 Causation in Science - An interdisciplinary Study of Causal Processes I manage a large-scale interdisciplinary research project involving a number of national and international collaborators. The project is funded by FRIHUM, The Research Council of Norway, and started up at Norwegian University of Life Sciences in January 2011. More information about the project and its collaborators is found here. 
Understanding and influencing for change is a central concern of design, commerce and societies. Well-intended interventions often lead to unexpected outcomes with significant implications for health, safety, security and prosperity. While considerable intellectual investment has been directed at quantitative and statistical approaches to understanding causality of socio-cultural system change, the complexity and indeterminate nature of underlying states and often nonlinear dynamics poses significant, if not, intractable measurement, computational, and interpretation challenges. As a result, a scalable and functional understanding of underlying causal dynamics of socio-cultural systems that can inform real-world interventions leading to desired outcomes remains elusive. Read more about the project here. Collaborators  On the project Causation in Science,
I have recruited more than 40 philosophers and scientists from a range
of institutions. For a full list of the CauSci collaborators and
Directors, see the official project webpage. But I also have some highly valued co-authors: Stephen Mumford, University of Nottingham I met Stephen in Tromso in 2006 when he was invited to speak at a workshop on dispositions. I ended up in Nottingham as a visiting researcher, and since 2007 we have worked together on causation and dispositions. The main result of our collaboration is the forthcoming book Getting Causes from Powers. Johan Arnt Myrstad, University of Tromsø Arnt was my supervisor for years and has worked with me on conditionals, conditional probability and the logic of statements like 'All men are animals'. Arnt is a philosopher of science and physics, a Kantian and a mathematician. Sissel Redse Jørgensen, University of Oslo Sissel and I met in 2001 and discovered a mutual interest in conditionals and logic. While I had worked on conditionals and truth functionality with a philosophy of language perspective, Sissel had worked on conditionals, implication and logicism. Two of the papers in my dissertation are co-authored with Sissel, and together we have edited a book on sign language, Tegn som Språk, and written some papers on the philosophy of education in Bostad & Pettersen (eds.) Dialog og Danning. Sissel is also my main source of real life examples and was the ghost editor of all my Nordlys philosophy texts. The Metaphysics of Automaticity and Personal Dispositions
 This project will bring together philosophers and psychologists working on automatic behaviour, character and personality traits, and dispositions in general. We will be discussing the metaphysical commitments of dispositional explanations of human behaviour. A preliminary conference was held at the Sorbonne in Paris on 22-23 September 2010. Project managers: Jonathan Webber, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Cardiff University Alberto Masala, PhD, Researcher, Paris-Sorbonne |