SSIS Politics and International Relations Postgraduate Research Conference 2015

The one-day conference will consist of student-led panels attended by academics of the two disciplines and individual sub-fields. The day will end with a social event, enabling all participants to get to know each other better and strengthening the South West Doctoral Training Centre’s (SWDTC) academic community.

The conference will bring students together from all three Universities of the South West Doctoral Training Centre (Bath, Bristol, Exeter) across the two disciplines (Politics and International Relations).

Guest Speaker

Our guest speaker will be Professor Julian Reiss of Durham University, whose talk will be 'Cause, Causatives, and Theories of Causation'.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the difficulties raised by the ubiquity of causatives such as oxidise, transduce, dampen, and prolong in scientific language for truth-conditional theories of causation which have the form ‘C causes E if and only if…’ or a near variant.

The difficulties are a consequence of three features of the use of causatives in science:

• they are ineliminable
• they represent causal relations and processes of many different metaphysical kinds
• they are polysemous

I argue that no truth-conditional theory of causation can do justice to the use of causatives in scientific language. I then sketch an alternative, inferentialist theory of causation and finally show how it deals with causatives.

Guidance for Attendees

If you do not wish to present at the conference but still wish to attend, then you simply need to send an email to ssispgresconference2015@gmail.com, with PGR conference attendee 2015 in the subject line. Please also provide us with:

• your name
• discipline of study
• your home University (where applicable)
• and your preferred 'reply to' email address

Only those who have expressed their interest in this way will be able to participate in the conference and social event.

Lunch and coffee/tea breaks will be provided for all attendees.