Category: Academia

Where should I publish my X-Phi? A new resource

Posted on by Joanna Demaree-Cotton

We (Sinéad Cleary, Joanna Demaree-Cotton, and Alexander Max Bauer) are excited to announce a new community resource to help experimental philosophers choose journals for their work.

https://sites.google.com/view/wheretopublishxphi

After another recent round of identifying a suitable journal for one of our own recent experimental philosophy manuscripts (going through the process of identifying prospective journals with any record of publishing experimental studies, as well as basics – subfield, word count, etc.) we figured: why not pool the community’s knowledge and resources? The result is a crowd-sourced, interactive table compiling journals that publish experimental philosophy. The table includes links to official journal guidelines as well as existing crowdsourced metrics and sources, and lets users filter and sort by keywords and various categories.

This resource was partly inspired by the memory of a previous resource compiled by Justin Sytsma in 2018 (see here and here). However, some things have (happily for x-phi) changed since then. To give just one example, while in 2018 Justin noted only one experimental paper published in Ergo, this journal now has an area editor in the field of experimental philosophy (shout out to Pascale Willemsen!) and a number of great experimental philosophy papers have appeared on its pages in recent years. We have not attempted any analysis of change over time, nor have we attempted to replicate Justin’s efforts to quantify how much x-phi is published where. But we expect things have changed for other venues as well. Indeed, as of 2026 there’s a brand new dedicated journal for publishing experimental philosophy. 

We have also designed the resource with the future in mind. We hope that continued crowd-sourced input from the x-phi community – from you! – will go into correcting, maintaining, and updating this resource, as inevitable errors are identified and things change in the field.

With that in mind, we would love the community to offer feedback in response to the following questions: 

  1. Are you aware of journals that publish x-phi work that are not currently included?
  2. Some journals currently have empty entries under “Examples of x-phi papers recently published,” as we haven’t had the capacity to locate relevant papers. If you know of suitable examples, we’d be grateful if you could nominate references!
  3. Do you have any additional notes or comments we should include about specific journals listed here (in the “Notes” column or otherwise)? 
  4. Do have other information that you believe should be included and would help researchers decide where to submit their work? If so, do you have ideas about how we might source this information?

One final caveat. We acknowledge that this resource is imperfect in many ways. We regard it as a works-in-progress – but one that does not pretend to aim at perfection (though we hope to correct any outright errors). It is a community resource based on crowdsourced information, not a formal analysis.  We have tried to be transparent about where different pieces of information come from through consistent hyperlinking and attribution notes. Unsourced data can be assumed to be anecdotal or individual opinion. We have no doubt that some of the primary/sub-field classifications are up for debate. And we take no stand on such questions as to whether one should or should not pay attention to journal rankings or this-or-that metric when publishing (plenty of healthy debate on these issues exist in the academic blogosphere!). We include these sources or metrics because we know that many people do consider them, and consolidating these different sources into a single spreadsheet might save folks some time. Our hope is simply that this is a useful resource to the experimental philosophy community (at different career-stages, with different professional and research needs, with different views on publication).

Please comment or get in touch with your comments, feedback, or updates!

Special thanks go to Kevin Reuter, Edouard Machery, Carme Isern-Mas, and Eugen Fischer for invaluable feedback that helped us put this together. 

Call: “The New Measurement Heretics”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Following the “Measurement Heretics Workshop – Being, Meaning, and Measuring Well,” Rebecca Jackson, Michele Luchetti, Morgan Thompson, and Aja Watkins edit a volume on the topic.

Abstracts for contributions can be submitted until June 15, 2026. The call reads:

This edited volume stems from the Measurement Heretics Workshop – Being, Meaning, and Measuring Well, organized by Rebecca Jackson at Durham University on March 11–13, 2026. We warmly welcome proposals from researchers in the philosophy, history, sociology, and anthropology of measurement (broadly construed) who would like to address the themes in the description below.

Once the list of contributions is selected, the volume proposal will be submitted for consideration to Chicago University Press.

