Invitation to two lectures by Stephen Mumford, professor of metaphysics at Durham University: 1. "Introducing the Dispositional Modality", Monday, 20 November, 6:00 p.m. 2. "Are There Negative Kinds?", Tuesday, 21 November, 12:00 a.m.

Two open lectures and a seminar

The Section of Logical Rhetoric invites everyone interested in the topic to Cracow Workshops in Analytical Philosophy. The event will be held from 7 to 9 July 2017 at the Jagiellonian University Conference Centre in Przegorzały and it will be dedicated to the problem of conceptual analysis. A detailed programme of the workshops and organisational information about the event can be found on: http://2017.cwap.pl.

In this talk I will seriously take the idea of logic as representational language for cognitive science (language of thought, LoT). I will argue that LoT framework seems attractive at least in the sense of Marr’s computational level. I will survey recent computational cognitive modeling efforts founded on the logical representations. These studies will illustrate how the modern computational techniques (e.g., machine learning, Bayesian modeling) can be creatively combined with logical representation languages to shed light on compositional structure of human thinking. Taking LoT seriously brings logic back to the center of cognitive debate.

The Department of Epistemology organises a workshop on "Modally rich metaphysical landscapes", in collaboration with the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Konstanz. The workshop will take place between 9 and 10 June 2017 at the Institute of Philosophy, JU, Room 28. The aim of the workshop: The central question of modal metaphysics concerns real possibilities: What are the real (thus, objective) possibilities and what evidence justifies the claim that they exist. The workshop focuses on the anti-reductionist analyses of possibilities, worked out in the past two decades, and the application of these analyses in the work on traditional issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of science. At the conference, recent research on formal theories of real possibilities, such as branching time and branching space-times, will be presented. New applications of these theories in modelling agency, as well as cases of the alternative evolution of physical systems will be demonstrated. Several papers will deal with the theory of possibilities rooted in objects, i.e. with the dispositions of objects to behave in a particular manner, or more generally - with the potentialities of objects. Discussions will also focus on modally rich accounts of the laws of nature and on non-reductive notions of probability on which probability measures the possibility of the occurrence of a particular token-event. The programme of the conference can be found in the description below.