Category: Methods

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: “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

Call: “Folk Epistemology and Science Skepticism”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From August 10 to 14, 2026, the Cologne Summer School will take place at the University of Cologne. This year’s topic will be “Folk Epistemology and Science Skepticism,” with special guest Mikkel Gerken.

Proposals for brief presentations on Gerken’s work can be submitted until April 15, 2026. The call reads:

The Cologne Summer School is an annual, week-long, event at which leading epistemologists present their current work in a series of lectures, defend their views against critical comments, and discuss their work with participants. The Summer School mainly aims at professional philosophers and graduate students, but anyone is welcome to apply. In 2026 our special guest will be Mikkel Gerken (University of Southern Denmark).

Gerken works in epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. In Epistemic Reasoning and the Mental (Palgrave 2013), Gerken considers how externalism in philosophy of mind bears on the nature of the epistemology of inference. In On Folk Epistemology (OUP 2017), he argues that folk epistemological heuristics explain patterns of intuitive judgments that have mistakenly been taken to motivate epistemic contextualism, pragmatic encroachment, and knowledge-first epistemology. Doing so involves engagement with cognitive psychology as well as methodological considerations about the relationship between folk epistemological intuitions and epistemological theorizing. In Scientific Testimony (OUP 2022), Gerken argues that testimony is a vital part of science and articulates epistemic norms governing it. Furthermore, he considers scientific testimony to the lay public and empirically informed science communication strategies for addressing science skepticism. In addition to the monographs, Gerken has published on epistemic injustice, epistemic norms of action and assertion, transcendental arguments, the necessary a posteriori, philosophical skepticism, philosophical methodology etc.

Cologne Summer School Themes: The 2026 Summer School will address a range of issues from foundational to applied social epistemology. Many of the discussions will revolve around an important real-life problem – namely, science skepticism. For example, we will examine how science skepticism is related to varieties of philosophical skepticism. Furthermore, we will consider how folk epistemological heuristics and conversational norms may fuel public skepticism about science. We will also consider ways in which epistemologists and philosophers of science may play a role in combating science skepticism. Thus, some of the discussions overlap with issues in philosophy of science. Throughout, there will be an emphasis on philosophical methodology and epistemology’s relationship to empirical research in the social and cognitive sciences.

Topics will include

  • Philosophical skepticism and real-life (science) skepticism
  • Folk epistemology and its relation to epistemology
  • Epistemic norms of assertion and science communication
  • Internalism and externalism in epistemology and mind
  • Intuitive judgments and philosophical methodology
  • The epistemic roles of science in society

The Summer School is free but limited to 50 participants. Online application is possible through April 15. Please supply a short letter that sketches your academic background and main motivation for participating in the Summer School. If you are interested in giving a brief presentation (approx. 20 minutes) related to Gerken’s work, please also send an abstract of no more than 1,000 words.

Apply via email to:
summerschoolphilosophy@uni-koeln.de

Call: “The Armchair on Trial”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From July 9 to 11, 2026, the Vienna Forum for Analytic Philosophy (WFAP) will host its 15th annual graduate conference, titled “The Armchair on Trial – A Graduate Conference on Philosophical Methodology.” Hilary Kornblith, Jennifer Nagel, and Christian Nimtz are confirmed as keynote speakers.

Proposals for presentations can be submitted until February 28, 2026. The call reads:

This year’s annual WFAP graduate conference is devoted to debates around philosophical methodology. It is centered around the question of whether philosophy is best done from the philosophical armchair or whether it can and should be done using empirical methods. The conference is focused on the extent to which the emergence of naturalistic approaches and of experimental philosophy (“X-Phi”) pose a problem to ‘traditional’ armchair methods (e.g. consulting intuitions, conceptual analysis, reflective equilibrium, conceptual engineering). We are interested both in work that focuses on individual methods or on the relations between them (e.g. their compatibility).

We aim to bring together early career and advanced researchers in order to discuss questions such as:

  • What is the role of intuition in philosophy?
  • What is the role of a priori knowledge in philosophy?
  • What is the role of X-Phi in philosophy?
  • What is the role of conceptual analysis in philosophy?
  • What is the role of conceptual engineering in philosophy?
  • What is the role of linguistic and conceptual competence in philosophy?
  • What is the role of formal methods in philosophy?
  • Is philosophy importantly distinct from other sciences?
  • How can advocates of armchair methods best respond to the challenges raised by X-Phi?
  • Are armchair philosophy and X-Phi reconcilable?
  • Considering the methodological discussions listed above, are professional philosophers epistemically better positioned for answering philosophical questions than lay people? E.g. Do they have better conceptual competence? Are they expert intuiters?

