Dean McHugh
Postdoctoral Researcher
Contact details
- Email: dmchugh3@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
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Dugald Stewart Building
Room 1.16
3 Charles Street - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9AD
Background
I am a postdoctoral fellow of the Communicating Causality project at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Daniel Lassiter. During the 2025/26 academic year I will be Fulbright Scholar at the New York University philosophy department, supervised by Kit Fine. At present I am working on modality, philosophical logic, conditionals, and causality.
CV
158889.pdf
Qualifications
PhD in Logic, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam. Defended May 2023.
MSc in Logic, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam.
BA in Philosophy, Trinity College Dublin.
Past PhD students supervised
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Bachelor Thesis supervisor. Laurens Graver, BA Philosophy. Co-supervised with Aybüke Ozgün.
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Master Thesis supervisor. Frank Goossens. Co-supervised with Jean Wagemans.
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Bachelor Thesis supervisor. Juliette Calf, Puck Voorham. Winner of the 2024 Amsterdam AI Thesis Award.
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Individual project supervisor. Flip Lijnzaad.
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Project supervisor. Louis Bunt, Flavia Caradonna, Simon Chiu, Sarah Dukic, Arun Ganguly, Swapnil Ghosh, Frank Goossens, Laura Hernández Martín, Ruiting Jiang, Flip Lijnzaad, Mees Lursen, Kirti Singh, Alex Stan, Ștefan Zotescu.
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Project supervisor. Billy Chan, Gerson Foks, Angelica Hill, Flavia Nährlich, Nachiket Sakhadeo, Grace Shao, Arie Soeteman, Laura Vetter, Tianwei Zhang.
Research summary
- Philosophical logic
- Modality
- Conditionals
- Causality
- Formal semantics
Current project grants
Communicating Causality
Fulbright Scholarship
Past project grants
PhDs in the Humanities Grant. Awarded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), supervised by Katrin Schulz and Sonja Smets.
Participant
2025
- Experiments on Deontic Modals. TbiLLC 2025, Kutaisi, Georgia 8–12 September 2025. Joint work with Arseny Anisimov.
- Truthmaker semantics for causal sufficiency. Truthmaker Semantics and Modal Logic, Bochum, Germany, 4–8 August 2025
- The parts of only. Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 35, Harvard University, 20–22 May 2025. Joint work with Keny Chatain.
- Disjunctions of universal modals and conditionals: a solution to Zimmerman's problem. Meaning, Logic, and Cognition Seminar, ILLC, University of Amsterdam, 28 February 2025
- On the nature of reasons why. 7th Asian Workshop on Philosophical Logic (AWPL 2025). Jadavpur University, Kolkata. 6–8 February 2025.
- On the logic of reasons for. 11th Indian Conference on Logic and its Applications (ICLA 2025). Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. 3–5 February 2025.
- Analyses of difference-making. American Philosophical Association (APA), Eastern Division. New York, 8–11 January 2025.
2024
- Local Modals. Meaning in Language Colloquium Series, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 11 December 2024.
- New Experimental Evidence Against the Similarity Approach to Conditionals. University of Padua, 21 October 2024. Joint work with Tomasz Klochowicz.
- New Experimental Evidence Against the Similarity Approach to Conditionals. Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 34, Rochester New York, 28–30 May 2024. Joint work with Tomasz Klochowicz.
- A Dynamic Interpretation of Structural Causal Models. Formal Methods and Science in Philosophy V, Dubrovnic, 16–18 May 2024
- Wide Scope Simplification: Free Choice Effects from Disjunctions of Conditionals. The 4th Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language, and Meaning (TLLM IV), Beijing, 29–31 March 2024
- Modality Disordered. Linguae Seminar, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris, 21 March 2024
- A Dynamic Interpretation of Structural Causal Models. Converging On Causal Ontology Analyses (COCOA), Online, 23 February 2024
- Conditional Perfection in the Semantics of Causal Claims. Colloquium on Empirical English Linguistics, Humboldt University, Berlin, 18 January 2024
In the press
Talk that Science interview, discussing the connections between semantics of causation and discrimination law, with Thijmen Nuninga, Nicolien Janssens and Nikki Weststeijn. Broadcast on Echobox Radio, 2 September 2021.
Interview for Lab42 website, published 15 February 2022.
ILLC Open Day talk, The Foundations of Mechanistic Reasoning, ILLC Open Day, 4 October 2019.
Logically Speaking interview, discussing philosophical logic, semantic paradoxes and Newcomb's paradox. Logically Speaking Episode 6, with Max van den Broek. Broadcast 29 June 2017.
University of Toronto News interview, 5 October 2017, Link to interview.