Reasoning, Computation & Languages

Language has always accompanied computation and has served as one of the central media through which reasoning becomes explicit, communicable, and formalizable.
This conference/workshop explores the triangular relationship between reasoning, computation, and language. Reasoning aims at validity and justification; computation offers procedures for solving problems; and the relation between computation and correct reasoning is mediated by language —  whether in natural language, formal language, or something like a "language of thought". Once reasoning is expressed in such a medium, one can ask whether its forms can be governed by explicit rules and whether correct reasoning can be modeled as a kind of computation.

Two relations are central to the conference. The first concerns reasoning and computation: On the one hand, computation allows formalized reasoning to be made explicit, analyzed, and mechanically checked. On the other hand, impossibility results in logic and theoretical computer science reveal principled limitations to the idea that reasoning could be fully captured by computational procedures.
The second relation concerns natural and formal languages as vehicles of actual reasoning. Both have grammar and syntactic structure, yet differ in their expressivity, determinacy and degree of ambiguity. Both, however, shape how reasoning can be represented, communicated, and transformed.

Recent developments in large language models have created a newly productive interface between computation and language. In these models, linguistic representation becomes computationally tractable at an unprecedented scale. This invites us to ask whether, and in what sense, computation, reasoning and language share common forms of representation, transformation and inference.
The conference brings together perspectives from philosophy, logic, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, cognitive science and related fields to examine how reasoning, computation and language mutually shape one another.

• Tom Sterkenburg (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU München)

• Yannis Arazam (Research Center for Arabic classical Philosophy and Philosophy of Sciences, University Mohammed VI Polytechnic)

• Francesca Zaffora Blando (Dept. of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University)

• Baptiste Mélès (CNRS, Archives Henri Poincaré)

• Brice Halimi (Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science, Université Paris Cité)

• Tomasz Steifer (Center for Credible AI, Warsaw University of Technology)
• Luca San Mauro (Dept. of Philosophy, University of Bari)
• Andrew Arana (Dept. of Philosophy, Université de Lorraine)
• Martin Butz (Dept. of Computer Science, Universität Tübingen)
• Manon Prost (Dept. of Philosophy, Université de Strasbourg)
• Daniel Leube (Tübinger Forum für Wissenschaftskulturen, Universität Tübingen)