The Society for Philosophy of Causation

The Society for Philosophy of Causation was founded in Kyoto on June 26th 2023 by the silent agreement of people present in one of the rooms of the Seifuso Villa. A century earlier, the Japanese prime minister held there talks with the queen of Belgium. Only history will tell which event has been more consequential.

SPOC’s mission is to promote research in causation. Some of the society’s activities include:

The society is for philosophers, psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists working on causation. There are no fees. To be included in the mailing list and the discord channel, and otherwise count officially as a member, please send an email to spoc@causation.science titled membership. If it’s not immediately clear that you work on causation (e.g., from your personal website, publication record), please describe your interests briefly in the email. This is to filter out bots and spies.

annual conference

Annually, SPOC organizes a conference. The first one was in Kyoto. The second one was in Göttingen. The third one was in Paris. In 2026, SPOC is helping in organizing one in Pittsburgh.

To Be or Not to Be Included in a Causal Model

In 2026, SPOC is helping organize a conference To Be or Not to Be Included in a Causal Model at the Center for Philosophy of Science, February 28 and March 1.

Keynote speakers: Samantha Kleinberg (Stevens Institute of Technology) and Lily Hu (Yale University).

The guiding question of this conference is: what can and cannot be represented by a variable in a causal model?

The first host of problems arises in the philosophy of social sciences. What sorts of causal variables make sense when we talk about causation in social contexts; how do we handle variables that are socially constructed (e.g., race, gender); what do we do with causal relationships that are contextual, as social causal claims often are? These questions are theoretically interesting, but, more importantly, they must be considered if we want our theories to inform policy making.

The second host of problems arises when we investigate discovering causal relations from data. What’s available in the data, what would be useful for a particular discipline, and what would yield models that are amenable to interventions?

The third host of problems arises in formal work on causal modeling. What causal models are formally valid, and what do these constraints mean for causal theories? Interestingly, similar questions also arise in cognitive science: what variables are psychologically plausible and therefore can be exploited in cognitive representations?

Submission Instructions: Please prepare an anonymized abstract for a 20-minute talk addressing one of the questions asked above or a related issue. Abstracts of no more than 1000 words should be emailed as a PDF to causalmodelingconference@causation.science Please include your contact information in the body of the email.

Deadline for Submissions: November 1st, 2025

Organizing Committee: Clark Glymour (Carnegie Mellon University), Caitlin Mace (University of Pittsburgh), Justin Shin (University of Pittsburgh), Zina Ward (Florida State University), Jim Woodward (University of Pittsburgh), Tom Wysocki (Universität Göttingen)

Location: Center for Philosophy of Science (CL 1117, 4200 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260)

Parisation 2025

The third annual conference of the Society for Philosophy of Causation took place at Maison Suger, 16 Rue Suger, 75006 Paris, France, from July 15 to 18, 2025.

Quintidi, 27 Messidor
1400-1500Christopher Hitchcock California Institute of Technology
Double Effect and Intervention
1500-1600Marina D’Amico Universität Mailand
An Interventionist Approach to Causal Selection: The Optimal Control Hypothesis
1600-1700Gauvain Bourgne Sorbonne Universität
Formalizing Overdetermination with Labeled Transition Systems
1700-1800Brad Weslake NYU Shanghai
A Puzzle About High-Level Causation
Sextidi, 28 Messidor
930-1030Michael Waldmann Universität Göttingen
Understanding Causal Devices: How Capacity Representations Guide Mechanism Knowledge
1030-1130Tomasz Wysocki Universität Göttingen
The Relevance Theory of Dispositions
1130-1230David Kinney Washington University in St. Louis
Towards a Formal Semantics for Generic Causal Claims
1230-1330Esteban Céspedes Catholic University of the Maule
A Case Against Causal Structuralism Based on Strong Emergence
At 16, we will meet at the Notre Dame. No reservation needed: the line is long but moves very quickly, I was assured. Download the free app for audioguide. Then, people who want can come with me and see L’Hôtel de Ville. As this should be all quick, this might be the day to go and see the Eiffel Tower if you have not. (I don’t think I will go though.)
Septidi, 29 Messidor
930-1030Samuel Lee Universität Hamburg
The Ground Confound
1030-1130Thomas Blanchard Université Bordeaux Montaigne
Causal Constraints
1130-1230Brian Ortmann Universität Hamburg
An Overlooked Necessary Condition For Causation
1230-1330Christopher Gregory Weaver University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
On Feynman Diagrams and Causal Models
Musée d'Orsay at 18:00. Book your ticket in advance. Please choose “late opening rate on Thursdays” for 12 Euro. Hurry. Slots are running out, as both Christophers have pointed out.
Octidi, 30 Messidor
930-1030Jon Iwry Harvard Law School
Toward a Legal-Philosophical Theory of Actual Causation in the AI Age
1030-1130Aydin Mohseni Carnegie Mellon Universität and Daniel Herrmann Universität Groningen
A Bayesian Reduction of Causation
1130-1230Simone Salzano LMU München & Universität Urbino
Emergence, Causation, and Free Will: A Case Against Libertarianism
1230-1330Can Konuk Jean-Nicode
Learning from Causal Explanations
At 16, we will head out to le Petit Palais (a free, awesome museum) and walk there through the gardens of the Louvre.
Here’s the app for public transport in Paris. You can then use your phone to get on the metro.

