Month: December 2024

The 2024 X-Phi Blog Recap

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

It’s the last day of the year; time for a little recap of the blog.

After the “New Experimental Philosophy Blog” by Justin Sytsma, Joe Ulatowski, and Dan Weijers sadly went offline around the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024, this blog stepped in, starting with a repost of The Revolver Case Revisited on March 4.

Since then, 40 blog posts (this one included) have been published by Mario Attie-Picker, Rodrigo Díaz, Josh Knobe, and me. Eleven of them are original texts, another eleven are announcements, nine are calls, six are from our “Hot of the Press,” and another three are from our “Faces of X-Phi” series.

In total, these posts were seen more than 4,500 times by more than 2,500 visitors. Many came from social networks: More than 1,000 views originated from Twitter, another nearly 200 from Bluesky, and six from – yes, it still exists – Facebook. Some traffic also came from news sites: Slightly more than 200 views came from Vox and another nearly 50 from Daily Nous. Also, roughly 200 views can be attributed to traffic from search engines, including – in descending order – Google, Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo.

While most views came from the United States (nearly 2,000), Germany (nearly 500), and the United Kingdom (also nearly 500), we had visitors from all over the globe, coming from 67 countries.

Thank you all for reading and contributing. Have a happy new year, and stay curious!

Call: “Basel-Oxford-NUS BioXPhi Summit 2025”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Organized by the University of Basel’s Institute for Biomedical Ethics, the University of Oxford’s Uehiro Oxford Institute, and the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics, next year’s “Experimental Philosophical Bioethics Summit” will take place in Basel from June 25 to 27. Confirmed keynote speakers are Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh) and Edmond Awad (University of Exeter and University of Oxford).

Abstracts for presentations and posters can be submitted until January 31, 2025. The call reads:

We invite junior and senior researchers working in bioethics or other relevant fields, and using or engaging with methods of cognitive science, moral psychology, empirical bioethics, and experimental philosophy, to submit contributions.

Abstract for conference presentation – guidelines:

To submit an abstract for a conference presentation, please send an email with the subject line “Conference Submission for Bioxphi 2025” to bioxphi2025@unibas.ch by January 31st, 2025.

The body of the email should include a proposed title for the presentation, the (list of) author(s) and affiliation(s), and a 500 word abstract outlining the topic/study, methods, and (if available) results.

Please also indicate if any data have already been collected/analyzed or whether the study is in-progress.

Abstract for poster presentation – guidelines:

We will favor poster submissions that have a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, or (other) early-career researcher(s) as the first author.

To submit an abstract for the poster presentation, please send an email with the subject line “Poster Submission for Bioxphi 2025” to bioxphi2025@unibas.ch by January 31st, 2025.

The body of the email should include a proposed title for the poster, a list of authors and affiliations, and a 300 word abstract outlining the topic/study, methods, and (if available) results.

Please clearly indicate if the first author is a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, or other early-career researcher (within 5 years of PhD); please also indicate if any data have already been collected/analyzed or whether the study is in-progress. In addition to empirical work, we will consider purely theoretical posters that engage with BioXPhi or empirical bioethics.

Call: “New – Experimental – Perspectives on Valence in Language”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Anouch Bourmayan, Pascal Ludwig, and Morgan Moyer are organizing a “Valence in Language” workshop at Sorbonne Université on June 13, 2025. Invited speakers are Diana Mazzarella (Université de Neuchâtel), Joshua Knobe (Yale University), and Nicole Gotzner (University of Osnabrück).

Abstracts for talks can be submitted before February 28, 2025. The call reads:

It is widely agreed that Frege’s On Sense and Reference set the foundations for contemporary philosophy of language, as well as formal semantics. It should not come as a surprise, then, that affective meaning, which tracks speakers’ subjective feelings and attitudes, has been almost completely dismissed in both disciplines as an unsuitable object of study. Indeed, Frege’s misgivings about the relevance of psychological aspects is one of the hallmarks of his approach to logic and formal language. A way of rephrasing Frege’s worries would be to say that the affective information associated with a word is necessarily subjective, and, as such, irrelevant to the study of meaning that aims at objective and hence shareable aspects of meaning.

