On Monday, January 20, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Kristen Syrett and Misha Becker’s talk “How Language Supports the Acquisition of Predicates of Mental States and Emotions” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:
As children acquire adjectives, they must tackle the challenge that while some properties denoted by these predicates are stable and visually salient (e.g., color, shape), others (e.g., emotions and mental states like happy, sad, or confident) lack a reliable physical correlate, and are typically only inferable via second order characteristics. How, then, do children master the meanings of adjectives that label these fleeting, internal, abstract states? One answer may lie in the very linguistic environment in which these adjectives appear. Previous work in language acquisition has documented the power of the frame and complementation patterns for verb learning, subject form for control and raising verbs, count syntax for acquiring nouns, and adverbial modification for different types of gradable adjectives. In this talk, I draw on this prior work to lay a foundation for a series of experiments investigating how children might recruit both syntactic and semantic cues in the input to narrow the hypothesis space for emotion/mental state adjective meaning. I begin by presenting extensive evidence from CHILDES corpora showing that while these adjectives are relatively infrequent in the input, they diverge from other adjectives (e.g., those of color, shape, size, or multidimensional subjective adjectives) in their preference of syntactic position, their requirements on subject animacy, and their syntactic complementation patterns. Next, I present data from a set of word guessing studies using scripted dialogues that both adults and older children (age 5–8) recruit the type of subject and syntactic complement to constrain adjective meaning. Finally, I present a set of binary forced-choice word learning studies putting emotion/mental state against color and shape showing once again, that the presence of an animate subject and syntactic complement points to an emotion/mental state adjective meaning, this time for preschoolers. Taken together, these experiments – the first to document the combined power of syntax and semantics for acquiring abstract adjective meaning – make connections between emotion/mental state adjectives and mental state verbs in word learning, thereby further demonstrating the potential universality of syntactic bootstrapping, and the role of language itself in focusing young word learners’ attention on mental aspects of the situation that are not readily observable.
The talk can be joined using Zoom. Please write an email to stalnetwork@gmail.com for the invitation link.
Abstracts for presentations, symposia, and posters can be submitted until January 31. The call reads:
Call for papers, symposia and posters
The European Philosophy of Science Association invites submissions for its 10th biennial meeting, EPSA25, to be held in Groningen (Netherlands) on 27-30 August 2025.
The conference will feature contributed talks, symposia, and posters covering all subfields of the philosophy of science and will bring together a large number of philosophers of science from Europe and overseas.
We also welcome philosophically minded scientists and investigators from areas outside the philosophy of science, for example, as symposium participants; and we particularly welcome submissions from women, ethnic minorities, and other under-represented groups in the profession. Childcare facilities will be provided.
The conference has ten sections:
General Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of the Physical Sciences
Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Philosophy of the Cognitive Sciences
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Philosophy of Technology and Philosophy of Interdisciplinary Research
Philosophy of Science in Practice
Formal Philosophy of Science
Ethical and Political Issues Concerning Science
Integrated History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science
The EPSA25 Programme Committee, headed by Marie I. Kaiser (Bielefeld) and Olivier Sartenaer (Namur), will strive for quality, variety, and diversity on the programme. A selection of accepted contributed and symposium papers will appear in the European Journal of Philosophy of Science (EJPS).
Submission Categories
We invite submissions in any of the following three categories:
1. Contributed Papers
Submissions of proposals for contributed papers to be presented at the conference must contain a short abstract (max. 1000 characters) as well as an extended abstract (max. 1000 words).
The short abstract must be copied or typed into the abstract field in the conference management system EasyChair (https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=epsa25). The short abstract will be used for assigning reviewers. Please include the number and title of the most relevant section at the end of the abstract. In addition, please tick up to 4 sections that apply to the submission in the topic section of the submission form in EasyChair. This information will be used to optimize the schedule of the conference.
The extended abstract must start with the title of the paper as it is also typed into the submission form. The extended abstract serves as the basis for the review. Please prepare it for blind review and submit it as a PDF file.
Please tick whether you want your submission to be considered for the poster session in case of non-acceptance as a talk, or whether the submission should be considered only as a talk.
The allocated time for delivering contributed papers as talks at the conference will be 30 minutes, including discussion. Presenters are expected to be present at the conference.
2. Symposia
Submission of proposals for symposia to be presented at the conference must contain a short abstract (max. 1000 characters) as well as a full proposal (max. 3000 words).
The short abstract must be typed into the abstract form in the conference management system EasyChair (https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=epsa25). The short abstract will be used for assigning reviewers. Please include the number and title of the most relevant section at the end of the abstract. In addition, please tick all sections that apply to the submission in the topic section of the submission form in EasyChair. This information will be used to optimize the schedule of the conference.
The full symposium proposal must start with the title of the symposium as it is also typed into the submission form. In addition, it must include the contact details of the organizer(s), who may or may not be speaker(s), the names and short CVs of all speakers (max. 1 page in total), a general description of the topic, its significance and how the individual talks contribute to the topic and relate to each other (max. 1500 words), as well as titles and abstracts of all talks (max. 300 words for each). The full symposium proposal serves as the basis for the review. Please submit it as a PDF file.