Topic description

What we measure, and how we measure, matters deeply. In the human sciences especially, the definition and status of what we call “measurement,” the distinguishing or desirable features of measurement, and whether (and when) we should measure at all, has seen a resurgence of interest and debate. This volume engages with scientific, medical, and social measuring practices of the past and present, inviting contributions that dissect and reform the meaning and desirability of fundamental notions in philosophy of measurement – or as we call them, measurement heresies.

This is not the first time fundamental notions in measurement, or “dogmas,” have been challenged in disparate areas of study. The current wave of philosophically influenced history of measurement owes its roots to works such as Chang’s Inventing Temperature (2004), which troubled the dogma that accurate instruments require a prior foundation of true theories of what is being measured. Prior to this, sociological and historical work had already troubled the separation between the purity of numbers and the messiness of human knowers, showing that the growing emphasis on quantification in the 19th and 20th century was marked by the influence of bureaucracy and social agendas more than it mirrored the practice of physicists (Porter 1995; Collins 1975; Gould 1981). Looking further back, stances that today are well within the orthodoxy were once at the center of heated debates. The Kantian dogma of the non-measurability of psychological properties was challenged by Fechner’s “heretical” psychophysics, which on the one hand initiated a long and influential debate on the quantifiability of sensation and, on the other, inspired Mach’s relational theory of measurement in physics that seeded later developments in measurement theory and philosophical debates on the nature of measurement. Waves of reform and reaction in the 20th century included tension between physicists and psychophysicists (Campbell 1920; Stevens 1946), and theories of measurement as foundational to the project of logical positivism (Reichenbach 1927; Carnap 1966). When psychometric visions and techniques were first beginning to shape theory of measurement in psychology (Cronbach and Meehl 1955; Campbell and Fiske 1959), reformist projects led to the beginning of the representational theory of measurement in the physical sciences (Krantz et al. 1971; Suppes et al. 1989; Luce et al. 1990). Reconciling the two has proven difficult but philosophically productive, as several volumes and special issues have shown (Berglund et al. 2013; Vessonen 2017; Pendrill 2019; Mari et al. 2023; Uher 2025; Basso et al. 2026; Luchetti 2026). More recently, works on patient-centered and health measures have challenged the dogma that measurement can, and should, be carried out from a stance of aperspectival objectivity (Duque et al. 2024; McClimans 2024).

There is still much to be done to bring the dogmas of philosophers, inherited from the above mentioned 20th century reformist projects, to face the challenge of measuring in biomedical, clinical, and social contexts. A particular challenge here is to measure that which is unique or highly contextual, such as the lived experience of persons, and to measure moving targets that are more affected by, than reflected by, data meant to capture them (Godman & Marchionni 2022; Runhardt 2025; Zahle 2023). This work has been ongoing in medical humanities, sociological, historical, geographical, anthropological, and literary scholarship, as well as in geophysical and environmental sciences, in ways that have not yet been articulated together. This volume brings the heresies (and the heretics) together, to map the terrain of the current re-evaluation which is taking place in Measurement Studies more broadly.

The purpose of this book is to give space to critical re-evaluations of dogmas regarding fundamental notions about measurement and to invite novel interpretations of formal and informal measurement concepts. We invite contributions focusing on topics including (but not limited to) the following:

  • STANDARDISATION
  • COMPARABILITY
  • QUANTIFICATION, QUANTITIES, and/or MAGNITUDES
  • MEASUREMENT SCALES
  • PRECISION and/or RELIABILITY
  • VALIDITY and/or VALIDATION
  • ACCURACY and/or SENSITIVITY/SPECIFICITY
  • PROXIES

We also invite contributions that are critical of the activity of measurement in general:

  • What are the affective and real-world impacts of measuring and being measured on human and non-human subjects?
  • When is it worse to measure at all, and when is it worth it to measure (even badly) to provide voice to marginalized actors within a system?
  • What would it look like to gather evidence against measurement itself, as being an intervention?

Rather than chapters taking the form of a strictly circumscribed philosophical argument, we invite authors to address one of the above topics from their own disciplinary perspective. We expect chapters to reference a case or cases from past or present measuring practices. The editorial team will explicate the broader philosophical implications in the introductory and concluding chapters.