This view has remained largely unchallenged, and the dismissal of the relevance of affective information sank even deeper down as this referentialist semantics approach to natural language reified in the mid 20th century with the melding of technical and philosophical advances from Tarski, Davidson, Montague, and Lewis, and then standardized with the formalism in Heim and Kratzer (1998).

However, the last 20 years have seen a flourishing of interest in such phenomena, including recent proposals by, e.g. McCready (2020) on expressives, Cepollaro (2020) or Hess (2021) on slurs, and Jeshion (2021) for a taxonomy of pejorative meaning. Nonetheless, the mainstream still views these phenomena as generally irrelevant to the study of meaning proper, in part since they are thought to manifest in a minimal or exceptional part of the lexicon.

In parallel, the field of cognitive psychology has extensively explored the significance of valence in language. Following an early idea from Wundt (1907), Zajonc (1980, 2000) has defended the general hypothesis that affective responses may precede conceptual recognition, that is, may be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing. Regarding language more specifically, as early as 1957 Osgood introduced the semantic differential technique which allowed him to define the affective connotation of words – not only specific classes of words but “plain vanilla” words – along three underlying dimensions, the first of which was valence. Other models of semantic differentials were subsequently developed, including those by Mehrabian and Russell (1974), Bradley and Lang (1999) and Warriner et al. (2013). Overall, all the studies confirmed that valence is the most significant dimension of the three parameters, being the most stable and the most informative one. Further, with advances in psycho- and neurolinguistic methodologies in the last decades, the Affective Primacy hypothesis found support at the level of linguistic content, comparing affective to descriptive dimensions of meaning (see, among others, Bargh et al. 1989, Kousta et al. 2009, Gaillard et al. 2006 or Ponz et al. 2014).

In this workshop, we would like to examine the idea that valence has a greater role in language than has been generally acknowledged. Indeed, a word’s valence might be an important aspect of the meaning of many more words than those that are recognized as “expressives”. That is, expressivity could be a broad and ubiquitous phenomenon rather than a feature specific to only certain terms.

In What Sense are Generics Normative?

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

Suppose you see a teacher speaking to a student in an insulting or degrading way. You might go up to the teacher and say: “What are you doing? That’s not what a teacher does when students are having trouble.” And then you might say:

  • A teacher tries to help her students.

Here you are using a special type of sentence called a generic. Moreover, you are using this sentence in a way that is normative. That is, you aren’t just saying that teachers generally tend to help their students; you seem to be saying that helping one student is a way of fulfilling some kind of ideal.

The specific sort of normative claim you are making here is a puzzling one, and I don’t feel like I completely understand it. To begin with, it’s clearly not just a claim about what someone should do. For example, it’s not just the claim: teachers should help their students. Instead, it seems to mean something more like: helping one’s students is what follows from the characteristic ideals of being a teacher.

To see this, imagine that you see a teacher listening to Coldplay. You are outraged because you believe that teachers should have better taste in music. In such a case, you could not express the thought you are thinking by saying: “A teacher has good taste in music.” The reason is that even if you think that teachers should have good taste in music, you presumably do not think that this is something that follows from the characteristic ideals of being a teacher.

Okay then, what do we even mean when we speak of the “characteristic ideals” of a particular kind of thing? Unfortunately, I don’t know. I wish I could say something more helpful about this, but I don’t feel like I have a good handle on it yet.

Instead, I just want to suggest that this somewhat mysterious kind of normativity is really a big deal, i.e., that all sorts of different questions we face in understanding people’s ordinary cognition boil down to understanding this kind of normativity, meaning that if we could understand it, we would be able to understand all sorts of different aspects of the way people think.

In people’s ordinary way of thinking about things, people don’t seem to be concerned only about what you should do. They also seem to be very concerned about what follows from certain sorts of characteristic ideals. People have a notion of the characteristic ideals of being a teacher, the characteristic ideals of being a scientist, the characteristic ideals of being a Christian. Then they also have a way of thinking about the characteristic ideals of certain sorts of situations and certain sorts of objects. These notions seem to be right at the heart of people’s ordinary way of making sense of the world.

Just as a first step down this road, consider sentences like:

  • That’s not how one behaves at a Jewish wedding.

Or, more colloquially:

  • That’s not how you behave at a Jewish wedding.

