Author: Alexander Max Bauer

The 2024 X-Phi Blog Recap

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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

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

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

Abstract for conference presentation – guidelines:

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

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

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

Abstract for poster presentation – guidelines:

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call: “Experimental Argument Analysis”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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

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

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

Deadline: March 1st, 2025.

Submission link​

Questions:

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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

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

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

Call: “5th European Experimental Philosophy Conference”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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

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

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

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

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

Deadline: March 1st, 2025

Submission link​

Decisions by April 1st, 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call: “EPITHETS & STAL-2025 Workshop”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The next workshop by the project “Explaining Pejoratives in Theoretical and Experimental Terms” (EPITHETS) and the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will take place in Genoa, Italy, from May 7 to 8, 2025.

Abstracts for contributions can be submitted until December 10. The call reads:

We invite contributions on issues concerned with the positive, negative or ambivalent valence of expressive terms. In particular, we encourage:

  • empirical studies (experimental, corpus and field studies) concerned with the valence of expressive terms (incl. slurs, pejoratives, amelioratives);
  • analyses of how the valence of a term can shift (as, for example, in slur reclamation).

Call: “The Puzzle of Social Behavior – Game Theory and Beyond”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Mantas Radzvilas and Wolfgang Spohn organize a workshop on “The Puzzle of Social Behavior – Game Theory and Beyond” at the University of Bielefeld. It will take place from April 3 to 5, 2025.

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until January 6, 2025. The call reads:

There are up to 5 further slots of 40 minutes (30 minutes talk, 10 minutes discussion) for presentations. Everyone interested in presenting themselves is invited to apply for participation. Early-career researchers and scholars from underrepresented groups are particularly encouraged to apply.

For this purpose, please submit an abstract of your talk of at most 1000 words (2 pages) and a CV till January 6, 2025. Decisions on the submissions will be made within four weeks. Those selected will be invited to participate including a coverage of travel and accommodation costs.

Please send your application both to: mantas.radzvilas@uni-konstanz.de and wolfgang.spohn@uni-konstanz.de

Abstract: The workshop will be co-organized by the Reinhart-Koselleck project “Reflexive Decision and Game Theory” of Wolfgang Spohn at the University of Konstanz and the Center of Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld. Its game-theoretic part is particularly concerned with foundational issues of game theory. Which is hence the topic of the second workshop of this project.

Social reality is built on the capacity of human beings to engage in social behavior – complex forms of intentional, coordinated actions involving more than one individual. For several decades, game theory has served as the primary conceptual framework for developing a variety of theories aiming to explain social behavior, such as social norms, prosocial preferences, virtual bargaining, and team reasoning theories. All of these theories converge on the idea that social behavior is sustained by sufficiently aligned interests and beliefs of the interacting individuals, yet they disagree on how these necessary alignments of interests and beliefs come about. A number of game-theoretic accounts of social behavior can claim substantial amounts of experimental results as supporting evidence. In many cases, experimental evidence supports multiple accounts equally, thus creating a problem of underdetermination. To conclude, after a number of decades of intensive development, a unified mathematical framework of game theory has not been able to produce a unified account of social behavior.

This conceptually unsatisfactory state of affairs raises a number of important questions. Is there a methodology to select among the competing accounts? Should these accounts be viewed as competing theories of social behavior, or rather as theories that complement one another? Are there better unconsidered alternatives to existing theories? Is game theory truly the best approach towards explaining social behavior?

The purpose of the workshop is to advance the discussion on these and other philosophical questions related to the status of game-theoretic explanations of social behavior.

Talk: “Maximize Expressivity!” (Nicolás Lo Guercio)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, November 4, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+2), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Nicolás Lo Guercio’s talk “Maximize Expressivity!” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

