I am assistant professor (UD 1) in logic at the department of philosophy, University of Amsterdam. My research is situated at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC). At the moment my research focusses mainly on the question how we -- as humans -- make predictions. The ability to make predictions is key to our survival. But at the same time it is also very problematic, because -- as we all agree -- we cannot know the future. So, how do we make predictions? And why is it that we are doing it so successfully? I study these questions from various angles: linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. At the moment I focus on two particular cognitive tools that allow us to make predictions.

• generic sentences, stereotypes and biases, and
• the relation between causation and hypothetical thinking.

Recently I have been awarded an NWO Open competition for digitalisation SSH for the project "The biased reality of online media - Using stereotypes to make media manipulation visible". Together with Leendert van Maanen from the University of Utrecht, Jelle Zuidema from the University of Amsterdam and two PhD students we will work on a model that allows the automatic extraction of stereotypes and biases from (online) text corpora. The model is based on the work I have done together with Robert van Rooij on the meaning of generic sentences. The project started in September 2021. For more information see the project website.

I'm chair of the Causal Inference Lab of the University of Amsterdam.

From September 2013 until August 2016 I was programme director of the BA philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

Between 2010 and 2015 I worked on an NWO veni- project with the title "The semantic anatomy of conditional sentences". This project aims to unravel the compositional structure of conditional sentences cross-linguistically.

Upcoming publications

1. van Rooij, R. A. M., & Schulz, K. (2021). Causal Relevance: Semantics or Pragmatics? Causality even for Even-if conditionals. Linguistic Vanguard.
2. Barbero, F., Schulz, K., Smets, S., Velázquez-Quesada, F. R., & Xie, K. (2020). Thinking About Causation: A Causal Language with Epistemic Operators. In M. A. Martins, & I. Sedlár (Eds.), Dynamic Logic : New Trends and Applications: Third International Workshop, DaLí 2020, Prague, Czech Republic, October 9–10, 2020 : revised selected papers (pp. 17-32). (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Vol. 12569). Springer.
3. Rooij, R. van & K. Schulz  (2021): A causal power theory of generics. Topoi. https://rdcu.be/bMdHN

See "Publications" for links to the papers.

CV

I'm teaching in the BA and MA programme in philosophy of the University of Amsterdam, as well as the BA Artificial Intelligence and the MA in logic.

Conditional Sentences and Causal Reasoning

Course taught as part of the MCMP Summer School on Mathematical Philosophy for Female Students 2017 in Munich (http://www.mathsummer.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/index.html).

Onderwijsprijs / Teaching Award for Logische Analyse, bachelor philosophy (Dutch)

This is a BA course that I enjoy teaching very much. It's a short 8 week course taught in the first semester of the academic year. One the one hand the course teaches philosophy students basic proof-writing skills up to proofs by induction. For this part I rely a lot on "How to prove it" by Velleman. On the other hand the course aims at training the students in analytical argumentation. This year I discussed with the students different alternatives to classical inference. We focused in particular on non-monotonic reasoning and paraconsistent logic.

In 2011 the course Logische Analyse has won the teaching award of the faculty of humanities for the best BA course. For more information see the links below.