Sentences like these seem to express something pretty fundamental about how people ordinarily understand the behavior that is called for in certain situations. We have a sense that it is sometimes possible to identify a certain behavior that is just “what one does” in a particular type of situation. This notion seems to be normative in some important sense, but how should that normativity be understood?

James Kirkpatrick and I have argued that they are normative in the same hard-to-capture sense that generics are normative. What do we mean when we say that something is “what you do at a Jewish wedding”? We don’t just mean something like: when someone is at a Jewish wedding, she should do this thing. Rather, we are saying something more like: doing this is a way of conforming to the characteristic ideals that follow from being at a Jewish wedding. (For example, you might think that the best thing to do if you are at a Jewish wedding is to ignore all the proceedings and start thinking instead about some profound philosophical question – but this has nothing to do with the characteristic ideal of Jewish weddings per se, and you could not speak about it using this specific type of sentence.)

Now consider the traditional philosophical question regarding knowledge attributions like:

  • Rachel knows how to behave at a Jewish wedding.

This sentence also seems to be saying something normative. It isn’t just saying that Rachel knows something that would be a way of behaving at a Jewish wedding; it seems to be saying that Rachel knows that “right” way of behaving, or the way of behaving that conforms to certain ideals. But which ideals? An obvious hypothesis would be: the exact same ideal we discussed in the previous paragraph. That is, the sentence means something at least broadly like: Rachel knows a way of behaving that conforms to the characteristic ideals that follow from being an action performed at a Jewish wedding.

Finally, consider judgments about persistence over time. Suppose that today we form a club for discussing recent experiments and call it the “Experiment Discussion Club.” Over the course of many years, certain features of the original club are lost but others are retained. Now suppose someone looks at the thing that exists ten years from now and says:

  • Ultimately, this isn’t even the Experiment Discussion Club anymore.

How do people decide whether this sentence is true or false?

In a series of amazing papers, Kevin Tobia finds experimental evidence that intuitions about persistence over time in cases like these depend on something normative. Basically, people’s intuitions depend on whether the changes involve the object getting better vs. worse. People will be especially inclined to say that the club isn’t even the Experiment Discussion Club anymore if it gets a lot worse, whereas if the club changes by getting a whole lot better, people will say that it is still the Experiment Discussion Club – just a more awesome version of that club.

But better in which specific sense? It certainly doesn’t seem that it is just a matter of getting better in any old way. For example, suppose people in the club stopped doing experiments entirely and instead focused on fighting for human rights. You might think that this would make the club better, but it would not make the club better at being the Experiment Discussion Club. It seems that it is not just a matter of being better but rather a matter of being better at embodying the specific ideals that are characteristic of the object itself.

Second-Order Desires Are Not What Matters

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

Here’s a classic philosophical thought experiment: Sandra is struggling with an addiction to heroin. She desperately wants another hit, but she wishes she didn’t. She wishes that she could stop craving heroin and that she could start living a very different life. Faced with this thought experiment, many people have the intuition that Sandra’s desire to do heroin is not part of her true self – that Sandra’s true self is entirely on the other side of this inner conflict.

Now consider a reversed version of the classic thought experiment: Sandra has a visceral aversion to using heroin, but she wishes that she didn’t feel that way. Many of her friends are using heroin, and it’s clearly the easiest way to fit in with the people in her social group, so she wishes that she could stop feeling this aversion and just start using heroin like all her friends are. In this reversed case, do you have the same intuition? Does it seem like Sandra’s aversion to doing heroin is not part of her true self – that her true self is entirely on the other side of this inner conflict?

Within the philosophical literature, the usual view about the original version of this thought experiment is that the agent’s desire does not count as a part of her true self because she completely rejects this desire. Then a lot of the literature is about precisely how to cash out the broad idea that she is somehow rejecting a part of her own self (in terms of second-order desires, or in terms of identification, or in terms of her values, and so forth).

But none of this stuff has anything to do with the actual reason why we have this intuition! The reason we have the intuition that her desire isn’t part of her true self has nothing to do with the fact that she herself rejects this desire. Instead, it has everything to do with the fact that the desire in question is a desire to do heroin. There’s something about this specific desire that makes people think it is not part of the agent’s true self, and if we want to understand the way people ordinarily understand the true self, we need some way of making sense of this.