In interpreting utterances language users frequently compare the sentence used by the speaker with a set of alternative sentences that she could have used instead. Arguably, such comparison can have a significant impact on the interpretation, the grammaticality, or the felicity of the utterance. In this talk I focus on scalar inferences, alternative-based inferences that arise as a result of the comparison between sentences mainly in terms of their informativeness. In this regard, a lot of research has focused on scalar implicatures and anti-presuppositions, where the hearer compares alternatives regarding their at-issue and presuppositional content respectively. To my knowledge, however, no attention has been paid to differences in informativeness regarding expressive meaning, arguably a type of non-presuppositional, non-at-issue content. Thus, for example, the sentence “That idiot Nicolás lost his keys” is intuitively more informative than “Nicolás lost his keys” in terms of its expressive content. The question arises whether expressives may license expressive scalar inferences (ESIs) parallel to scalar implicatures and anti-presuppositions, and under what circumstances. In this talk I argue, based on the discussion of epithets and certain honorifics (e.g., the Spanish honorific ‘don’) that expressive utterances may license ESIs under the right circumstances, and I suggest that the data can be accounted for by postulating a principle called Maximize expressivity! Some expressives, however, e.g. expressive adjectives and group pejoratives, do not seem to license ESIs. In the second part of the talk I attempt to account for these apparent counterexamples in a way that is compatible with Maximize expressivity!: on the one hand, I maintain that expressive adjectives do not license ESIs because of the particularities of their semantics; on the other hand, I contend that group pejoratives do not license ESIs because they are (sociolinguistically) marked.

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

Workshop: “Methodological Trends and Challenges in Contemporary Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From October 25 to 26, the workshop “Methodological Trends and Challenges in Contemporary Philosophy,” organized by Martin Justin, Maja Malec, Olga Markič, Nastja Tomat, and Borut Trpin, will take place at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The announcement reads:

Contemporary analytic philosophers have expanded their methodological toolkit beyond traditional philosophical inquiry, embracing a wide array of approaches that intersect with various disciplines. These methods include (but are not limited to) experimental approaches, which involve empirical testing and data collection to inform philosophical hypotheses; non-idealized and naturalized epistemology, which considers the real-world complexities of knowledge acquisition and justification; computer simulations and probabilistic modeling, which enable philosophers to explore complex systems and uncertainties in reasoning; neuroscientific methods, which offer insights into the neural underpinnings of cognitive processes and decision-making; formal ontology, which provides rigorous frameworks for analyzing concepts and categories; conceptual engineering, which involves the deliberate design and modification of conceptual frameworks to address philosophical problems; evolutionary modeling, which investigates the emergence and evolution of cognitive capacities and norms; and feminist perspectives, which critically examine power dynamics and social structures in philosophical discourse.

The upcoming workshop aims to delve into these methodological trends, showcasing recent research that employs these diverse approaches and addressing the challenges and opportunities they present for contemporary philosophy. Over the course of two days, the workshop will feature a total of 14 talks, evenly distributed with 7 talks scheduled for each day. Each keynote talk will span 75 minutes, while contributed talks will be allocated 45 minutes. This workshop seeks to enrich our understanding of contemporary philosophical inquiry and inspire new avenues of research.

October 25, 9:00–17:30 (UTC+2)

  • Jan Sprenger (University of Turin): “Semantic Modeling between Empirical Data and Norms of Rationality”
  • Olga Markič (University of Ljubljana): “Roles of Philosopher in Interdisciplinary Research”
  • Timothy Tambassi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice): “Is Extensible Markup Language Perspectivist?”
  • Thomas Engeland (University of Bonn): “What Would Methodological Naturalism in Ethics Be?”
  • Paweł Polak (Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow) and Roman Krzanowski (Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow): “Ethics in Silico – Computer Modeling of Ethical Concepts in Autonomous AI Systems”
  • Michal Hladky (University of Geneva): “End of Logical Positivism? #toosoon”
  • Rafal K. Stepien (Austrian Academy of Sciences): “The Absent Elephant – Non-Western Methods in Contemporary Philosophy”

October 26, 9:00–16:45 (UTC+2)

  • Borut Trpin (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Maribor, and University of Ljubljana): “Revisiting Epistemic Coherence From A Posterior-Probability Perspective”
  • Martin Justin (University of Maribor): “The Value of Social Coherence in Science – An Agent-Based-Modelling Exploration”
  • Raimund Pils (University of Salzburg): “Integrating Empirical Research and Philosophical Theorizing on the Scientific Realism Debate for Science Reporting”
  • Juan de Jager (University of Ljubljana): “Making Porosity More Porous – An Open Call for Brainstorming After Tanya Luhrmann’s Recent Findings”
  • Danilo Šuster (University of Maribor): “Open-Mindedness and the Appeal to Ignorance”
  • Nastja Tomat (University of Ljubljana): “Bounded Epistemic Rationality as a Link Between the Normative and the Descriptive”
  • Dunja Šešelja (Ruhr University Bochum): “When Expert Judgment Fails – Epistemic Trespassing and Risks to Collective Inquiry”