Here are some pictures from the conference.

Gösation 2024

The second annual confernece of the Society for Philosophy of Causation is taking took place at Paulinerkirche, Papendiek 14 , 37073 Göttingen, Germany, on July 19-21, 2024. The first one took place in Kyoto, Japan, on June 24-26, 2023. It was widely considered a blast, and the current one is expected to be second one was too.

Donnerstag, 18. Juli
19Dinner: Zum Szültenbürger Prinzenstraße 7
Freitag, 19. Juli
11-12Jenn McDonald Columbia Universität
Deriving Naturalness from Causal Structures
12-13Sander Beckers Universität Amsterdam
Nondeterministic Causal Models
13-14Gauvain Bourgne Sorbonne Universität
Causality and Responsibility with Non-Occurrence of Events
14-15Mittagessen
15-16Michael Waldmann Universität Göttingen
Interpolating Causal Mechanisms: The Paradox of Knowing More
16-17Caitlin Mace Pittsburgh Universität
On Dissecting Causal Circuits
17-18Liu Yue Southwest University of Finance and Economics
Causal Reasoning as Causal Model Attribution
19Dinner: Café Botanik Karspüle 1B
Samstag, 20. Juli
10-11Alexander Max Bauer Universität Oldenburg
Experimental Evidence in Favor of the Compositionality Constraint
11-12Tom Wysocki Universität Göttingen
Polymorphic Functions for a Better Semantics of Counterfactuals
12-13Reuben Stern Duke Universität
Causal Direction in Causal Bayes Nets
13-14Mittagessen
14-15Alexander Gebharter Marche Polytechnic Universität
A causal Bayes net analysis of dispositions
15-16Gabriel Gil ICIMAF, Havana, Cuba
Rethinking the Counterfactual Theory of Causation
16-17Reinoud Pino Universität Amsterdam
On The Possibility of Quantum Interventionism
19Dinner: Hans im Glück Goethe-Allee 8
Sonntag, 21. Juli
10-11Luna De Souter Universität Bergen
Identifiability and informativeness in regularity theory of causation
11-12Can Konuk École Normale Supérieure
Plurals in causal judgment
12-13Julie Goncharov Universität Göttingen
Rationalising Statements and Causation
13-14Mittagessen
14-15Malcolm Forster Universität Wisconsin-Madison
Probability, Causality, and the Dog Bite Example
15-16Simon Stephan Universität Göttingen
Reasoning about Actual Causation in Reversible and Irreversible Causal Structures
16-17Xiuyuan An Fudan Universität
Brain Regions as Difference-Makers and the Limits of Interventionism
19Dinner: Le Feu Weender Landstraße 23
Montag, 22. Juli
noonBrunch: Deutsches Theater Bistro Theaterplatz 11

Here are some pictures from the conference.

The website for the confernece is here.

Here are some pictures from the conference.

APA affiliated sessions

SPOC is affiliated with the American Philosophical Association. As an affiliate, SPOC can organize sessions at APA divisional meetings. And it has. The first one was Eastern, in New York, January 2025. The second one, Central, online, in February 2025.

Pacific APA 2025

The second APA affiliated session was held at the Central APA, online, Feruary 2–March 1, 2025.

Here's the program:

Freitag, 21. Februar 2025
Shimin Zhao University of Wisconsin–Madison
The Forgotten Problem of Statistical Inconsistency
Marc Johansen Creighton University
Regularities and Safeguards
Levi Smith University of Colorado Boulder
How Normativity Can Play a Role in a Realist Account of Causation by Omission
Tom Wysocki Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
A Solution to World-Counting in the Proportion Analysis of Dispositions

Eastern APA 2025

The first APA affiliated session was held at the Eastern APA in New York, January 8–11 2025.

