To Be or Not to Be Included in a Causal Model

Venue and Date: Center for Philosophy of Science, February 28 & March 1, 2026

Keynote Speakers:

• Samantha Kleinberg (Stevens Institute of Technology)
• Lily Hu (Yale University)

We are excited to announce this call for papers for work on causal modeling. 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 [email protected] Please include your contact information in the body of the email.

Deadline for Submissions: October 1st, 2025

Organizing Committee:

• Jim Woodward (University of Pittsburgh)
• Caitlin Mace (University of Pittsburgh)
• Tom Wysocki (University of Pittsburgh)
• Justin Shin (University of Pittsburgh)
• Clark Glymour (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Zina Ward (Florida State University)

Location:

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