On Friday the 6th of March the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation is organising a memorial event in honour of Anne Troelstra.

LIRa has switched to an online-only format, using the platform zoom.us. Contact ansolaki at gmail.com in case you have questions about the new format. The link for the e-seminar session is: https://zoom.us/j/424666901?pwd=RDEydDA5dEszV3p4Tmc2ZHo4YlNudz09

The Causal Inference Lab reading group will meet this Friday afternoon to discuss the problem of causal selection (when moral and other factors influence what events are selected as causes). We will discuss Thomas Icard, Jonathan Kominsky & Joshua Knobe's 2017 paper 'Normality and actual causal strength' [doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.01.010] [preprint]

Everyone with an interest in causal reasoning is very welcome to join the discussion.

Certain comparative sentences like "More people have been to Russia than I have." are known as so-called comparative illusions. Native speakers of English judge these statements as acceptable, i.e. report that they are proper English sentences with a coherent interpretation. However, it turns out that people struggle to articulate that interpretation. In fact, it is not clear at all if there is a coherent meaning that we can assign or where the illusion of grammatical correctness originates from. This challenges some of our most basic assumptions about language architecture, like that we perceive sentences veridically, interpret them fully and that sentence form and meaning are tightly coupled. During the talk, I will present a possible solution for all these problems, the category mismatch hypothesis, I developed based on existing experimental data and some German examples.

This talk will be delivered in an online-only format, via the platform Zoom. To join the meeting, please click the following link: https://zoom.us/j/773519367.

The Causal Inference Lab reading group will meet this Friday to discuss two papers on the problem of causal selection (determining how people select, from a myriad of events, only some as causes). We will discuss two papers: Julia Driver (2008), Attributions of causation and moral responsibility [copy of book chapter], and Christopher Hitchcock & Joshua Knobe (2009), Cause and norm [doi:10.5840/jphil20091061128] [preprint].

Everyone with an interest in causal inference is very welcome to join!

Patricia Mirabile, a new PostDoc at the ILLC, will present this Friday via Zoom at the Meaning, Language and Cognition (MLC) seminar.  To join the meeting, please click the following link: https://zoom.us/j/703591008

Argumentation and exchange of information help groups to coordinate, deliberate and decide. On the other hand, debates often generate detrimental large-scale phenomena such as polarization, informational cascades and echo-chambers, where the behavior of entire groups shifts in seemingly irrational ways.

Understanding the deep mechanisms of informational and social influence that underlie these phenomena in the age of social media is a challenge that engages methods from different disciplines, including philosophy, artificial intelligence, computer and social sciences and psychology.

This workshop brings together scholars with different theoretical approaches. Its broader aim is to foster an interdisciplinary understanding of the mechanisms that determine the behavior of individuals in a social context from multiple perspectives. The workshop will last two and a half days. The first half-day of it will be dedicated to an introductory seminar on abstract argumentation, held by Professor Pietro Baroni (Brescia).

Due to the spreading of COVID-19, this workshop will be held online as a video-conference-only.

Argumentation and exchange of information help groups to coordinate, deliberate and decide. On the other hand, debates often generate detrimental large-scale phenomena such as polarization, informational cascades and echo-chambers, where the behavior of entire groups shifts in seemingly irrational ways.

Understanding the deep mechanisms of informational and social influence that underlie these phenomena in the age of social media is a challenge that engages methods from different disciplines, including philosophy, artificial intelligence, computer and social sciences and psychology.

This workshop brings together scholars with different theoretical approaches. Its broader aim is to foster an interdisciplinary understanding of the mechanisms that determine the behavior of individuals in a social context from multiple perspectives. The workshop will last two and a half days. The first half-day of it will be dedicated to an introductory seminar on abstract argumentation, held by Professor Pietro Baroni (Brescia).

Due to the spreading of COVID-19, this workshop will be held online as a video-conference-only.