Author: Alexander Max Bauer

Hot Off The Press: “The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Recently, “The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence,” a new entry in the “Cambridge Law Handbooks” series, has been published. It was edited by Kevin Tobia and contains no fewer than 38 chapters. See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – Foundations and Theory

  • Kevin Tobia: “Introduction”
  • Barbara A. Spellman, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, Janice Nadler, and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan: “Psychology and Jurisprudence Across the Curriculum”
  • John Mikhail: “Holmes, Legal Realism, and Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Frederick Schauer: “The Empirical Component of Analytic Jurisprudence”
  • Felipe Jiménez: “The Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Jonathan Lewis: “Competing Conceptual Inferences and the Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Joseph Avery, Alissa del Riego, and Patricia Sánchez Abril: “The Contours of Bias in Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Christoph Bublitz: “Experimental Jurisprudence and Doctrinal Reasoning – A View from German Criminal Law”
  • Bert I. Huang: “Law and Morality”
  • Brian Sheppard: “Legal Constraint”

Part 2 – Introductions

  • Guilherme da Franca Couto Fernandes de Almeida, Noel Struchiner, and Ivar Hannikainen: “Rules”
  • James A. Macleod: “Surveys and Experiments in Statutory Interpretation”
  • Thomas R. Lee and Stephen C. Mouritsen: “Corpus Linguistics and Armchair Jurisprudence”
  • Meirav Furth-Matzkin: “Using Experiments to Inform the Regulation of Consumer Contracts”
  • Doron Dorfman: “Experimental Jurisprudence of Health and Disability Law”
  • Jessica Bregant, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, and Verity Winship: “Studying Public Perceptions of Settlement”
  • Benedikt Pirker, Izabela Skoczeń, and Veronika Fikfak: “Experimental Jurisprudence in International Law”
  • Heidi H. Liu: “The Law and Psychology of Gender Stereotyping”
  • Christian Mott: “The Experimental Jurisprudence of Persistence through Time”
  • Lukas Holste and Holger Spamann: “Experimental Investigations of Judicial Decision-Making”
  • Christoph Engel and Rima-Maria Rahal: “Eye-Tracking as a Method for Legal Research”
  • Jessica Bregant: “Intuitive Jurisprudence – What Experimental Jurisprudence Can Learn from Developmental Science”

Part 3 – Applications

  • Corey H. Allen, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Jason Shepard, and Eyal Aharoni: “Moral Judgments about Retributive Vigilantism”
  • Karolina M. Prochownik, Romy D. Feiertag, Joachim Horvath, and Alex Wiegmann: “How Much Harm Does It Take? An Experimental Study on Legal Expertise, the Severity Effect, and Intentionality Ascriptions”
  • Gabriel Lima and Meeyoung Cha: “Human Perceptions of AI-Caused Harm”
  • Christopher Brett Jaeger: “Reasonableness from an Experimental Jurisprudence Perspective”
  • Lucien Baumgartner and Markus Kneer: “The Meaning of ‘Reasonable’ – Evidence from a Corpus-Linguistic Study”
  • Roseanna Sommers: “Commonsense Consent and Action Representation – What is ‘Essential’ to Consent?”
  • Neele Engelmann and Lara Kirfel: “Who Caused It? Different Effects of Statistical and Prescriptive Abnormality on Causal Selection in Chains”
  • Ori Friedman: “Ownership for and Against Control”
  • Andrew Higgins and Inbar Levy: “Examining the Foundations of the Law of Judicial Bias – Expert versus Lay Perspectives on Judicial Recusal”
  • Jacqueline M. Chen and Teneille R. Brown: “The Promise and the Pitfalls of Mock Jury Studies – Testing the Psychology of Character Assessments”
  • Piotr Bystranowski, Ivar Hannikainen, and Kevin Tobia: “Legal Interpretation as Coordination”
  • Janet Randall and Lawrence Solan: “Legal Ambiguities – What Can Psycholinguistics Tell Us?”
  • Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter: “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Rights for Future Generations”
  • Austin A. Baker and J. Remy Green: “The Right to Transgender Identity”
  • Enrique Cáceres, Christopher Stephens, Azalea Reyes-Aguilar, Daniel Atilano, Manuel García, Rosa Lidia López-Bejarano, Susana González, Carmen Patricia López-Olvera, Octavio Salvador-Ginez, and Margarita Palacios: “The Legal Conductome – The Complexity Behind Decisions”
  • Neil C. Thompson, Brian Flanagan, Edana Richardson, Brian McKenzie, and Xueyun Luo: “Trial by Internet – A Randomized Field Experiment on Wikipedia’s Influence on Judges’ Legal Reasoning”

Literature

Tobia, Kevin (ed.) (2025): The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. (Link)

Talk: “Creativity in Taboo Terms in Sign Languages” (Donna Jo Napoli)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, May 26, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Donna Jo Napoli’s talk “Creativity in Taboo Terms in Sign Languages” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

Deaf signing communities share many of the same language taboos that hearing speakers observe. Still, there are areas that are sticky in sign that are not in speech and vice versa. We will take a peek at how signers create taboo signs, looking at ASL and DGS (the sign language of Germany) and perhaps a couple of other languages, noting primarily morphological creativity but also syntactic creativity.