Within the literature in experimental philosophy and psychology, the usual view is that people think an agent’s true self is drawing that agent toward things that truly are good. Thus, if one part of the agent’s self is drawing the agent to use heroin and another part of the agent’s self is drawing the agent to refrain, people will have a general tendency to think that the part of the agent that is drawing her to use heroin is not her true self. This tendency doesn’t have anything to do with which part of the agent is the part that the agent herself rejects. Independent of anything like that, it is just a very fundamental tendency to think that the deeper essence of the agent is the part of her that is drawing her to the good.

As a result, experimental philosophy research finds that people show a general tendency to think that bad desires are less full part of the agent true self. In cases like the classic philosophical thought experiment, where the desire that the agent rejects is a desire to do something bad, people think that the desire that the agent rejects is not part of her true self. But in cases like the reversed version, where the desire that the agent rejects is a desire to do something good, people tend to think that this desire is a part of her true self.

This effect seems to connect with some much deeper philosophical issues that have nothing to do with second-order desires or anything like that. Basically, it seems like when people are thinking about what is most essential about an object, they tend to pick out what is good about that object. This isn’t just something about how they think about agents; it arises much more generally. For example, if you are reading an academic paper and you think that there is a lot of pointless stuff in it but that there is also an idea of genuine value, you will tend to think that the real essence of the paper is the valuable idea. And when people are thinking about what is most essential about the United States – what the United States is “really all about” – they tend to think about the good things about the United States. This is an important but mysterious phenomenon, and I don’t think we have a good understanding of it quite yet. It seems to involve some important connection in the ways people ordinarily think about essence, teleology and value.

But if we want to understand the role of things like reflective endorsement and second-order desires, then clearly, we need to be wary of looking at cases in which peoples intuition are determined by this other factor. Surely, it is cheating to look at cases in which the agent has a second-order desire not to do something that we ourselves regard as bad. If the action in question is something like doing heroin, then there’s an unrelated psychological process that will lead us to see the desire is not being part of the true self. If we want to understand the role of second-order desires per se, we should look at cases in which the desire itself is not something that we would independently see as particularly bad or good.

So let’s introduce a third case in which you have no independent ideas about whether the desire is good or bad: Sandra is an undergraduate student who is caught between two different majors, A and B. She has a strong desire to focus on major A, but when she reflects about what she is doing, she thinks that she should focus entirely on major B. Sometimes she finds herself staying up at night reading books related to A or writing in her journal about questions related to A, but when she thinks about it, she always concludes that this is a big mistake. She wants to stop wanting to study A so that she can focus on what she think she really ought to do, which is B. In this case, which of the two desires would you see as coming from Sandra’s true self? 

If you are like most people, then when faced with cases of this type, you specifically have the opposite of the intuition aligned with the traditional view. That is, when there are two desires such that one align with the agent’s unreflective urges and the other with the agent’s reflective endorsement, the desire associated with more reflective endorsement is seen as less part of her true self.

Given all this, why might people have had thought that there was some special connection between reflective endorsement and the true self? I don’t know the answer, but in closing, I want to briefly mention one speculative hypothesis. Perhaps the issue is that it just generally happens in life that we more often encounter cases like the classic philosophical experiment in the first paragraph of this post than cases like the reversed version in the second paragraph. That is, when we see an agent who has an unreflective urge toward a behavior but who completely rejects that behavior at a reflective level, we very frequently think that the behavior is something bad. As a result, we normally think that the desires that the agent rejects on reflection are not part of her true self.

But this is just a statistical correlation. Ultimately, second-order desires are not what matters. It’s not as though we have the intuition that these desires are not part of the agent’s true self because the agent wishes she didn’t have them. Rather, we have that intuition because the desires have a certain other quality, and that other quality happens to frequently arise in cases where people reject their own desires.

The Power of Norms

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

In many communities, there is a shared sense that if someone disses you, it is pretty normal to react by punching them. But academia is not like that. In academia, if someone disses your research, it would be considered wildly abnormal to react by punching them. This shared understanding then has a very large impact on behavior. If you understand how academia works, you almost certainly will not react to someone who disses your research by punching them. This is an example of the power of norms.