Confirmed contributors

  • Nicholas Binney (HHU Düsseldorf)
  • Femke Truijens (University of Rotterdam)
  • Riana Betzler (San José State University)

Submission details

Please submit an abstract aimed at an interdisciplinary audience (600–800 words, not including references) to the following email address: measurementheretics@gmail.com

The deadline for abstract submission is June 15th, 2026. Authors of selected contributions will be notified at the end of July. An authors’ workshop will take place online in November 2026, and the final submission of the chapters (6k–8k words) is planned for March 2027.

Summer School: “Advanced Methods in Eye Tracking”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From June 22 to 23, 2026, the summer school “Advanced Methods in Eye Tracking” will take place at the University of East Anglia, UK.

See the poster for details. The announcement reads:

This interdisciplinary summer school will offer Phd students and other early career researchers from psychology and across the cognitive and social sciences advanced training in all aspects of eye tracking, and a clear interdisciplinary understanding of a range of research questions that can be addressed by eye tracking. It will be conducted over two days, with the first day consisting of research talks and the second day consisting of hands-on lab work and skill building. The first day is being offered as a hybrid event with talks being streamed live, for students wanting to attend online only. The second day is “in person” only.

Call: “New Methods in Semantics of Artefacts”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From September 15 to 16, 2026, the conference “New Methods in Semantics of Artefacts – Meaning Beyond Linguistic Signs” will take place at the Cité de la Mode et du Design, Paris.

Abstracts can be submitted until May 25, 2026, 12:00 CEST. The call reads:

Conference details

Our organizing committee, with the support of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE–Paris Sciences Lettres) and the Institut Français de la Mode (IFM), invites submissions to the New Methods in Semantics of Artefacts: Meaning beyond linguistic signs conference, to be held on 15–16 September 2026 at the Cité de la Mode et du Design in Paris.

We are delighted to announce our invited speakers:

Philosophy: Enrico Terrone (University of Genova), Nicola Di Stefano (CNR Italy); Cognitive psychology: Charles Spence (University of Oxford); Linguistics: Philippe Schlenker (École Normale Supérieure / NYU), Pritty Patel-Grosz (University of Oslo); Musicology: Ben Curry (University of Birmingham).

Topic of the conference

Objects such as perfumes, works of art, and creations in design, gastronomy, or entertainment often give rise to mental representations that go beyond the objects themselves. Through perception and interaction, individuals attribute meanings, associations, and symbolic values to such objects, even when these meanings are not explicitly expressed in language. Understanding how such meanings emerge is a shared challenge for philosophy, linguistics, and the cognitive sciences, and this conference aims to put these complementary approaches into dialogue.

The philosophical tradition has long sought to ground what one would ordinarily call the meaning of objects in a general theory of signs – an approach exemplified, within contemporary naturalized philosophy, by Millikan’s work (Beyond concepts, 2017), as well as by more targeted theories addressing the meanings of particular kinds of objects. Pursuing the formalization of such a general theory of signs, the super-linguistics program (Schlenker, Patel-Grosz, among others) holds that formal linguistic theory can be productively extended across various domains of non-linguistic signs, drawing on notions such as the constituency (or grouping) principle central to syntax, the use of logical variables for object tracking, and the variety of inference types investigated in semantics and pragmatics. Finally, several theoretical frameworks in psychology may help address the origins of artefact meaning: in addition to the cognitive foundations of such meaning – cross-modal associations, conceptual representations, affordances, technical reasoning, and intention-based accounts – psychology can illuminate the transmission and cultural learning of the meanings that objects come to bear.

We aim to take stock of the experimental methods and conceptual tools used to study the semantics of objects, and to foster epistemological transfers from the semantics of one domain to another – music, design objects, fragrances, images, food, dance, and so forth – with particular attention to the plurality of sensory modalities through which these objects are perceived.

Submission guidelines

Each selected contributor will be invited to give a 45-minute presentation, including Q&A.