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

Call: “Cognitive Tools in Action”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Valentina Cuccio and Francesco Parisi will organize the conference “Cognitive Tools in Action” in Messina, Italy, from May 28 to 30. Marianna Bolognesi, Anna Ciaunica, Elena Cuffari, Lambros Malafouris, Erik Myin, Gerard Steen, Vittorio Gallese, and Michele Cometa have been confirmed as keynote speakers.

Abstracts can be submitted until March 30. The call reads:

The conference “Cognitive Tools in Action” aims to explore the diverse ways in which cognition is both shaped by tools and manifests itself as a dynamic interplay of strategies and embodied actions.

The term “cognitive tools” encompasses both external instruments (e.g., artworks, technologies, artifacts, and media) that modulate cognitive processes, and internal strategies (e.g., metaphor) employed in cognitive processing. By emphasizing “in action,” we seek to foreground the deeply embodied, sensorimotor, and interactive nature of cognition.

This conference invites scholars from a range of disciplines (including but not limited to anthropology, arts, literature, neuroscience, performance studies, philosophy, psychology), to reflect on the reciprocal relationship between cognitive tools and the environments, bodies, and contexts in which they operate.

Talk: “Derogatory Speech – Conversations, Hearers, and Listeners” (Claire Horisk)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, March 10, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Claire Horisk’s talk “Derogatory Speech – Conversations, Hearers, and Listeners” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

In discussions of how to mitigate political and cultural polarization, we are often told that we should listen to our opponents. But should we listen regardless of what they say – even to derogatory speech? From the standpoint of philosophy, the prescription to listen lacks subtlety, and we cannot reach greater subtlety without a philosophical account of listening itself. In my recent work, I distinguish between listening and hearing and argue that listening to derogatory speech in the context of a conversation is sometimes morally wrong. In this talk, I expand my account, particularly with respect to how power dynamics affect who counts as a conversational participant.

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

Hot Off The Press: “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Lying”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Alex Wiegmann has edited a new volume on “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Lying,” a further entry into Bloomsbury’s “Advances in Experimental Philosophy” series. See below for the table of contents.

  • Emanuel Viebahn: “What Does it Take to Tell a Lie?”
  • Romy Jaster and David Lanius: “The Concept of Fake News”
  • Jörg Meibauer: “The Concept of Bullshit”
  • Markus Kneer: “The Truth About Assertion and Retraction – A Review of the Empirical Literature”
  • Shirly Orr: “Truth Evaluators – A Different Point of View in the Lying/Misleading Distinction”
  • Alejandro Erut: “Cross-Cultural Studies on Concepts of Lying – Methodological Approaches and Their Findings”
  • Mailin Antomo: “Lying With Gestures”
  • Louisa Reins: “The Impact of Modality and Presentation Time on Judgments of Deceptive Implicatures as Cases of Lying – An Empirical Investigation”
  • Izabela Skoczeń: “From Lying to Blaming and Perjury – Deceptive Implicatures in the Courtroom and the Materiality Requirement”
  • Neele Engelmann: “Murderer at the Door! To Lie or to Mislead?”

Call: “ESPP 2025”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 2025 conference of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology will take place in Warsaw, Poland, from September 2 to 5, hosted by the Polish Academy of Sciences. As keynote speakers, Emma Borg, Cameron Buckner, Nora Newcombe, and Petra Schumacher are confirmed.

Abstracts for papers, posters, and symposia can be submitted until March 3. The call reads:

The Society invites the submission of papers, posters and symposia. Submissions are refereed and selected on the basis of quality and relevance to psychologists, philosophers and linguists. If you have any questions, contact us by writing an email to espp2025@gmail.com.