Here's the program:

Freitag, 10. Januar 2025
Jenn McDonald Columbia Universität
Deriving Naturalness from Causal Structures
Reuben Stern Duke Universität
The Elusive Transitivity of Causal Relevance
Dean McHugh Universität Amsterdam
Unraveling Sartorio’s Difference-Making Principle
Tomasz Wysocki Universität Göttingen
Polymorphic Functions for a Better Semantics of Counterfactuals
Christopher Weaver University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The Problem of the Arrow of Causation in Fundamental Physics

Submitted sessions

SPOC also submits sessions to conferences. So far, we've had two at the Philosophy of Science Association.

Groningen 2025

Symposium. How to do things with causation?

Our goal in the symposium How to do things with causation? is to present the audience with cutting-edge research on causation that spans disciplines yet uses the same, familiar language of causes, counterfactuals, variables, and causal models. The interdisciplinary nature of our symposium fits with the breadth of approaches to philosophy of science characteristic of the ESPA. The talks, while firmly in philosophy of science, overlap with computer science (Hanti’s), linguistics (Dean’s), metaphysics (Bram’s), and cognitive science (Tom’s). The speakers will bring in modeling frameworks and methods from these disciplines with the intention to enrich the toolkits of philosophers working on causation. Our hope is that the audience leaves with a good idea of what new problems are tackled in the philosophy of causation, what new approaches are used to solve old problems, and how formal and empirical methods borrowed from other disciplines can help with philosophical investigations into causation.

Hanti Lin investigates the limits of causal inference from non-experimental data. He shows that even the weakest standards of reliability fail when testing for conditional independence under minimal assumptions. This result has worrying implications for the epistemology of causal discovery, reinforcing concerns about the feasibility of learning causal structures from data alone.

Dean McHugh shows that current similarity-based frameworks fail to model the concept of causal sufficiency—that accounting for sufficiency requires a fundamental shift in how we think about modality and the nature of hypothetical reasoning. In this talk, he will propose how this shift can be achieved.

Bram Vaassen addresses a long-standing concern in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind—causal overdetermination. Pace the orthodoxy, which finds overdetermination problematic, Bram defends the view that overdetermination is both widespread and benign in many philosophical domains, from mental causation to composite objects. His argument shifts the debate from an ontological issue to a pragmatic dispute about causal attributions.

Finally, Tom Wysocki, in a talk co-authored with Louisa Reins and Michael Waldmann, proposes a new theory of dispositions that uses causal models and contextual factors to represent the strength (i.e., degree or intensity) of a disposition. This theory, supported by empirical evidence from psychology, proves superior to competing theories in metaphysics and philosophy of science.

Hanti Lin
The Very Hardness of Testing Conditional Independence
Dean McHugh
The Concept of Causal Sufficiency
Bram Vaassen
Widespread Benign Overdetermination
Tom Wysocki, Louisa Reins, Michael Waldmann
A Contextualist Theory of Dispositions

Belgrade 2023

Symposium. Causation and causal models - how to overcome the standstill

Since the early noughts, causal models have been instrumental in developing theories of causation, with increasingly complex theories handling increasingly complex cases. This progress has recently slowed down, and we aim to explore ways in which the standstill could be overcome. We agree on the problem but disagree on the solution, with each speaker challenging, suspending, or modifying a different element of the causal-models framework. Günther adapts causal models to regularity theories and work out a reductive theory of causation. McDonald dismantles the assumption that the role of causal models is to encode counterfactuals. Beckers abandons saving intuitions for a functional approach: producing a theory that satisfies the epistemic and pragmatic norms that guide causal reasoning in science and in life.

Samstag, 23. September 2025
Jenn McDonald Columbia Universität
Sander Beckers University of Amsterdam
Mario Günther Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Tomasz Wysocki Universität Göttingen

Courses organized

SPOC also organizes courses. We organized one on causation and counterfactuals at NAßLLI 2025.

NAßLLI 2025

Description: We use counterfactuals and causal claims either to explain the world or to change it: sociologists wonder how to fight poverty; historians ask why Rome fell; engineers want to ascertain what would have happened had the primary safety system in the Chernobyl power plant worked. This is why philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science have long been interested in causality. The overarching aim of this course is to present participants with the latest developments in the exciting field of causal modeling. After the course, participants will have the necessary background knowledge to conduct their own research in the philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science of causation and counterfactuals.

Instructors: Dean McHugh and Tom Wysocki.

