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)
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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