Conditionals

Abstract

This special section of Erkenntnis on Conditionals was accompanied by the First Formal Epistemology Festival that took place in Konstanz, Germany, from July 28 to July 30, 2008. The festival was kindly sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, the Gesellschaft fu¨r Analytische Philosophie, the German Research Foundation, and the University of Konstanz. It was the first of a series of small and thematically focused in events in formal epistemology organized by Eric Swanson (Michigan), Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto), and Franz Huber (Konstanz). The background for both the special issue and the festival was the 40th anniversary of Robert C. Stalnaker’s ‘‘A Theory of Conditionals’’ and the 20th anniversary of Wolfgang Spohn’s ‘‘Ordinal Conditional Functions: A Dynamic Theory of Epistemic States.’’ The festivities of 2009 will take place in Ann Arbor, featuring Causal Decision Theory and Scoring Rules, against the background of the 10th anniversary of James M. Joyce’s The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory. The 2009 festival will be accompanied by a special issue of Studia Logica on the same topics. The festivities of 2010 will take place in Toronto, focusing on Defeater/Default Logic and Perception, against the background of the 30th anniversary of Ray Reiter’s ‘‘A Logic of Default Reasoning’’ and the 15th anniversary of John L. Pollock’s Cognitive Carpentry. The 2010 festival will be accompanied by a special issue of Synthese on the same topics. The following speakers presented papers at the 2008 festival: Igor Douven, David Etlin, Anthony Gillies, Alan Ha´jek, Franz Huber, Hannes Leitgeb, Sarah Moss, Hans Rott, Wolfgang Spohn, Robert C. Stalnaker, Eric Swanson, Jonathan Weisberg, J. Robert G. Williams, and Timothy Williamson. Peter Bro¨ssel, Anna- Maria Eder, and Alexandra Zinke served as conference chairs. They and Sandra Mandl deserve special mention for guaranteeing a smooth course of action before, during, and after the festival. The Reasoner 2 (9) contains a report on the conference by Peter Fritz, Robert Michels, Maryia Ramanava, and Alexandra Zinke. Three out of the four papers comprising this special section—Robert C. Stalnaker’s ‘‘Iterated Belief Revision’’, J. Robert G. Williams’ ‘‘Vagueness, Conditionals and Probability’’, and Timothy Williamson’s ‘‘Conditionals and Actuality’’—were also presented at the festival. The fourth paper ‘‘Conditional Excluded Middle’’ by Charles B. Cross was submitted only for publication in the special section.