Monday, 23 July
1510-1555Dean McHugh Universität Amsterdam
Theories of counterfactuals in Lewis, Stalnaker, and Kratzer
  1. Stalnaker, Robert (1968). A theory of conditionals. Ifs. Ed. by William L. Harper, Robert Stalnaker, and Glenn Pearce. Springer, pp. 41–55. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9117-0_2.
  2. Lewis, David (1973). Counterfactuals. Wiley-Blackwell.
  3. Kratzer, Angelika (1986). Conditionals. Chicago Linguistics Society 22.2, pp. 1–15.
  4. Leahy, Brian (2018). Counterfactual antecedent falsity and the epistemic sensitivity of counterfactuals. Philosophical Studies 175.1, pp. 45–69. DOI: 10.1007/s11098-017-0855-z.
1555-1630Tom Wysocki Universität Göttingen
Deterministic causal models
  1. Halpern, Joseph Y. and Judea Pearl (2005). Causes and explanations: A structural-model approach. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56(4):843–887. DOI: 10.1093/bjps/axi147.
  2. Halpern, Joseph Y. (2016). Actual Causality. MIT Press.
  3. Hitchcock, Christopher (2001). The intransitivity of causation revealed in the structure of causal models. Journal of Philosophy 98(6):273–299. DOI: 10.2307/2678432.
  4. Woodward, James (2003). Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation. Oxford University Press.
Tuesday, 24 July
1510-1630Tom Wysocki Universität Göttingen
Counterfactuals and causation in deterministic causal models
  Same as above.
Wednesday, 25 July
1510-1630Dean McHugh Universität Amsterdam
Difficulties with logically complex antecedents
  1. Bacon, Andrew (2013). In defence of a naive conditional epistemology. Manuscript.
  2. Boylan, David and Ginger Schultheis (2021). How strong is a counterfactual? The Journal of Philosophy 118(7):373–404. DOI: 10.5840/jphil2021118728.
  3. Ginsberg, Matthew L. (1986). Counterfactuals. Artificial Intelligence 30, pp. 35–79. DOI: 10.1016/0004-3702(86)90067-6.
  4. Kratzer, Angelika (1989). An investigation of the lumps of thought. Linguistics and Philosophy, 607–653. DOI: 10.1007/BF00627775.
Thursday, 26 July
1510-1600Dean McHugh Universität Amsterdam
Causal sufficiency
  1. Fine, Kit (2014). Permission and possible worlds. Dialectica 68(3):317–336. DOI: 10.1111/1746-8361.12068.
  2. McHugh, Dean (2022). Aboutness and modality. Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium.
  3. Walters, Lee and Robert G. Williams (2013). An argument for conjunction conditionalization. The Review of Symbolic Logic 6(4):573–588. DOI: 10.1017/S1755020313000191.
1600-1630Tom Wysocki Universität Göttingen
Underdeterministic models, underdeterministic counterfactuals
  1. Briggs, Ray (2012). Interventionist counterfactuals. Philosophical Studies 160(1):139–166. DOI: 10.1007/s11098-011-9683-1.
  2. Wysocki, Tomasz (2023). An event algebra for causal counterfactuals. Philosophical Studies 180(12):3533–3565. DOI: 10.1007/s11098-023-02015-4.
  3. Wysocki, Tomasz (Forthcoming). The underdeterministic framework. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
  4. Wysocki, Tomasz (Hopefully forthcoming). Type causation, underdeterministically. Erkenntnis.
Tuesday, 24 July
1510-1630Tom Wysocki Universität Göttingen
Causation and counterfactuals with polymorphic models
  1. Hall, Ned (2007). Structural equations and causation. Philosophical Studies 132(1):109–136. DOI: 10.1007/s11098-006-9041-3.
  2. Wysocki, Tomasz (2023). An event algebra for causal counterfactuals. Philosophical Studies 180(12):3533–3565. DOI: 10.1007/s11098-023-02015-4.
  3. Wysocki, Tomasz (2023). Conjoined cases. Synthese 201:197. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-023-04101-w.
  4. Wysocki, Tomasz (Forthcoming). No causation for the unsettled. Australian Philosophical Review.
  5. Wysocki, Tomasz. The causal-causal theory. Manuscript.

Here are the slides:

  1. Dean's: the first set, and the second set.
  2. Tom's: deterministic models, counterfactuals, causation, underdeterministic counterfactuals, polymorphic functions and recursive causation

calendar

You can subscribe to the SPOC google calendar.

The calendar contains deadlines of interest to SPOC members, such as the deadline for the SPOC confernce, SPOC affiliated sessions at the APA, the three deadlines for the APAs, online talks, deadlines for conferences related to causation, SPOC online talks, or other online talks. If you know of an event that should make its way to this calendar, please post it on the Discord channel, and I'll add it to the calendar.

contact

To contact the society, message Tom Wysocki at spoc@causation.science.

The formal address of the society, as if this ever mattered, is currently:
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Georg-Elias-Müller-Institut für Psychologie
Goßlerstraße 14
37073 Göttingen, Deutchland.