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.
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.