Accepted symposia will be allocated 120 minutes, including discussions. They can have any format, but the maximum number of speakers is five. If a symposium has a classical format (successive talks & discussions) we encourage the organizers to include four talks (each 30 min) to fall in with the rhythm of contributed talks.
Symposium proposals that explore connections between different areas or research programmes in philosophy of science or between philosophy of science and sciences are especially encouraged. Online presentation will be allowed in symposia, but they should be exceptions and well justified. Plans for online presentation must be described in the symposium proposal.
3. Posters
We invite contributions of posters, which will be presented in a dedicated poster session. Posters can be submitted either specifically for the poster session or as a second option for papers that are also submitted as contributed talks.
Submissions of proposals for posters must contain a short abstract (max. 1000 characters) as well as an extended abstract (max. 1000 words). For poster submissions, please follow the guidelines for contributed papers and select the submission category “poster” (or “contributed paper” and poster option “yes”).
Submission Guidelines and Rules
The deadline for all submissions is by 31 January 2025, 11.55pm GMT.
Authors can simultaneously make one submission for each of the three above types (contributed paper, symposium, poster), but any author can appear on the programme only once as a presenter. In case of acceptance of multiple submissions by one author, the programme committee will give symposium participation priority over contributed talks and contributed talks over posters.
For co-authored contributed papers, symposium papers, and posters, only one presenter of the paper or poster must be chosen and identified as such in EasyChair. Accordingly, authors presenting at EPSA25 may also appear as co-authors of other papers that are part of the programme, but not as first author/presenter.
Decisions on the acceptance of submissions will be made by the end of April 2025.
To present at the conference, the conference fee must be paid before 31 May 2025. In addition, presenters must be active and paying members of the EPSA.
The final program of the conference will be released in June 2025.
Contact us
For all enquiries related to EPSA25 submissions, please contact the following mailbox: epsa.pc@philsci.eu
In a previous post, I wrote about a course (which I taught together with Stephan Kornmesser in the summer term of 2024) for master’s students who had no previous contact with X-Phi at all. After learning some methodological and statistical basics and conducting their own small replication of Knobe (2003), they had the opportunity to develop their own questions and conduct their very own studies in small groups. Below, Johannes Bavendiek, Marvin Jonas Laesecke, and Aileen Wiechmann present some results from their study on the perception of civil disobedience.
The Perception of Civil Disobedience
Johannes Bavendiek, Marvin Jonas Laesecke, and Aileen Wiechmann
Civil disobedience is a highly topical issue in light of current political events and protests. For example, groups of protesters like the “Letzte Generation” in Germany currently use this form of protest, fighting current climate change legislation. However, the legitimation of civil disobedience in their case was questioned by wider parts of society. Further, the definition of non-violence as an essential condition for civil disobedience turned out vague and unclear. In which cases is a protest violent in people’s eyes, and which kind of civil disobedience is considered legitimate? Does it make a difference who’s affected by the consequences of civil disobedience or does only the manner of the protest matter? These questions will be explored in this survey.
As a part of political philosophy, different philosophers over time have defined the term “civil disobedience” and discussed its potential influence on society, (in)justice, and democracy. Philosophers like Henry David Thoreau, John Rawls, Hannah Arendt, or Jürgen Habermas are some of them (see, e.g., Thoreau 1849, Rawls 1999, Arendt 2000, Habermas 1983). In the following, we focus on Jürgen Habermas’ definition. His work is one of the most recent ones focusing on civil disobedience as a part of modern democracy, and he refers to Rawls’ definition of the term. Focusing on Habermas seems fitting because the context of a modern democracy makes the definition most applicable to a survey addressed to people in Germany nowadays.
According to Jürgen Habermas (with reference to John Rawls), civil disobedience is a form of protest often aiming for a change in government policy and/or laws, and a protest has to meet four conditions to be classified as civil disobedience (cf. Habermas 1983, 34ff.). The protest has to be
determined by conscience,
a deliberate infringement,
a public act, and
non-violent.
We chose to approach this with an online questionnaire and created a number of vignettes in which a company intended to clear woodland and resettle a village in favor of coal mining. A protest group used (a) different variants of civil disobedience against (b) either police officers or civilians. All of the above-named conditions were always fulfilled except for the last one. Only the manner of protest as well as the group of affected people were varied.
Regarding the manner of civil disobedience (a), we created three different levels of (non)violence, ranging from nonviolent (peacefully not clearing the forest) to a more violent manner (blocking people on the street) to the most violent manner (throwing rocks at people). Changing the manners of protest allowed us to compare the perception of different levels of (non)violence and to evaluate which manners of protests were perceived as more or less violent and as more or less legitimate. Additionally, the variation of people affected by the protests (b) allowed us to investigate whether who’s affected by the consequences makes a difference in the judgement of (non)violence and (il)legitimacy. This leaves us with the five between-subjects variations displayed in Table 1.
Affected Group / Manner of Protest
Peaceful
Blocking
Throwing
Civilians
1
2
3
Police
1
4
5
Table 1: Between-subjects variations
Here is a translation of the vignette for variation 1:
A company plans to clear an old forest for coal mining and relocate a village in the process. The company complies with all legal standards, legally purchases the mining rights, and compensates the village’s inhabitants. However, a group of people filed a lawsuit against this deforestation, as they do not see coal mining as sustainable in terms of climate protection but rather as a threat to the future. The courts do not uphold this complaint. Even after long demonstrations, no change can be brought about at the company. The clearing of the forest comes closer, and the group decides to occupy the forest illegally by chaining themselves to the trees. They do this because it is not in their conscience for the forest to be cleared for coal mining or for the village to be relocated. The group also invites the press to draw public attention to their concerns. The group does not voluntarily comply with the eviction order but allows the police to remove them peacefully.