We welcome submissions that apply these methodological issues to other philosophical debates as case studies.

Call: “Theory and Practice After the Practice Turn”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On April 17, 2026, the Research Center Normative Orders at Goethe University Frankfurt will host an online workshop titled “Theory and Practice After the Practice Turn – Where Social Theory and Empirical Philosophy Meet.”

Proposals for contributions can be submitted until February 14. The call reads:

Sociology and philosophy have always shared a close relationship. Critical Theory famously tied the two disciplines together to unravel societal phenomena, and feminist philosophers regularly borrow sociological concepts to understand domination and power asymmetries. Similarly, sociologists often draw on philosophical concepts to sharpen their analyses. In recent years, this dialogue has gained new momentum through the so-called “practice turn” in epistemology and philosophy of science. Contemporary philosophy of science and applied epistemology increasingly incorporate empirical methods originally developed within the social sciences such as interviews and ethnographic studies. But while empirical approaches from sociology are frequently adopted, social-theoretical concepts remain rarely integrated within epistemology and philosophy of science.

It is the goal of this workshop to explore the potential of social theory for empirical approaches in philosophy of science and epistemology. What are instances of fruitful applications of social theory to philosophy of science and epistemological scholarship? How does social theory transform when it is resituated in a different disciplinary setting? What are caveats and best practices when using social theory as a philosopher of science/epistemologist?

We are looking for workshop contributions that are focused on but not limited to:

  • Examples of using social theory along with empirical methods in philosophy of science and
    epistemology.
  • Reflections on methodological and conceptual challenges when transferring social-theoretical
    concepts into philosophical work.

Workshop contributions will also be considered for publication in a special issue (target journal: Synthese) on social theory in empirical philosophy of science & epistemology.

Send submissions to: sophie.juliane.veigl@univie.ac.at; riegler@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Call: “The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Lake Forest College’s philosophy department is hosting “The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop” (FAX5), which will take place from March 20 to 21, 2026.

Abstracts for posters can be submitted until October 10. The call reads:

The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop (FAX5) at Lake Forest College brings together philosophers who use formal and experimental methods to address a wide range of philosophical questions. Although these methods have developed largely in isolation, they share data-driven foundations, often aim to answer similar questions, and can greatly enrich one another when integrated. Over two days, leading scholars and emerging researchers will share advances, explore collaborations, and develop new ways to combine empirical and formal methods. By fostering cross-methodological dialogue and building learning networks, FAX5 aims to strengthen, expand, and integrate these methods across the discipline.

Call for Poster Abstracts: The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop (FAX5) at Lake Forest College invites poster abstracts on topics in formal or experimental philosophy. Submissions (max 500 words) should be emailed as a single PDF and include: a title; an abstract; a full author list with the presenting author(s) in bold; and institutional affiliations. Please name your file “FAX5_Poster_LastName.pdf” (the first presenter’s last name) and use the subject line “FAX5 Poster Abstract Submission.” Send submissions to phenne [at] lakeforest [dot] edu. Posters will be selected for clarity, originality, and relevance to integrating or advancing formal or experimental methods in philosophy.

Call: “Experimental Argument Analysis”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Eugen Fischer and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga are preparing a special issue on “Experimental Argument Analysis – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Verbal Reasoning” in Philosophical Psychology.

Manuscripts can be submitted until April 30, 2026. The call reads:

The Special Issue will 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.

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 SI 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?

Submission Instructions

The Special Issue accepts theoretical, experimental, and review papers that address the questions set in the Call for Papers, or directly related questions.

  • Papers should be concisely written and tightly argued.
  • Papers should ideally be ca. 10,000 words long, but there is no formal word limit.
  • Authors should bear in mind the interdisciplinary readership of Philosophical Psychology.
  • When submitting papers to ScholarOne, please select “Experimental Argument Analysis” as the special issue title.
  • Inclusion in the special issue is conditional on the outcome of peer review. Peer review is initiated upon submission.
  • Accepted papers will be published online without delay prior to being included in the special issue.

We encourage submission well in advance of the submission deadline. Please email the guest editors if you have any further queries.

How People Cite Old Papers in Philosophy vs. Psychology

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

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.