"Causal reasoning and Boolean minimisation"

There is no consensus on how to formalise causal reasoning. However, the notion of /minimality /is widely regarded as being of critical importance.

In this roundtable seminar, we discuss causal reasoning and minimality in the Boolean setting. The idea that reasoning about causality requires minimalisation raises interesting conceptual and algorithmic questions in this setting. While early attempts at formalisation rely on the Quine-McCluskey algorithm for Boolean minimisation, subsequent work by Professor Baumgartner and others demonstrate that we need a more refined and – it would appear – computationally heavy notion of minimality when reasoning about causality, also for the Boolean case at the type level. This could have important implications beyond the Boolean setting, for structural equations modelling of token causality, formalised legal reasoning, and reasoning about causality in machine learning.

The speakers:

Sjur Kristoffer Dyrkolbotn - Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering

Michael C. Baumgartner - University of Bergen
Professor at the Department of Philosophy