In variation 2, the last part is changed to the following:
The group does not voluntarily comply with the eviction order. When the eviction is announced, they also block the access roads to the forest to avoid the eviction. Civilians are blocked in their everyday lives.
In variation 3, it reads:
The group does not voluntarily comply with the eviction order. When the eviction is announced, they also block the access roads to the forest to avoid the eviction. Civilians are blocked in their everyday lives. When the civilians try to break up the blockade by carrying all kinds of objects and the now chained demonstrators to the side, the demonstrators take stones and throw them at the civilians.
In variations 4 and 5, “civilians” is simply replaced with “policemen.”
A total of 265 participants took part in our survey. Our findings are summarized in Figure 1, below, reporting the results of χ² tests between two variations for the yes-or-no questions “Is this kind of protest justified in a democracy?” (Justification) and “Would you classify this type of protest as violent?” (Violence).
Figure 1: Results of χ² tests between two variations for Justification and Violence
Comparing the manners of protest, we did not find a significant difference between peaceful protest and blocking civilians or policemen (neither regarding Justification nor Violence). However, the evaluation for throwing rocks significantly differs from peaceful protest and blocking people (regarding both Justification and Violence). This means that it didn’t matter to our participants whether the group protested peacefully or if they blocked someone; both of these manners were perceived as significantly less violent and more legitimate than throwing rocks.
Surprisingly, it didn’t make a difference (neither regarding Justification nor Violence) to our participants whether civilians or policemen were affected (“Blocking Civilians” vs. “Blocking Policemen” as well as “Throwing Rocks at Civilians” vs. “Throwing Rocks at Policemen” are not evaluated significantly different). Another surprising result is that about one-third of our participants didn’t consider throwing rocks violent in case civilians were affected. Also, one-third considered the peaceful protest to be illegitimate. About 38% even considered it to be violent.
Arendt, Hannah (2000): In der Gegenwart. Übungen zum politischen Denken II, Munich: Piper.
Habermas, Jürgen (1983): “Ziviler Ungehorsam – Testfall für den demokratischen Rechtsstaat. Wider den autoritären Legalismus in der Bundesrepublik,” in Peter Glotz (ed.): Ziviler Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 29–53.
Knobe, Joshua (2003): “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,” Analysis 63 (3), 190–194.
Rawls, John (1999): A Theory of Justice, revised edition, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Thoreau, Henry David (1849): “Resistance to Civil Government,” in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (ed.): Æsthetic Papers, Boston and New York: E. Peabody and G. P. Putnam, 189–211.
Applications are possible until November 25. The job announcement reads:
PhD scholarship at GSN
You can apply for a neurophilosophy PhD scholarship in an annually recurring call for scholarships (application period from early December to mid-February). The GSN offers a structured doctoral program with an independent PhD (GSN Doctoral Program), in which you can choose from a wide range of interdisciplinary courses together with your TAC (Thesis Advisory Board) to put together an interdisciplinary study program tailored to your individual research interests. This gives you a sound neuroscientific insight into the (natural) scientific contexts that are important for your neurophilosophical doctoral project. In addition, there is an extensive range of “soft skills” and an attractive social program.
Call for PhD scholarships in Neurophilosophy
The application round for 2024/25 is now open and will close on 17 February 2025 (12:00 noon CET).
The Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences (GSN) at LMU Munich invites applications for several PhD scholarships in Neurophilosophy. The GSN is the teaching entity for the Munich Center of Neurosciences – Brain & Mind (MCN). By creating an interdisciplinary network of research, the GSN provides a stimulating environment for students and faculty to produce novel formulations of current concepts and theories. Successful applicants will be affiliated with the Research Center for Neurophilosophy and Ethics of Neurosciences at the GSN.
Projects in the research center fall in the following areas:
philosophy of cognitive neuroscience (explanation, reduction)
philosophy and cognitive science of agency (mental causation, free will, moral psychology, abilities)
philosophy and cognitive science of reasoning (e.g. deductive and non-deductive reasoning, logic and neural networks, decision making)
ethics of neuroscience (research ethics, enhancement)
philosophy of perception
philosophy and social cognition
In the new application round we encourage applications in smaller focus areas in order to build research groups. In the 2024/25 round the focus areas are:
human agency (esp. mental causation, complex action, multi-tasking, attention, reductive and non-reductive explanation of agency)
metacognition (esp. metacognition in perception, self-evaluation and sense of self)
group cognition (group epistemology, collective decisions and group responsibility)
However, single exceptional and independent projects in one of the other areas are also encouraged.
Applicants should have advanced training in philosophy (typically a Master’s degree in philosophy) and a genuine interest in the neurosciences. This includes the willingness to acquire substantial knowledge of empirical work relevant to their philosophical project. Cooperative projects with empirical scientists in the network of the MCN are strongly encouraged.