One common view about the power of norms is that they operate by having an impact on people’s beliefs. For example, one might think that people observe that academics never never punch each other and therefore conclude that punching people is bad (or that punching people would lead to negative social consequences, or some other belief of this sort). I don’t think that this is the right way to understand the power of norms, and I want to sketch a very different approach.

To begin with, let’s note an obvious but deeply important fact about how people make decisions. Typically, when we face a choice, there are an enormous number of possible options, but we only consider a small subset of these options. For example, suppose someone points out a problem in my research, and I am trying to figure out how to respond. Perhaps I would consider three possible options: address the issue by doing further empirical work, or by doing further computational work, or just don’t do anything. As for all other possible options, I simply would not think about them at all. Take the possible of trying to learn some organic chemistry in the hopes that this will give me a valuable insight into the problem. Most likely, this option just would not occur to me.

Now let’s note a second key fact. When it comes to the options that people don’t consider, people might not form any belief about whether those options are good or bad. Thus, suppose someone says: “I notice that he did not respond to this problem by learning organic chemistry. Is that because he believes that learning organic chemistry wouldn’t be a good way to address it?” The correct answer would be: “No! He hasn’t formed any beliefs at all about whether learning organic chemistry would be a good way to address this problem. The whole possibility has not occurred to him.”

This is where we see the power of norms. When an option violates a norm, people tend not to think about it all. (For experimental evidence, see this paper.) So if there is a norm in academia that you can’t respond to disses by punching people, the usual upshot would be that people who are dissed just don’t even consider the possibility of responding to disses with punches. The whole idea just never occurs to them. My point is that this is the power of norms: they completely transform our lives by having an impact on which possibilities occur to us and which do not.

This phenomenon is not a matter of existing norms leading people to conclude that certain options are bad. It is something much more fundamental. Indeed, if someone does form the belief that a particular option is bad, this would show that the norm was not exerting the sort of power one might have expected it to have. Consider an academic who thinks: “Well, there are clear disadvantages to punching this person.” The very fact that an academic is thinking this at all should make us think that the norm does not have the kind of grip on them we would expect it to have.

So let’s distinguish the ways that norms can impact beliefs vs. the ways that norms can truly have a power over you and transform your whole way of thinking about life. To begin with, it’s clear that norms can indeed change your beliefs. If I ask you what you think about responding to a particular academic criticism by starting a fistfight, you might think about that option and go through a process in which you infer something from the fact that you never observe anyone performing this behavior. But this is not an example of the power of norms! On the contrary, it is an example of a case in which norms are not able to exert their full power. When we are truly in the grip of a norm, it’s not just that the norm impacts what we think of an option – it’s that it impacts which options we even think of at all.

Changing Explanatory Theories vs. Changing Norms

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

Suppose you want to do something to decrease the amount of sexist behavior in the world. One thing you might do is try to change people’s explanatory theories. Perhaps you think that sexism is caused in part by people seeing certain outcomes as the result of a biological essence. You might then try an intervention in which you change people’s beliefs about gender and biology. A very different strategy would be to try to change prevailing norms. Some overtly sexist things were considered normal in the America of fifty years ago but are considered highly abnormal in America right now. So in a culture like today’s America, there might be certain sexist behaviors that almost never even come to mind as possible options.

The difference between these two approaches (theories vs. norms) is a very fundamental one. In this quick post, I want to focus on bringing out just one of the key differences. Changing people’s theories is the kind of thing one might be able to do in, say, 10 minutes. But changing norms is not like that. If you want to change the norms in a community, you can’t do it in 10 minutes. It’s the sort of thing you would hope to accomplish over the course of 10 years.

First, consider the point about theories. We are all familiar with times where we are wondering why something is happening, we read something that tells us the answer, and then we immediately adjust our explanatory theory. That’s just how theories work. The same point then arises for theories about social issues. At the moment, I have no idea why it is that such a high percentage of chess grandmasters are male. So if you presented me with a magazine article that provided strong evidence for a particular explanation, there’s a very good chance you could convince me. Over the course of 10 minutes or so, I might go from a state of having no idea why this happens to a state of being convinced by your explanatory theory. One might wonder whether this intervention would have any deep effect on my behavior, but at a minimum, it would successfully change my beliefs.