We welcome contributions that place particular emphasis on:

  • the choice and clarification of the semantic concepts employed; and/or
  • attempts at formalization; and/or
  • the originality of the empirical methods applied.

Contributions will be selected from submitted abstracts. Abstracts should be between 400 and 500 words in length, including footnotes but excluding references, and must be suitable for blind review.

The submission deadline is 25 May 2026, 12:00 noon (Paris time).

All abstracts should be submitted to: semanticsofartefacts.conference@gmail.com.

Authors will be notified of acceptance by 18 June 2026.

If your abstract is accepted for presentation, we will cover coffee breaks and lunches during the two-day conference. At present, our funding does not allow us to reimburse travel and accommodation expenses.

Call: “Law Observed”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Marco Mazzocca and Miriam Ferraro organize a workshop on “Law Observed – Sociological Methods and Empirical Research on Law,” which will take place at the IVR World Congress in Istanbul from June 28 to July 3, 2026.

Abstracts can be submitted until May 30, 2026. The call reads:

We invite abstracts for the Special Workshop SW42 “Law Observed: Sociological Methods and Empirical Research on Law,” to be held at the IVR World Congress 2026 in Istanbul.

The workshop addresses the relationship between legal theory and empirical inquiry, with particular attention to the methodological and epistemological implications of studying law as a socially embedded practice. It seeks to foster dialogue between legal philosophy, socio-legal studies, and empirical legal research.

Key questions include how empirical approaches to law can inform, challenge, or complement conceptual and normative accounts of legal systems, authority, and decision-making. Rather than presupposing a strict separation between normative and empirical perspectives, the workshop explores their points of interaction and tension.

We welcome abstracts engaging with, among others:

  • methodological and epistemological issues in socio-legal research
  • the concept of law as a social practice
  • legal reasoning, decision-making, and institutional practice
  • law, inequality, migration, and citizenship
  • biolaw and sociology of health
  • technology, AI, and the transformation of legal practices

Abstracts (300–400 words), together with affiliation and short bio, should be sent to miriam.ferraro@unife.it by 30 May 2026.

Selected contributors will be invited to present their work at the workshop. Contributions may be considered for publication in a collective volume or special issue.

Further information: https://coin-project.org

Call: “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Ben Gaskin and Simon McGregor organize a special session of The 2026 Artificial Life Conference titled “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy,” which will take place in Waterloo, Canada, from August 17 to 21, 2026.

Papers can be submitted until March 30, 2026. The call reads:

ALife has always had a markedly philosophical character – a fact not unnoticed by some philosophers. Daniel Dennett, for instance, saw in ALife the creation of testable thought experiments – in simulating a thing, you render explicit your assumptions. Despite this clear affinity, however, the engagement he foresaw has not materialised.

This is not for ALife’s lack of interest in or relevance to traditionally philosophical content, but perhaps rather for its practicing an alternate philosophy in which the reflexive relationship between pragmatic and theoretical is constitutive. Here philosophy and science are united, with thought in turn structuring and being structured by experimental practice. In this respect, ALife may be closer to the original tradition of natural philosophy than philosophy in its more modern disciplinary forms.

This session invites broad reflection on the nature of this relationship between philosophy and artificial life. What role do computational experiments play in philosophical inquiry – and what role should they? How does ALife address questions that philosophy also claims – agency, autonomy, emergence, individuality – and how does its treatment differ? The conference theme itself poses one such question: what is life, and what does it mean to be life-like?

Call for Papers

We welcome both experimental work whose philosophical motivations or implications are brought to the fore, and philosophical or theoretical work that engages directly with ALife methods and results. We are as interested in what can be said in principle as in what your work specifically reveals – and especially in work that does not sit neatly in either of these.