The application period will open on 1 December 2024 and will close on 17 February 2025 (12:00 noon CET). Please check our website and the GSN website for details concerning the application procedure. The application includes an outline of your proposed research project, a CV, an official transcript of your academic work (list of attended courses; grades), diplomas and two separate academic reference letters. Please also name two potential supervisors (possibly including one non-philosopher) from the core or affiliated neurophilosophy faculty of the GSN.
How to apply for a GSN PhD scholarship
Please follow the standard application process for GSN PhD applications:
Abstracts for articles can be submitted until March 31. The call reads:
The nature and structure of concepts have been a central focus of philosophical inquiry for centuries. Understanding how humans develop and apply concepts is essential for various fields, including language, cognition, and reasoning. In recent times, advancements in cognitive science have revitalized these discussions by providing philosophers with empirical tools to more thoroughly investigate and refine these debates. This blend of philosophical theories and empirical findings has led to new insights and perspectives, deepening the understanding of conceptual structures and how they are formed.
Historically, the study of concepts has evolved through diverse philosophical lenses. From the abstract Forms of Plato to Aristotle’s empirical categorization, through the rationalist and empiricist debates of Descartes, Locke, and Hume, to Kant’s synthesis of innate structures and sensory experiences, each era has reshaped the discussion. In modern philosophy, thinkers such as Wittgenstein further transformed the understanding by linking concepts closely to language and its use within social practices.
In the current context, numerous hypotheses have been proposed to explain the essence and mechanisms of concepts. Philosophers have integrated findings from fields such as experimental psychology, cognitive anthropology, neuroscience, linguistics, and ethology to develop and test these ideas.
The Special Issue of Arkete 2024 aims to enrich this ongoing conversation by presenting diverse research and analyses.
Key questions for exploration in this issue include:
How does concept formation occur?
What are the primary characteristics of concept formation?
What role do empirical findings play in shaping our understanding of concept formation?
How does concept formation occur?
What are the primary characteristics of concept formation?
What role do empirical findings play in shaping our understanding of concept formation?
Identifying attributes
Grouping objects/events based on similarities and differences
Generalization and abstraction
Testing and refining hypotheses about categories
Impact of linguistic labels on concept acquisition
Cross-cultural variations in concept formation
Role of memory in concept learning
Neural networks and brain regions involved (e.g., prefrontal cortex, hippocampus)
Connectionist models
Misconceptions and cognitive biases
Influence of prior knowledge
Difficulty with abstract or counterintuitive concepts
Contributors are invited to submit articles for consideration. Submissions should be in English and must not exceed 40,000 characters, including notes and spaces.
In a previous post, I wrote about a course (which I taught together with Stephan Kornmesser in the summer term of 2024) for master’s students who had no previous contact with X-Phi at all. After learning some methodological and statistical basics and conducting their own small replication of Knobe (2003), they had the opportunity to develop their own questions and conduct their very own studies in small groups. Below, Bastian Göbbels and Marina Hinkel present some results from their study on the perception of the moral obligation to help others.
The Perception of the Moral Obligation to Help Others
Bastian Göbbels and Marina Hinkel
The United Nations calculated a donation amount for development aid in the 1970s that wealthy countries could contribute to prevent the global consequences of absolute poverty – 70 cents per 100 earned dollars. In 2013, only Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, and Sweden reached this donation target. At that time, Germany was at 0.38–0.43 cents (cf. Singer 2013, 344). The bottom line is that we could contain extreme global poverty and its consequences relatively easily, but the reality is different.
Peter Singer raises the question of whether we have an obligation to help those in need and to whom we have moral obligations (by “we,” Singer means individuals in wealthy industrialized countries – including himself). Singer argues that we should, for example, prevent a certain level of absolute poverty because absolute poverty is bad, because we could prevent a level of absolute poverty without having to make comparable sacrifices, and if we can prevent something bad without having to make a comparable sacrifice, we should do so (cf. Singer 2013, 356f.). Singer reinforces the last premise by pointing out that it only requires us to prevent bad things and not to promote good things (this corresponds to the consequentialism of utilitarianism; cf. Singer 2017, 36).
Singer illustrates the principle of the obligation to help with a thought experiment about a child in a pond that is in danger of drowning. Here is how Singer himself describes the “drowning child”:
To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.
I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do. (Singer 1997, par. 1f.)
The principle should be applied equally to all cases, regardless of whether I am the only person potentially helping, e.g., by saving the child in the pond, or one of many, e.g., by donating (cf. Singer 2017, 37). Although Singer does not regard failure to help as intentional killing but as a moral challenge (cf. Singer 2013, 354), he emphasizes elsewhere that absolute poverty means a death sentence and that the diseases responsible for this are preventable (cf. Singer 2013, 341f.).
Under the premises of universalization, impartiality, and equality, the spatial aspect – distance or proximity to the person in need – should be obsolete, according to Singer. In light of globalization, with today’s improved communication and transport conditions, distance can no longer be an excuse for lack of assistance (cf. Singer 2017, 37f.). Singer concedes: “The fact that a person is physically close to us […] may increase the likelihood that we will help them, but this does not prove that we should help them rather than any other person who happens to be at a greater distance” (Singer 2017, 37).