Changing norms is a fundamentally different type of process. If a given community has a norm of telling lots of sexist jokes, there’s no way you could possibly change that norm through a 10 minute intervention. That’s just not the way norms work. The process of changing a norm requires much more time and effort. As a simple illustration, there has recently been a change of norms that led to the use of preregistration, open data and open code, but that change took around a decade or so.

Of course, one might think it could be possible to have a quick intervention that led to a big change in people’s perceptions of the norms in their community, but studies indicate that this hope is also not warranted. There has been a lot of research about interventions that briefly tell people about the percentage of folks in their community who perform a particular behavior, but research finds that this sort of quick intervention rarely works. Presumably, the reason is that quickly telling people about certain percentages is not something that can change their representation of the community norm in the relevant sense.

With all this in the background, let’s now consider a very general hypothesis. I’m not sure whether the hypothesis is true, but I do think it is very much worth considering.

The hypothesis is that quick interventions like changing people’s explanatory theories just fundamentally do not work. If you want to do something that changes someone’s psychological states in a way that would lead that person to engage in less sexist behavior, there is no way you can do that through an intervention that lasts 10 minutes. The only things that work are large interventions like changing the norms within a community, which typically take years to complete.

Before the replication crisis, it certainly seemed as though we had lots of evidence that quick interventions on explanatory theories could yield large effects on behavior – but most of that evidence seems to be evaporating. Growth mindset interventions designed to change people’s explanatory theories about achievement don’t seem to lead to higher achievement. Interventions designed to change beliefs about free will don’t seem to impact cheating behavior. Interventions designed to change beliefs about genetics don’t seem to have much impact on judgments about punishment. Some recent studies indicate that interventions designed to reduce genetic essentialism don’t have any impact on prejudice.

One possible reaction to all of this would be that we haven’t yet found the exact right interventions on explanatory theories or the exact right downstream behaviors to measure… but another possible reaction would be that we are just fundamentally not looking in the right place.

Call: “Experimental Argument Analysis”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Immediately before the next “European X-Phi Conference,” a satellite workshop on “Experimental Argument Analysis – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Verbal Reasoning,” organized by Eugen Fischer, Paul Engelhardt, and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga​, will be held from July 9 to 10, 2025, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. It aims to “bring together researchers from experimental philosophy, cognitive psychology, and experimental linguistics, to open up the experimental philosophy of verbal reasoning as a new interdisciplinary field of study.”

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until March 1, 2025. The call reads:

There will be 3 slots for submitted papers that address the research questions below. Accommodation will be covered for the 3 presenters. Any papers not accepted to the workshop will automatically be considered for the experimental philosophy conference. Papers will be allocated a 40-minute slot and should leave 10–15 minutes for discussion. Anonymized abstracts of up to 500 words (not counting references or figure captions) should be submitted through the submission point for the 5th European X-Phi conference. Please indicate that you submit the abstract for a talk at the EAA workshop.

Deadline: March 1st, 2025.

Submission link​

Questions:

To help develop interdisciplinary experimental argument analysis as a fruitful successor project to traditional conceptual analysis that benefits from advances in cognitive psychology and experimental linguistics, this workshop will address questions about methods, cognitive mechanisms, and philosophical applications:

  • Methods: How can empirical studies support the reconstruction or evaluation of verbal reasoning? Which conceptual and empirical tools can be adapted for this purpose and how? How can formal and experimental methods be combined to facilitate normative evaluation?
  • Mechanisms: How do automatic comprehension and production inferences shape verbal reasoning? What biases affect such inferences? Which factors affect specifically the contextualization of default inferences? How are irregular polysemes processed? What norms do people rely on for specific arguments of interest? How much individual variation is there in this respect?
  • Applications: How can insights into language processing, and specifically polysemy processing, support the assessment of philosophical arguments? How effective are verbal arguments at changing people’s minds? Which aspects of automatic language processing influence the persuasiveness of verbal arguments? To what extent do such arguments contribute to philosophical puzzles and paradoxes? How can insight into automatic language processing support the improvement of our conceptual tools?

For the preliminary program, visit the workshop’s website.

