn en de dingen. We used this opportunity to arrange for a small informal workshop on mathematical logic and set theory during the day. Speakers are Robert Paßmann, Sam Adam-Day, and Joel Hamkins. Everyone is cordially invited.

Researchers and students from all faculties at the UvA are warmly invited to the event of AI at the University of Amsterdam. This
interdisciplinary one-day event will celebrate and showcase the diversity of AI research and education at the university. During the day, the Rector Magnificus and key UvA researchers will provide an overview of AI research at UvA and participate in panels discussing the three main foci of the new Research Priority Area of Human(e) AI: AI & Society, AI & Public Values and AI & Science.

Catarina Dutilh Novaes will hold her inaugural lecture on May 17th at 15.45; reception will follow. The location is the Aula of the VU, in the VU main building.

There is a reason why we take some every-day ontological practices for granted. It is for the same reason that people in Trafalgar Square can‘t see England. ‘‘Pegasus flies’’, ‘‘Sherlock Holmes is intelligent’’ and ‘‘Apollo is not a rock-star”: all these things are conventionally accepted. The question is: how can we make sense of them? Or, to complicate the picture, consider ‘‘Ajax liked daises’’ or ‘‘Reptilians exist’’. This only gets more puzzling; but why so?

The existence of fictional characters challenges our way of deciding whether a sentence is true or not. Different philosophical stories seem to run into different formal problems and vice versa. In short, during this talk we will discuss stories about stories and try to make sense of our ontological practices.

Join us for drinks and snacks afterwards!

The Causal Inference Lab is pleased to announce that Sander Beckers (Utrecht) will visit the ILLC to present his work on definitions of actual causation.

The possible world semantics of epistology induces a theory of content which has the undesirable feature of 'logical omniscience', where any sentence that is 'necessary' (i.e. true in all possible worlds) is automatically considered to be 'known' by all agents. In this talk, I distinguish between several kinds of logical omniscience and investigate how different sorts of circumstantialist accounts can avoid them. I propose my own semantics for knowledge, based on Fine's truthmaker semantics, that manage to avoid (some kind of) logical omniscience while maintaining moderate rationality.