Singer argues that there is a certain level of extreme poverty that we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance in figures. On the one hand, he uses the amount calculated by the United Nations, which would be sufficient for basic development aid: 70 cents per 100 dollars earned. According to the World Bank in 2008, this would correspond to 1.25 dollars per day for a person’s basic needs (note currency-dependent purchasing power; cf. Singer 2013, 341). In 2008, the wealthy industrialized countries donated 19–43 cents for every 100 dollars earned (cf. Singer 2013, 344).
Based on Singer’s above-outlined thoughts, we wanted to investigate how spatial and social distance or proximity, as well as personal cost, influence the perception of moral obligation. To do this, we developed a vignette in which a child needs help from our subject. Between subjects, we varied (a) whether the child needs a new kidney directly from the subject or money for the same medical purpose, (b) whether our subject is said to know the child or not, and (c) whether the child is from the same neighbourhood, the same federal state, or a far-away country from the Global South. This resulted in a total of twelve different scenarios.
As an example, here is a translation of the vignette where a child from the neighbourhood, which the subject is said to know, needs money:
Imagine the following situation: You are informed that a child you know has life-threatening problems with his only kidney and, therefore, needs a donor organ. The child lives in your neighbourhood. You could donate one-third of your monthly income for the next two years without being at risk of losing your livelihood. With your help, the child would be saved.
After reading the vignette, subjects were asked to answer two yes-or-no questions: “Would you donate your money [kidney]?” and “Regardless of whether you would donate your money [kidney] yourself, do you think that someone in such a situation should donate their money [kidney]?” In the following, we will only look at the former question.
The online survey was programmed with LimeSurvey, and 630 subjects from Bilendi successfully participated (i.e., they did not fail an attention check and completed the survey).
A surprising finding is that more participants said they would donate a kidney than money (χ² ≈ 5.620, p < 0.05); see Figure 1. This increased willingness could be due to the fact that donating a kidney is perceived as more immediate and life-saving, while donating money is often perceived as less urgent.
Figure 1: Kidney vs. money
At the same time, we found that the willingness to donate does not change between the neighbourhood and the federal state (χ² ≈ 0.030, p > 0.1) but between the federal state and the far-away country (χ² ≈ 7.608, p < 0.01); see Figure 2.
Figure 2: Neighborhood vs. federal state and federal state vs. far-away country
Lastly, we didn’t find a significant difference when it comes to knowing the child or not (χ² ≈ 3.414, p > 0.05); see Figure 3.
Figure 3: Known vs. unknown
Our results are partly consistent with Peter Singer’s assumptions. Nevertheless, they show that people’s willingness to help – at least in our hypothetical scenarios – seems to decrease with distance. Also, the type of aid (kidney vs. money) seems to play a role, while social proximity does not. Of course, these results need to be taken with a grain of salt, and further, more elaborate research is necessary. Interestingly enough, there is a discrepancy between given answers and actual behavior, as illustrated by the low numbers of organ donations in reality. While respondents signal a high willingness to help in hypothetical scenarios, practical implementation falls short of these expectations.
Knobe, Joshua (2003): “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,” Analysis 63 (3), 190–194. (Link)
Singer, Peter (1997): “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle,” New Internationalist 289. (Link)
Singer, Peter (2013): Praktische Ethik, translated by Oscar Bischoff, Jean-Claude Wolf, Dietrich Klose, and Susanne Lenz, 3rd edition, Stuttgart: Reclam. (Link)
Singer, Peter (2017): Hunger, Wohlstand und Moral, translated by Elsbeth Ranke, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. (Link)
Philosophers and psychologists have very different practices when it comes to citing papers that were written decades ago. In philosophy, the norm is that you are supposed to carefully read those papers and accurately explain what they say. By contrast, in psychology, people typically make less of an effort to accurately summarize the ideas in decades-old papers, and it’s pretty common to cite something without ever having read it. (Of all the many psychologists who have cited Gordon Allport’s 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, how many have read even a single page?)
Looking at this difference in practices, the obvious first thought would be that what the philosophers are doing is clearly better. After all, the philosophers are the ones accurately describing the papers they cite! What could be more obvious than the claim that it’s better to be accurate than inaccurate? I certainly see the force of this point, but in my view, the situation is more complex. There is at least something to be said on the other side.
As a first step into this question, consider cases where people go much farther in the direction of what psychology does right now. In talking about math, we might speak of a “Riemann integral,” a “Galois group,” the “Peano axioms,” but no one would think that this kind of talk needs to accurately capture what these mathematicians said in their original papers. It would be seen as absurd if someone tried to object to the content of an ordinary calculus lecture by quoting from one of Riemann’s original texts and arguing that the lecture wasn’t faithful to it.
It’s easy to see what is so important about this aspect of our practices. In many cases, the great insights of centuries past were giving us a glimpse of something that was only fully appreciated later. So it’s deeply important that we allow these things to be refined over the decades rather than forcing students to learn them in the form in which they happened to appear when first introduced.
The key point now is that something similar might also be said about the sort of ordinary workaday research that many of us do all the time. As an illustration: it sometimes happens that I wrote a paper on some topic twenty years ago, but then subsequent work by other researchers showed that I didn’t get things quite right. In such cases, my papers tend to be cited in very different ways in philosophy vs. psychology. Philosophers read my papers and accurately explain the view I originally defended. By contrast, psychologists do something else, which sometimes involves citing my old papers without reading them. This practice might appear to be obviously lazy or sloppy when described in that way, but I do think there is something about it that is worth considering.
