The Question ‘What If’ in the Sciences and Humanities
This interdisciplinary workshop addresses the role of counterfactual considerations in various sciences as well as in the humanities. The focus will be on the evaluation of counterfactual conditionals that are proposed by scientists, philosophers, novelists and historians in response to specific ‘What if?’ questions.
The workshop is organized in close collaboration with the interdisciplinary DFG-SNSF
research unit ‘What if? On the Meaning, Epistemology and Scientific Relevance of
Counterfactual Claims and Thought Experiments’, based at the Universities of Konstanz, Geneva, Bochum, and the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Location:
The workshop is taking place in Geneva at Uni Dufour, room U159.
Workshop organizers:
Marcel Weber (University of Geneva), Maximilian Huber (University of Geneva) and Guillaume Schlaepfer (University of Geneva)
Program
| Thursday, 4 July 2013 | |
|---|---|
| 9h30 | Coffee |
| 10h | John Beatty, University of British Columbia, Vancouver What does it mean to say that “history matters”, causally speaking? |
| 11h | Quentin Deluermoz, Université Paris 13 Pierre Singaravélou, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne Counterfactuals: a historian’s perspective |
| 12h | Lunch |
| 13:30h | Eva Rafetseder, Universität Konstanz How young children mimic adult-like counterfactual reasoning |
| 14:30h | Maximilian Huber, Université de Genève Biological Function and Counterfactuals |
| 15:30 | Coffee |
| 16h | Daniel Dohrn and Thomas Krödel, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Should the role of laws in Lewis’ similarity criteria be fine-tuned? |
| 17h | Arthur Merin, Universität Konstanz Cartesian Doubts and Moore-Style Certainty in Contradoxical Conditionals |
| 20h | Conference Dinner |
| Friday, 5 July 2013 | |
| 9h | Natasha Grigorian, Ruhr-Universität Bochum / Universität Konstanz Thomas Malthus and Nikolai Chernyshevsky: Struggle for Existence or Mutual Help? |
| 10h | Tarja Knuuttila, University of Helsinki Counterfactual reasoning vs. fictional modeling – Causation of Inflation in Macroeconomics |
| 11h | Coffee |
| 11:30h | Christian Wüthrich, University of California, San Diego What if the world was quantum gravitational? |