The 2007 Shapiro Conference: Causal and Epistemic Asymmetry

The conference was held Friday, April 27 and Saturday April 28 at Brown University.

(This conference is unrelated to the philosophy department's annual Shapiro Graduate Student Conference which is held roughly in October.)

The topic was the causal asymmetry (why we can influence the future but not the past) and the knowledge asymmetry (why we typically have much more precise knowledge about what has happened in the past than what will happen in the future). There was a special focus on the role of the past hypothesis (roughly the fact that some special initial physical state exists and no similarly special state exists in at least the not-too-far off future) in explaining these asymmetries.

Presentations

Introduction

• Fri 11:00 AM Jenann Ismael (Centre for Time): "Probability, Asymmetry, and Chance"
  • Abstract: There’s a prima facie asymmetry built into the notion chance, embodied in the fact that the chances of past events can only take the values 0 and 1, while future events can have chances anywhere in the (closed) interval between 0 and 1.  I’ll explore the view that this suggests that chance is not fundamental, but is obtained from a more basic form of probability by conditionalizing on history.  The more basic form of probability, I will argue, is implicated in every aspect of theorizing and should receive more theoretical attention.
• Fri 2:00 PM David Albert (Columbia University): "Introduction to Causal and Epistemic Asymmetry"
• Fri 4:10 PM Barry Loewer (Rutgers): "How the World's Fundamental Probability Distribution grounds Both Indicative and Subjunctive Conditionals" (Audio incomplete)
• Sat 10:00 AM Doug Kutach (Brown University): "Explaining the Influence Asymmetry with the Past Hypothesis: A New Approach" (Audio very incomplete)
• Sat 1:30 PM Brad Weslake (University of Rochester): "Two Problems for Theories of The Asymmetry of Causal Counterfactuals" (Audio incomplete)
  • Abstract: This paper concerns two problems that arise for theories of the asymmetry of causal counterfactuals. The first problem arises for any theory in which the truthmaking world diverges smoothly from the actual world at some point so as to ensure the truth of the antecedent. The problem is that this generates true counterfactuals with consequents before the time of the antecedents. The second problem arises for any theory which reduces the asymmetry to some contingent physical asymmetry. Again, the problem is that unless the contingent asymmetry is sufficient to ensure that the actual world and the truthmaking world are identical throughout the entire past, such accounts generate true counterfactuals with consequents before the time of the antecedents. To the extent we do not judge there to be backwards causation of either of these varieties, such theories must be rejected as complete accounts of the asymmetry of causation. There are various escape routes; but I will argue that an agency theory of the asymmetry is best placed to handle the two problems in a well-motivated way.
• Sat 3:40 PM Mathias Frisch (University of Maryland): "Does the Big Bang Prevent Me from Influencing the Past?"
  • Abstract: Recently there have been a number of attempts to ground the asymmetry of the causation and of counterfactuals in considerations from statistical physics. In this paper I will critically examine one such attempt--Barry Loewer's recent theory of 'SM conditionals'.

Directions to Brown.