Caricaturing just a bit, the approach works like this: Psychologists first try to figure out what is actually true; then they write a sentence that they think captures the truth; then, after that sentence, they cite various previous papers. Some of those papers literally defend the view stated in the sentence itself, but others are cited just because the authors want to give credit to previous work that they see as a helpful stepping stone that led up to finding the truth. So, when it comes to my old papers, they might think that something I wrote decades ago was one of those stepping stones, but given all the research that’s been done subsequently, they might think it’s not worth it to go back and read that old paper now. So they might cite the paper without knowing precisely what it actually says.
I totally get why people would think there is something weird or fishy about this. Strictly speaking, there’s a sense in which the citation itself is inaccurate. (It seems to be saying that an old paper defended a particular view, when in reality that precise view was only articulated many years later.) But it also feels like the drive to be accurate about this stuff is moving us away from what we really should be caring about. Perhaps what we see in the seemingly slapdash way that psychologists cite old papers is a kind of half-formed and not fully acknowledged version of the practice that we see so clearly and explicitly in the non-scholarly use of people’s names for mathematical ideas.
Imagine an ethos in which people had very different expectations. When you publish a paper proposing a new theory, you hope that other researchers will improve on your theory. Indeed, you hope that these improvements will be so substantive that after a number of years there will be no need to read your original paper anymore. So the outcome you hope for is one in which people keep using your theory (and maybe citing your paper) but in which almost no one has an accurate understanding of what your original paper actually said.
Now that we’ve talked a little bit about these competing considerations, let’s return to our original question. What is truly the best approach to citing old papers? Something more like the scholarly approach favored in philosophy? Or something more like the non-scholarly approach favored in psychology? I honestly don’t know. My main goal has just been to argue that it’s a difficult question. It is a mistake to think: “Obviously, the best approach is to focus on carefully and accurately describing what those papers actually say.” The correct view is that it is not obvious what we should be doing. It’s very much worth thinking more about the different possible options, and I’d love to hear any further thoughts people might have.
In a previous post, I wrote about a course (which I taught together with Stephan Kornmesser in the summer term of 2024) for master’s students who had no previous contact with X-Phi at all. After learning some methodological and statistical basics and conducting their own small replication of Knobe (2003), they had the opportunity to develop their own questions and conduct their very own studies in small groups. Below, Frederike Lüttich and Jule Rüterbories present some results from their study on the perception of responsibility in accidents involving autonomous and human-controlled vehicles.
The Perception of Responsibility in Accidents Involving Autonomous and Human-Controlled Vehicles
Frederike Lüttich and Jule Rüterbories
The relevance of autonomous systems as potential moral agents is growing with their use in areas such as medicine, the military, and traffic, where they have – or will have – to make decisions in ethical contexts. The capacity of such systems to act has far-reaching legal and ethical implications. A frequently discussed example (see, e.g., Goodall 2014, Awad et al. 2018, Cecchini, Brantley, and Dubljević 2023) is this one: Although autonomous vehicles promise greater safety, they are not flawless. In the event of unavoidable accidents, they have to make decisions about which lives to protect. The programming of such systems is complex and raises key ethical questions. Below, we examine the perception of responsibility in accidents involving autonomous and human-controlled vehicles.
To investigate this, we created an online questionnaire in which we presented a vignette about a car and a pedestrian at a traffic light. Between subjects, we varied (a) whether the car was operated autonomously or was human-driven, (b) whether it hit the pedestrian or swerved and crashed into a wall (the outcome is deadly either for the pedestrian or for the driver), and (c) whether the pedestrian (rightfully) used a crosswalk or illegally crossed a red traffic light. This resulted in a total of eight different combinations, as shown in Table 1.
Behavior of Pedestrian / Car
Hits Pedestrian
Hits Wall
Legally Uses Crosswalk
1
2
Illegally Crosses Red Light
3
4
Table 1: Between-subjects variations (presented either with an autonomous or human-driven car)
Here is a translation of the vignette for variation 1 with a self-driving car:
Imagine standing on a foggy main road and observing the following scenario: A self-driving car is driving at approximately 50 km/h towards a traffic light, which is being crossed by a woman illegally on red. The self-driving car’s sensors notice the woman too late, and it is unable to brake. The self-driving car could swerve. In doing so, it would surely hit a house wall and be completely destroyed. The self-driving car does not swerve and hits the woman. The woman dies.
After reading the vignette, participants were asked to answer the following yes-or-no question: “Is the self-driving car [the person driving] morally responsible?” At the end of the survey, and after passing an attention check, participants provided socio-demographic data, including gender, age, and level of education.
420 participants successfully passed the attention check and completed the survey. 209 women, 210 men, and one non-binary person took part. Their age ranged from 18 to 74 years, averaging 52 years. According to their statements, two people had no school-leaving qualifications, 195 had a lower secondary school leaving certificate, 95 had a technical college or university entrance qualification, 113 had a university degree, seven had a doctorate, and eight were currently studying.
