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Communicating causation

Talk by Rebekah Baglini, School of Communication and Culture

Info about event

Time

Tuesday 20 November 2018,  at 11:00 - 13:00

Location

IMC Meeting Room, Jens Ch. Skous Vej 4, Building 1483-312

 

Humans are capable of understanding complex networks of causal dependencies. Yet the communication of causal information is constrained by available linguistic structures, resulting in simplified claims like “C causes E.”  This talk reports on a new strain of research which takes structured models of causal dependencies (Pearl 2000, Sloman et al. 2009) to provide a critical part of the licensing background for linguistic descriptions. I show that this approach solves several longstanding semantic and pragmatic puzzles, and reflects insights on causal reasoning from philosophy and cognitive science. I also discuss several forthcoming psycholinguistics experiments designed to test the predictions of the proposed linguistic analysis. 

About the speaker:

Rebekah Baglini, School of Communication and Culture and IMC 

https://rbkh.net/cv/