About


Sander Beckers

Welcome to my personal webpage, and thanks for taking the time to have a look! I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam.

Here I continue my work on a wide variety of topics involving causation and causal modeling. Roughly, my existing work can be grouped into three categories.

First, I use causal models to construct and discuss formal definitions of actual causation and their properties. Instead of only looking at how well such definitions match up with alleged intuitions about causation, I aim to justify my definitions in a more systematic and principled way.

Second, I use the combination of causal models and definitions of actual causation to formally define other important notions, such as harm, responsibility, and explanation. The underlying motivation to formally define these notions is twofold: they offer useful tools to develop ethical AI, and they contribute to the more general philosophical literature on these topics.

Third, I work on extending the framework of causal models itself, so that they can express a wider range of relations that we are interested in. For example, my work on causal abstraction makes precise how to represent the relation between two causal models that describe the same system at different levels of abstraction. Other work in progress aims to generalize even further, so that we can combine variables which share causal and non-causal relations with each other into a single model. This line of work also holds promise for discussions in the philosophy of science on reductionism and inter-level causation.

Although so far most of my work (but not all) has involved causality, I have very broad philosophical interests and do intend to widen the scope of my research significantly. (I just need to fix all issues involving causality first… Just kidding!) Despite the fact that I have been working within AI for many years, I am still first and foremost a philosopher, and my philosophical interests branch out to diverse areas that encompass the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the limitations of scientific knowledge, cultural relativism, any topic in formal philosophy, and many more.

Feel free to send me an e-mail if you would like to get in touch: srekcebrednas@gmail.com.