Let us compare cases with (a) autonomously or human-driven cars, (b) the pedestrian or the wall being hit, and (c) the pedestrian (legally) using a crosswalk or (illegally) crossing a red traffic light.
Regarding (a), 56% of participants do not attribute responsibility to the autonomous vehicle, while 42% consider the human driver not to be responsible (χ² ≈ 7.942, p < 0.01); see Figure 1.
Figure 1: Self-driving car vs. human-driven car
Regarding (b), if the pedestrian dies, 70% of participants say that the car or driver is responsible. If the driver dies, the attribution of responsibility drops to 34% (χ² ≈ 46.662, p < 0.001); see Figure 2.
Figure 2: Pedestrian dies vs. driver dies
And finally, regarding (c), in scenarios where the pedestrian illegally crosses the road at a red light, 54% do not think the car or driver is responsible. If the pedestrian legally uses a crosswalk, this drops to 43% (χ² ≈ 5.002, p < 0.05); see Figure 3.
Figure 3: Illegally crossing vs. legally crossing
The attribution of responsibility is complex and highly dependent on the situation. The results show that responsibility is attributed more often to human-controlled vehicles than autonomous ones. Factors such as compliance with traffic regulations and the person affected by the crash further influence this.
To gain more detailed insights in the future, open questions and alternative scenarios would be useful. Demographic data could have revealed additional differences in age, gender, and education. The study was limited to German participants, so possible cultural differences were not considered. Also, a basic understanding of machine ethics and automation levels is essential to grasp the ethical and technical challenges of autonomous vehicles fully. Further studies should explore these aspects in more depth.
Awad, Edmond, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, Jonathan Schulz, Joseph Henrich, Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon, and Iyad Rahwan (2018): “The Moral Machine Experiment,” Nature 563, 59–64. (Link)
Cecchini, Dario, Sean Brantley, and Veljko Dubljević (2023): “Moral Judgment in Realistic Traffic Scenarios. Moving Beyond the Trolley Paradigm for Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles,” AI & Society. (Link)
Gogoll, Jan, and Julian Müller (2016): “Autonomous Cars. In Favor of a Mandatory Ethics Setting,” Science and Engineering Ethics 23 (3), 681–700. (Link)
Knobe, Joshua (2003): “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,” Analysis 63 (3), 190–194. (Link)
This year’s “Jornadas Novatores” conference will take place at the University of Salamanca from February 27 to 28. This time, it will be all about expertise, and experimental philosophy will also be considered (see below). Invited speakers are Reiner Grundmann (University of Nottingham) and Michel Croce (University of Genoa).
Abstracts for presentations can be submitted before January 7. The call reads:
Jornadas Novatores is an annual 2-day conference dedicated to topics in philosophy of science and technology, but also open to contributions in related branches of philosophy, including epistemology, argumentation theory, philosophy of language and mind, feminist philosophy etc. The next edition of “Jornadas Novatores” invites contributions that advance research on the topic of expertise and its relation to a broad range of issues of social relevance.
The topic of expertise and expert knowledge has gained momentum in the last decade, and it now occupies a central position in philosophy. Many important issues related to the nature and social function of experts have been discussed in depth. The analysis of the concept has led to identifying levels of expert knowledge, and the debate about its nature has distinguished objective (knowledge-based) approaches from reputational or functional approaches, for which the credentials and social role are essential to the attribution of expertise. From an epistemological perspective, expertise is generally understood as a combination of theoretical knowledge, skills and experience, but the exact relation between them is still under discussion. In argumentation theory, the appeal to expert opinion is treated as a special kind of argument, the evaluation criteria and strength of which is a matter of dispute. The many social and political dimensions of the impact of expertise on democratic societies have also been addressed, including the intricate problem of the asymmetry of power and responsibility that comes with the distribution of expertise in society.
These discussions have also brought to light questions about expertise and expert knowledge that have received less attention. The main aim of our 2-day conference is to advance these discussions by including questions and methods of research that have remained peripheral to the central debates on expertise, as well as to build bridges between philosophical research on the topic and other perspectives. We seek proposals that critically examine topics such as, but not limited to, the following:
Gender bias and expertise
Cultural and social factors that influence the adscription of expertise
Experimental approaches to study of the nature of expertise and its attribution
Experts’ disagreement in the context of scientific and technological public controversies
Expertise and critical thinking
Testimonial injustice and trust in experts
The many forms of pseudo-expertise
Trust in experts and trust in social institutions
The relation between trust, expertise and regulatory science.
Participation
We invite abstract submissions for 30-minute talks (with 10 minutes for discussion in a 40-minute slot). Please send your proposals (around 1000 words long, excluding bibliography, and prepared for blind review) to jornadasnovatores@usal.es before 7th of January.
Organized by the research project “Appearance and Reality in Physics and Beyond,” this year’s “Method and Convergence” conference will take place at the University of Helsinki from June 25 to 27, bringing “together thinkers exploring philosophical methodology from different viewpoints. The focus is on the question of what kind of methodology could foster progress in philosophy, and on the question of how philosophy could foster progress in science.” Experimental philosophy is also taken into account (see below).
Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until March 15. The call reads:
Method and Convergence 2025 conference brings together thinkers exploring philosophical methodology from different viewpoints. The focus is on the question of what kind of methodology could foster progress in philosophy, and on the question of how philosophy could foster progress in science, as characterized below, after the sumission instructions. However, we welcome contributions about all important aspects of philosophical methodology.