Questions of Interest

Questions we are interested in include:

  • What are we doing when we simulate a thing?
  • Where is emergence when it happens in a machine – how do silicon and simulations reshape the question of emergence?
  • What is the relationship in simulations between form, function, parameters, and dynamics?
  • If the rules are made up, what do they teach us – how do we reconcile tunability with the language of findings?
  • What are the laws of motion of living matter, and how does ALife relate to theoretical biology?
  • Is life just physics, or is there something more – what can ALife tell us about the relationship between vitalism and mechanism?
  • What is ALife’s precedent, what does it inherit, and how does it differ – from the automata of Hero to the gavra of Rava to Jābir’s takwīn?
  • Could artificial life ever really be alive – and if so, what are the implications?
  • How does wet ALife relate to these questions – does it change what counts as artificial, as alive, or both?

These are examples, not boundaries – we welcome any work that engages with the philosophical dimensions of artificial life. Contributions from across ALife, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and related fields are encouraged.

Submissions

Papers should be 3–8 pages in ALIFE format. We welcome experimental, theoretical, and position papers. Accepted papers will be published in the ALIFE 2026 proceedings (MIT Press). The conference is hybrid – presentations can be given in person or online. Please select the “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy” special session when submitting. For full formatting guidelines, see the ALIFE 2026 Call for Papers.

Conference: “Social Ontology and Empirical Inquiry”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From April 11 to 12, 2026, the conference “Social Ontology and Empirical Inquiry – Conflicts and Connections” will take place at the University of Pittsburgh. The conference page reads:

We are pleased to announce a two-day interdisciplinary workshop hosted by the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing on the intersection of social metaphysics and empirical research in the social sciences.

The workshop aims to foster dialogue between philosophers and social scientists who are interested in the nature of social reality and in how conceptual and empirical approaches to understanding it can be fruitfully integrated.

Social scientists and philosophers have long sought to clarify what it means for entities such as races, genders, institutions, and social structures to exist and to act. Meanwhile, empirically-oriented social scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated methods for measuring, modeling, and explaining such phenomena. This workshop will bring these conversations together to explore the conflicts and connections between conceptual–theoretical frameworks and empirical–methodological practices in the study of the social world.

Organizing Committee

Confirmed Keynotes

The program will include keynote talks and panels by both philosophers and social scientists, including scholars such as:

Guiding Questions

  • What kinds of things are social entities – individuals, groups, institutions, norms, and categories such as race and gender?
  • How can such entities be both socially constructed and real?
  • What is the relationship between social ontology and social measurement?
  • How should metaphysical theories about the nature of the social world inform, or be informed by, empirical research designs?
  • Do social explanations involve forms of causation, mechanism, or structure that differ from those in the natural sciences?
  • How can philosophical analysis of social kinds enrich empirical debates about classification, comparability, and operationalization?

Format

The workshop will include:

  • 30-minute contributed presentations (20 minutes presentation + 10 minutes Q&A)
  • Keynote lectures by invited speakers
  • A roundtable discussion on future directions in social ontology and empirical research

Talk: “I wasn’t thinking about that!” (Franz Berto and Aybüke Özgün)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On April 15 from 18:00–20:00 (UTC+2), Franz Berto and Aybüke Özgün will give a talk titled “I wasn’t thinking about that!” as part of the PhiLang Seminars on Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the University of Lodz. The session can be accessed via Teams after registration via the online form. The abstract reads:

Framing effects occur when someone believes only one of two necessarily equivalent propositions, P and Q. Framing is well known and widely studied in economics, the social sciences, cognitive psychology, etc. We want a logic of framing.

Of course, we often find ourselves framed because of the guise under which propositional contents are presented to us. But if one has a hyperintensional conception of propositions – one according to which P can sometimes differ from Q even if they are true in the same possible worlds – then one can think that sometimes we are framed because of a difference in content.

In this paper we argue that this kind of framing is structural and pervasive. It depends on the distinction between working memory and long-term memory – a structural one, accepted in psychology for decades. The basic idea: sometimes we believe P without believing a necessarily equivalent Q because, whereas P concerns a topic we have activated in working memory, Q concerns something else: a topic that we have left dormant in long-term memory.

We then introduce a simple propositional modal language with belief operators, a class of possible-worlds models supplemented with topics, and a sound and complete axiomatization with respect to this class, in order to represent reasoners who can be framed in the way described above.

