We have a bi-weekly reading group that meets at Science Park. If not announced otherwise, this semester we will meet on Monday from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. starting on 4.2.2019. The location is SP 107 room F2.02. Everybody is welcome to join us.
Upcoming Meeting
The next meeting will be on 17.6. at 3 p.m. in F2.02.
During this meeting Kaibo and Dean will present recent work. Below you can find the title and abstract of Kaibo's talk.
Epistemic operators nested in counterfactuals
In recent years, the literature on the meaning of counterfactuals has been dominated by causal modelling approaches. The standard causal modelling approach provides a semantics for counterfactuals about factual statements, for instance:"Had the rock been thrown, the bottle would have been shattered". But its language does not allow epistemic statements being nested in counterfactuals, i.e. "Had the rock been thrown, I would have known that the bottle is shattered", unless the epistemic states is seen as a causal variable. However interpreting epistemic states as causal variables is not a satisfactory solution to epistemic counterfactuals: for instance it hides the logic connection between "I know that had the rock been thrown, the bottle would have been shattered" and "Had the rock been thrown, I would have known that the bottle is shattered". Therefore an extended causal language that can clearly express the epistemic elements in counterfactuals is in need. The talk will investigate possible ways of giving semantics to sentences with epistemic elements nested in counterfactuals.
The schedule for the next month
We will finish our first season with presentations of the PhD students affiliated with this research group.
- In the meeting on 1.7. at 12 am Ivar will present what he has been working on.
Contact
Dean McHugh is keeping track of the reading group. So if you have any questions, please contact him.