Talk: “The Invocational Impact of Slurs” (Elin McCready and Christopher Davis)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, November 9, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Elin McCready and Christopher Davis’ talk “The Invocational Impact of Slurs” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

Rappaport (2019) articulates three distinct components that together constitute the meaning profile of slur terms: 1. descriptive: Slurs denote particular groups of people; 2. evaluative: Slurs communicate or signal the speaker’s negative attitudes towards the group so denoted; 3. affective: Slurs are capable of “expressing powerful emotions and causing a strong emotional response in hearers”. We build on this three-component model of slur meanings, arguing that the slur’s descriptive content is encoded in its at-issue semantic denotation. The evaluative component has received the bulk of attention in both the linguistic and philosophical literature. It is this component that drives the intuition that use of a slur term signals some kind of negative sentiment on the part of the speaker toward the group picked out by the term. We argue for a non-conventionalist account of this meaning component, in which the evaluative component is derived through a particular kind of inference, as argued by Nunberg (2018), Pullum (2018), and Rappaport (2019). We argue further that the mechanism underlying this inference is of a kind with (at least some instances of) indexical meaning as articulated in third-wave sociolinguistics (Eckert, 2008, 2018). Our primary aim in this talk is to better understand Rappaport’s affectiv component, and to get clarity about how this component relates to the other two. In Rappaport’s formulation, this component includes (i) the expression of powerful emotions, and (ii) the elicitation of powerful emotions. It is the second subcomponent we focus attention on here: how do slur terms come by their ability to cause distress to those who perceive them? We concur with Rappaport’s view that the impact of a slur term cannot be fully derived from its evaluative component, contra e.g. Nunberg (2018) and Pullum (2018). We will argue instead that a slur’s impact derives from what we term invocational meaning, whose characteristic property is to unilaterally alter the discourse context by bringing to contextual and cognitive prominence a pre-existing but possibly backgrounded complex, achieved by mere mention (or more strictly speaking, mere perception) of the invoking term itself. Time permitting, we will discuss extensions of this model to non-slur terms as well.

The talk can be joined using Zoom. Please write an email to stalnetwork@gmail.com for the invitation link.

Call: “5th European Experimental Philosophy Conference”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The next “European X-Phi Conference” is coming! Experimental philosophers from all over Europe (and the world) will meet from July 10 to 12, 2025, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. Emma Borg (University of London), Susan Gelman (University of Michigan), Nat Hansen (University of Reading), and Joshua Knobe (Yale University) have been confirmed as keynote speakers.

From July 9 to 10, 2025, a satellite workshop on “Experimental Argument Analysis – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Verbal Reasoning” will also be held, featuring a keynote address from Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh).

Abstracts for talks, posters, and symposia can be submitted until March 1, 2025. The call reads:

The conference welcomes contributions from all areas of experimental philosophy. We welcome three kinds of contributions: talks, posters, and symposia.

Talks will be allocated 30-minute slots and should leave 5–10 minutes for discussion. Symposia will be allocated 2 hours and should consist of three talks and a panel discussion involving the three speakers and possibly up to two further discussants, all addressing one overarching question or topic from different perspectives. We encourage adversarial collaboration for this format.

Deadline: March 1st, 2025

Submission link​

Decisions by April 1st, 2025.

Submitting authors need to have or create a profile on OpenReview. Whereas new profiles with an institutional email will be activated automatically, new profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks.

Abstracts for talks and posters should be anonymised for review and not exceed 500 words. References and figure captions do not count towards the word limit.

Abstracts for symposia should be submitted as a single file, name the symposiasts, and consist of a 500-word introduction that sets out the questions and rationale of the symposium as well as 500-word abstracts for each talk and a shorter abstract for the panel discussion, indicating the guiding questions to be discussed and the discussants involved. References and figure captions do not count towards the word limit.

Submitted symposia contributions will automatically be considered for inclusion as regular talks, if the symposium submission cannot be accepted. Submitted talks will be automatically considered for poster presentations, if they cannot be accepted as talks.

The number of submissions for talks is capped at one per corresponding author. For joint papers, the submitting/corresponding author should always be the first author. A corresponding author may be named as a co-author of joint papers submitted for talks by other corresponding authors. For accepted talks, the submitting/corresponding author should be the main presenter of the talk at the conference. There are no limitations on poster submissions.

Please note the separate CFA for the satellite workshop. We are delighted to be able to subsidise the accommodation costs of speakers presenting submitted talks at the satellite workshop.

For more information, visit the conference’s website or email xphieurope2025@gmail.com​.