Call: “Measuring the Mind”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Daniela Nica and Sandra Branzaru organize a hybrid workshop on “Measuring the Mind – Conceptual Issues in Psychology, Psychiatry and Cognitive Science” that will take place at the University of Bucharest from May 29 to 30, 2026.

Submissions for contributions can be submitted until April 15, 2026. The call reads:

Psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science increasingly rely on sophisticated measurement technologies while remaining tied to inherited assumptions about what is being measured. Many constructs – emotion, memory, attention, intelligence, disorder – are still treated as if they were stable, homogeneous, mind‑independent natural kinds with latent quantitative essences, even as empirical work reveals pervasive heterogeneity, context‑sensitivity, and replication failure across domains such as affective neuroscience, psychopathology, and social cognition. At the same time, related debates in the philosophy of biology, metaphysics, and cognitive ontology emphasize conceptual relativity and the need to re‑engineer scientific categories in light of concept‑laden evidence.

This conference asks what follows for measurement and classification if psychological and psychiatric categories are better understood as populations of variable, situated instances or relational patterns in high‑dimensional spaces, rather than as tokens of fixed types. How should we think about constructs, latent variables, and diagnostic entities if variation is ontologically primary and averages are statistical abstractions? When do our instruments partially constitute the phenomena they purport to detect? To what extent do replication “failures” reveal construct instability or ontological mismatch rather than methodological error?

We invite contributions from philosophy of psychology and psychiatry, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of biology, metaphysics and metametaphysics, as well as empirically oriented work in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience that engages these conceptual issues. Topics include, but are not limited to: cognitive and psychiatric ontology; natural kinds, homeostatic property clusters and relational or internal realism; measurement theory, psychometrics and the “quantitative imperative”; classification and re‑classification in psychiatry and cognitive science (e.g., RDoC, HiTOP); construct instability and the replication crisis; predictive processing and constructionist theories of mind and emotion; and the concept‑ladenness of evidence and data‑driven ontology re‑engineering.

Our aim is to articulate and critically assess conceptual frameworks that could underpin a “variation‑first” science of mind, in which explanation, generalization, and measurement are explicitly aligned with the heterogeneous, context‑bound phenomena they target.

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, and is open to MA and PhD students, early PhDs and postdocs, as well as established researchers in philosophy of psychology, psychiatry, cognitive science, philosophy of biology, and related empirical fields.

Submission of abstracts up to 300 words is welcome via email: measuringthemind@gmail.com

  • Email subject line: “abstract submission”
  • Anonymity: Please include identifying information (name, affiliation, contact email) in the body of the email and submit an anonymized abstract as attachment.
  • Deadline for submissions: 15 April 2026
  • Notification of acceptance: on or before 10 May 2026

Date: May 29–30

Format: mixed (in‑person and online)

Contact email: measuringthemind@gmail.com

Organizers:

  • Drd. Daniela Nica
  • Drd. Sandra Branzaru

Talk: “Philosophical Thought Experiments Elicit Conflicting Intuitions” (Joshua Knobe and Ivar Hannikainen)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

As part of the Experimental Philosophy Talk Series, Joshua Knobe and Ivar Hannikainen will give a talk titled “Philosophical Thought Experiments Elicit Conflicting Intuitions” on April 2 from 16:00–18:00 (UTC+2). The session can be accessed via Zoom (Meeting ID: 680 676 8837, Code: xphi123). The abstract reads:

Existing research on intuitions about philosophical thought experiments typically finds that different participants give different answers. Some people say that the correct answer is A while others say it is B. One possible explanation of this finding is that individual participants actually have conflicting intuitions. That is, many of the participants who ultimately select option B may have an intuition drawing them toward option A, and vice versa. Two studies explored the possibility that people have such conflicting intuitions using self-report (Study 1) and mouse-tracking (Study 2) methods. Both studies found evidence for conflicting intuitions, and yet they also uncovered systematic variation: Across fifteen different thought experiments, the popularity of the answer one does not give predicts one’s tendency to feel conflicted. That is, the more common a particular answer, the more likely participants are to feel drawn to it intuitively – even if they ultimately decide it is incorrect.