Abstract submission
Submit your max. 1 page abstract using this template (link can also be found below).
Send your abstract to avril.styrman(at)helsinki.fi by March 15 2025. You will be informed of the approval of your speech in the conference by March 31. After the conference, each speaker may submit an article to the conference proceedings.
The conference team will arrange the peer review process of the articles. The articles accepted by the conference team will be submitted to Acta Philosophica Fennica, whose editors will review the articles independently of the conference team.
We invite case studies about ways in which philosophy has fostered progress in special sciences, and about ways in which philosophy could foster scientific progress.
How can scientific methods foster progress in philosophy?
The 20th and 21st century philosophical literature and the PhilPapers 2009 and 2020 surveys show that philosophy lacks processes that efficiently yield consensus on solutions to long-standing problems and preferences among competing theories (Chalmers 2009; Slezak 2018; Dellsén et al. 2024). In this sense, philosophy differs significantly from the special sciences. Sometimes the non-convergence into consensus stems not from the topics themselves, but from the methods of analysis. This raises the question of whether scientific methods could foster science-like convergence in philosophy, enabling more systematic accumulation of results and increasingly complete answers to fundamental questions, much like sciences where historical debates become irrelevant (Gutting 2016, pp. 323–5). This leads us to strongly interrelated naturalist themes.
Methodology and progress of philosophy
We invite case studies about what kind of progress has taken place in philosophy, and what kind of progress has been absent, and what kinds of methods, alone or together, could foster progress in the field. Although the focus is on the interplay of philosophy and science, we welcome insights about any known (and yet unknown) philosophical methods such as phenomenology, pragmatism, conceptual analysis, hermeneutics, analysis of language, discourse analysis, transcendental method, and thought experiments.
– Evaluation criteria of philosophical theories. We seek contributions that examine criteria for philosophical theories, preferably with case examples demonstrating how such criteria guide theory selection. From the naturalist viewpoint, we may ask whether science provides criteria that could make the selection between rival philosophical theories with the same function more objective and unequivocal than, for instance, plain intuition and reflecting equilibrium? The frequently cited virtues of scientific theories include accuracy, explanatory depth, internal consistency, ontological simplicity and unity, diachronic virtues (or fruitfulness over time), and external coherence (consistency and inferential relations with background knowledge or other well-regarded theories) (Kuhn 1977; McMullin 1982, 2014; Keas 2018). Brenner’s (2017) defense of simplicity as a criterion in metaphysics exemplifies this approach.
– Invention of ontological commitments. Ontological commitments are indispensable in the buildup of metaphysical theories, and we need the element of discovery if we want new sciences to emerge from philosophy. We invite contributions examining the invention or induction of new ontological commitments (Norton 2021; Schurz and Hütteman 2024; Arenhart and Arroyo 2021), as well as those addressing how strongly philosophers should adhere to ontological commitments of contemporary scientific theories, given Kuhn’s view that science advances through paradigm shifts.
– From pluralism to syntheses. The Vienna Circle Pamphlet dictates: “The goal ahead is unified science. The endeavor is to link and harmonize the achievements of individual investigators in their various fields of science.” However, the opposite trend has dominated philosophy since logical positivism: system-building has given way to analyzing details. In contrast, in many other areas of science and life, it is considered natural to build functional totalities out of parts. We invite submissions exploring how to better leverage the wealth of detailed philosophical investigations by counterbalancing specialization with unification. For instance, Ingthorsson (2019) argues that multiple theories of truth can be considered complementary views instead of considering them as rivals. Can you make a similar argument concerning other sets of theories or views that are typically considered as rivals?
– Philosophical theories as axiomatic systems. We invite submissions exploring ways to clarify concepts and to unify detailed aspects of topics by formulating metaphysical theories as axiomatic systems (De Jong and Betti 2010), with ontological commitments as primitive axioms/postulates, concepts defined in terms of them, and semantics mapped to them. In logic, an axiomatic system is expressed in a formal language and typically coupled with a proof system. However, a philosophical theory does not always need to be formal and typically does not require an explicit proof system, no more than Euclid’s Elements and Newton’s Principia did.
– Causal-mechanical explanations in philosophy. Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular changes from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions (Machamer et al. 2000). The core idea of mechanistic accounts is that causation is the activities of compound parts of organized wholes that produce changes in either whole and/or parts (Ingthorsson 2024). Causal-mechanical explanation and the axiomatic method play together very well. For instance, Newtonian mechanics is an axiomatic system that postulates hypothetical laws of nature that function in the context of an overall mechanism, namely, Keplerian Solar System. We invite contributions about the role of causal-mechanical explanations in metaphysics, or similar non-causal-mechanical explanations in metaphysics, such as in Trogdon (2018).
– Experimental philosophy typically investigates philosophical questions through methods of behavioral and social science. What kind of progress has taken place in different domains of experimental philosophy, such as rational thinking and moral judgment, mean? For instance, has experimental philosophy enhanced conceptual analysis and how? How has experimental philosophy influenced non-experimental philosophy? Are empiricists overlooking any philosophical tools that could enrich their interpretation of experimental results?
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