Travel scholarships for PhD Students

Thanks to support from IFiS/GSSR, via the NAWA grant PROM Short-term academic exchange (in Polish, PROM Krótkookresowa wymiana akademicka; BPI/PRO/2024/1/00020/DEC/1), we can award up to 10 travel grants for PhD students at universities outside Poland to attend the conference and present a talk or poster. Please see the Call for Applications for these scholarships, which promotes equal opportunity for people with disabilities, and adequate gender representation. Successful applications will be selected on the basis of: (i) quality of the proposed talk or poster, as judged by the ESPP expert reviewers’ report on the anonymised abstract you submit when applying to present at the conference; (ii) NAWA PROM’s eligibility rules (see the Call for Applications).

Submission instructions for papers, posters and symposia

The deadline for all submissions is 3rd March 2025. Submissions should be made online via EasyChair.

Papers should be designed to be presentable within 20 minutes (for a total 30 minutes session). Submissions should consist of a long abstract of up to 1000 words (excluding bibliography). If required, an additional page of tables and/or graphs may be included. A submission for a poster presentation should consist of a 500-word abstract.

When submitting your paper or poster online, please first indicate the primary discipline of your paper (philosophy, psychology, or linguistics) and whether your submission is intended as a paper or a poster. Submitted papers may also be considered for presentation as a poster if space constraints prevent acceptance as a paper or if the submission is thought more suitable for presentation as a poster. All paper and poster submissions (whether abstracts or full papers) should be in DOC or PDF format and should be properly anonymized in order to allow for blind refereeing.

Each person may present only one paper during the conference’s parallel sessions, though you may be a co-author of more than one paper. If you submit multiple single-authored papers only one will be accepted. This includes contributions to submitted symposia.

Symposia are allocated a two-hour slot and consist of a set of four linked papers on a common theme or three linked papers with an introduction. Symposia should include perspectives from at least two of the three disciplines represented in the society (philosophy, psychology and linguistics). Submissions should be made by symposium organizers (not speakers).

When submitting a symposium proposal online, your submissions should include the following three elements in a single PDF:

  1. A list of 3 or 4 speakers which indicates representation of at least two disciplines (individual speakers may also represent multiple disciplines).
  2. A general abstract of up to 500 words, laying out the topics to be addressed and indicating connections among the talks.
  3. Individual abstracts of up to 500 words and provisional titles for each talk. Please do not submit more than one PDF file per symposium.

General Aim

The aim of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology is to promote interaction between philosophers and psychologists on issues of common concern. Psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, computer scientists and biologists are encouraged to report experimental, theoretical and clinical work that they judge to have philosophical significance; and philosophers are encouraged to engage with the fundamental issues addressed by and arising out of such work. In recent years ESPP sessions have covered such topics as theory of mind, attention, reference, problems of consciousness, introspection and self-report, emotion, perception, early numerical cognition, spatial concepts, infants’ understanding of intentionality, memory and time, motor imagery, counterfactuals, the semantics/pragmatics distinction, comparative cognition, minimalism in linguistic theory, reasoning, vagueness, mental causation, action and agency, thought without language, externalism, hypnosis, and the interpretation of neuropsychological results.

Hot Off The Press: “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Edited by Karolina Prochownik and Stefan Magen, “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law,” a new entry into Bloomsbury’s “Advances in Experimental Philosophy” series, has recently been published. See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – Topics in Experimental General Jurisprudence

  • Raff Donelson: “Experimental Approaches to General Jurisprudence”
  • Guilherme de Almeida, Noel Struchiner, and Ivar Hannikainen: “The Experimental Jurisprudence of the Concept of Rule – Implications for the Hart-Fuller Debate”

Part 2 – Topics in Experimental Particular Jurisprudence

  • Kevin Tobia: “Legislative Intent and Acting Intentionally”
  • Lara Kirfel and Ivar Hannikainen: Why Blame the Ostrich? Understanding Culpability for Willful Ignorance”
  • Paulo Sousa and Gary Lavery: “Culpability and Liability in the Law of Homicide – Do Lay Moral Intuitions Accord with Legal Distinctions?”
  • Levin Güver and Markus Kneer: “Causation and the Silly Norm Effect”

Part 3 – (New) Methods and Topics in Experimental Jurisprudence

  • Justin Sytsma: “Ordinary Meaning and Consilience of Evidence”
  • Pascale Willemsen, Lucien Baumgartner, Severin Frohofer, and Kevin Reuter: “Examining Evaluativity in Legal Discourse – A Comparative Corpus-Linguistic Study of Thick Concepts”
  • Leonard Hoeft: “A Case for Behavioral Studies in Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter: “Experimental Longtermist Jurisprudence”

Literature

Prochownik, Karolina, and Stefan Magen (eds.) (2024): Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law, London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury. (Link)

Hot Off The Press: “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Edited by Paul Henne and Samuel Murray, “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action,” a new entry into Bloomsbury’s “Advances in Experimental Philosophy” series, has recently been published. See below for the table of contents.

