Conference on Conditionals

Thanks to Richard Dietz for sending me the following conference announcement:

Conditionals and Conditionalization Conference
Formal Epistemology Project (FEP), Centre for Logic and Analytic Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, Sept 4-6, 2009
Organizers: Richard Dietz and Igor Douven

While it strikes most as obvious that there exist close conceptual connections between conditionals and conditionalization, it is far less obvious what these connections precisely are. The aim of the workshop is to investigate these connections from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on recent work in philosophy and experimental psychology. The time is ripe for such an approach, given that both linguists and psychologists working on conditionals are increasingly turning to the probabilistic theories of conditionals that philosophers have been developing over the past forty years or so. On the other hand, various philosophical claims have been made about conditionals – in particular concerning their semantics and pragmatics – apparently on no other basis than the linguistic intuitions of the philosophers making these claims. It would be interesting, and from a methodological perspective desirable, to subject these claims to more rigorous testing, which is where experimental psychologists could help (and, to some extent, have already helped).

Speakers:

Horacio Arlo-Costa (Carnegie Mellon)
Jean-François Bonnefon (Toulouse)
Richard Bradley (LSE)
John Cantwell (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm)
Richard Dietz (Leuven)
Igor Douven (Leuven)
Shira Elqayam (De Monfort University, Leicester)
David Etlin (Leuven)

Alan Hájek (ANU)

James Hawthorne (Oklahoma)

Janneke Huitink (Frankfurt/M.)

Peter Milne (Stirling)

David Over (Durham)

Niki Pfeifer (Salzburg)

Gerhard Schurz (Duesseldorf)

Sara Verbrugge (Leuven)

Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto)


There is no registration fee. However, if you would like to attend talks, lunches and/or dinners, please send an email to richard.dietz@hiw.kuleuven.be by August 15 at the latest.

Further particulars will be circulated nearer the time. For further information, please contact Richard Dietz under the above email address.

Hopefully, some of the readers of this blog can make it.  If so, please post something afterwards to let us know how it went!