  • Justin Sytsma and Melissa Snater: “Consciousness, Phenomenal Consciousness, and Free Will”
  • Myrto Mylopoulos: “Skilled Action and Metacognitive Control”
  • Samuel Murray: “Bringing Self-Control into the Future”
  • Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: “Who is Responsible? Split Brains, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and Implicit Attitudes”
  • Paul Noordhof and Ema Sullivan-Bissett: “The Everyday Irrationality of Monothematic Delusion”
  • John Turri: “Truth, Perspective, and Norms of Assertion – New Findings and Theoretical Advances”
  • Joanna Korman: “The Distinct Functions of Belief and Desire in Intentional Action Explanation”
  • Cory J. Clark, Heather M. Maranges, Brian B. Boutwell, and Roy F. Baumeister: “Free Enough – Human Cognition (and Cultural Interests) Warrant Responsibility”
  • Edouard Machery, Markus Kneer, Pascale Willemsen, and Albert Newen: “Beyond the Courtroom – Agency and the Perception of Free Will”
  • Katrina L. Sifferd: “Do Rape Cases Sit in a Moral Blindspot? The Dual Process Theory of Moral Judgment and Rape”
  • Shane Timmons and Ruth M. J. Byrne: “How People Think About Moral Excellence – The Role of Counterfactual Thoughts in Reasoning about Morally Good Actions”
  • Caroline T. Arruda and Daniel J. Povinelli Index: “Why Idealized Agency Gets Animal (and Human) Agency Wrong”

Literature

Henne, Paul, and Samuel Murray (eds.) (2024): Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action, London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury. (Link)

Talk: “Expressivity in Georgian and other Caucasian Languages” (Thomas Wier)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, February 10, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Thomas Wier’s talk “Expressivity in Georgian and other Caucasian Languages” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

Expressive and ideophonic constructions conveying “marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2012) are frequently found in the languages of all regions of the world, but their distribution, use and functioning across languages of the Caucasus has never been documented from a regional perspective. This talk will give you a brief taste of the various kinds of expressive language present in the three autochthonous Caucasian families: Abkhaz-Adyghean, Kartvelian and Nakh-Daghestanian. It will also look at greater length at the specific morphological and syntactic peculiarities of expressives in Georgian, which exhibit exuberant consonant clusters, processes of reduplication uncharacteristic of the language as a whole, as well as specific morphosyntactic alignment splits between different classes of expressive.

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

Talk: “How Language Supports the Acquisition of Predicates of Mental States and Emotions” (Kristen Syrett and Misha Becker)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, January 20, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Kristen Syrett and Misha Becker’s talk “How Language Supports the Acquisition of Predicates of Mental States and Emotions” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

As children acquire adjectives, they must tackle the challenge that while some properties denoted by these predicates are stable and visually salient (e.g., color, shape), others (e.g., emotions and mental states like happy, sad, or confident) lack a reliable physical correlate, and are typically only inferable via second order characteristics. How, then, do children master the meanings of adjectives that label these fleeting, internal, abstract states? One answer may lie in the very linguistic environment in which these adjectives appear. Previous work in language acquisition has documented the power of the frame and complementation patterns for verb learning, subject form for control and raising verbs, count syntax for acquiring nouns, and adverbial modification for different types of gradable adjectives. In this talk, I draw on this prior work to lay a foundation for a series of experiments investigating how children might recruit both syntactic and semantic cues in the input to narrow the hypothesis space for emotion/mental state adjective meaning. I begin by presenting extensive evidence from CHILDES corpora showing that while these adjectives are relatively infrequent in the input, they diverge from other adjectives (e.g., those of color, shape, size, or multidimensional subjective adjectives) in their preference of syntactic position, their requirements on subject animacy, and their syntactic complementation patterns. Next, I present data from a set of word guessing studies using scripted dialogues that both adults and older children (age 5–8) recruit the type of subject and syntactic complement to constrain adjective meaning. Finally, I present a set of binary forced-choice word learning studies putting emotion/mental state against color and shape showing once again, that the presence of an animate subject and syntactic complement points to an emotion/mental state adjective meaning, this time for preschoolers. Taken together, these experiments – the first to document the combined power of syntax and semantics for acquiring abstract adjective meaning – make connections between emotion/mental state adjectives and mental state verbs in word learning, thereby further demonstrating the potential universality of syntactic bootstrapping, and the role of language itself in focusing young word learners’ attention on mental aspects of the situation that are not readily observable.

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