On June 11 from 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1), Pascale Willemsen and Lucien Baumgartner will talk about “Moral Language and Moore’s Paradox – Challenging Moral Expressivism.” The talk can be accessed via Zoom (Meeting ID: 651 0778 6432, Code: 235823). The abstract reads:
Moore’s Paradox – e.g., “It’s raining but I don’t think it’s raining” – is widely considered infelicitous despite being logically consistent. In this paper, we extend Moore’s Paradox to moral discourse and test whether moral statements like “Murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it” elicit similar intuitions. Rooted in moral expressivism, the Parity Thesis predicts that moral assertions express non-cognitive attitudes (e.g., approval/disapproval) in a manner analogous to how descriptive statements express beliefs. In a pre-registered study with 1200 participants, we empirically test this thesis using a mixed design that manipulates moral term type (thick vs thin), evaluative polarity (positive vs negative), perspective (first vs third person), and attitude (belief vs disapproval). The results of our main study and one qualitative follow-up study suggest that while moral statements resemble Moorean Paradoxes in important ways, participants find it largely acceptable to call an action wrong without disapproving of it. As the infelicity of such statements is a core ingredient of Moorean Paradoxes and, as we suggest, the Parity Thesis, we conclude that moral language does not express approval and disapproval like declarative language expresses beliefs.
On May 26 from 15:30–17:30 (UTC+2), Helen Fischer will talk about “Justified True Belief Revisited – A Psychological Perspective on ‘Knowledge’” at Heidelberg University. The talk can be accessed via Zoom. The abstract reads:
Modern societies rely fundamentally on the production, circulation, and recognition of reliable knowledge. Yet despite the normative and institutional prominence of knowledge, we know surprisingly little about what citizens themselves count as knowledge, to whom they attribute it, and on what grounds. A dominant philosophical account defines knowledge as Justified True Belief, requiring that a proposition be true, believed, and adequately justified. In this talk, I present a large-scale empirical test whether ordinary knowledge ascriptions adhere to this normative standard. In a preregistered conjoint experiment with a nationally quota-matched U.S. sample (N = 1,295), participants judged whether an agent “knows” propositions across a politically contested domain (climate change) and an uncontested domain (astrophysics). We fully crossed Justification (six levels varying strength and source), Truth (true vs. false), and Belief (strong vs. weak). Knowledge ascriptions systematically diverged from Justified True Belief across both domains. Belief exerted the strongest causal influence (Average causal effects: AMCE ≈ −0.42 for weak vs. strong belief), Truth was helpful but not necessary (AMCE ≈ 0.18 for true vs. false), and Justification contributed little or not at all (AMCE range across levels ≈ 0.00–0.05). This asymmetry had striking consequences: more than half of participants attributed knowledge even to false propositions when belief was strong, whereas only about one quarter attributed knowledge to true, strongly justified propositions when belief was weak. Across both domains, participants thus heavily prioritized conviction over truth and justification when judging whether others “know.” By showing that ordinary knowledge ascriptions more closely follow a model of “Strong Belief with optional Truth” than the normative account of Justified True Belief, these results help explain why low-justification and even false propositions can be treated as knowledge in public discourse.
From May 27 to 28, 2026, the workshop “Praise – The Moral, The Prudential, The Overlooked” will take place as a hybrid event at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. The workshop can be joined via Zoom (Meeting ID: 635 3364 7504, Code: 481443).
There is a marked tendency in the philosophy of mind to characterize mental interpretation – the understanding of each other and ourselves in terms of mental concepts, folk or sciency – in broadly universalist terms. Whether described as the exercise of psychological capacities whose basic structure is universally shared across the species (a Theory of Mind, described in functionalist-representationalist terms), or as a predictive practice based on fundamental norms of rationality, the underlying commitment remains the same: the downtown of mental interpretation is a set of universal rules, functional or rational, that set fixed boundaries to what can plausibly count as a (healthily) minded creature.
This assumption has been challenged from a number of directions. On the one hand, empirical evidence from fields like anthropology and cultural psychology points to a rich intercultural diversity in the meaning and function of mental concepts. This evidence partly converges with experimental studies on attributions of mental states like belief or intention, which reveal a marked context-dependence in the way mental attributions are used and assessed. In parallel, civil right movements like the Neurodiversity or Mad Pride movements have increasingly demanded greater recognition for intracultural cognitive diversity. This includes both subpersonal differences in sensory and executive processing, for which neurodiversity-informed research provides accumulating evidence, as well as person-level differences in how such differences are interpreted and policed in interpersonal practices.
In sum, this points to the need for a philosophy of mind better suited to accounting for this rich diversity in minds and in the ways we talk and think about them. The present workshop aims to move in this direction by bringing together cutting-edge research on mental interpretation, mental diversity, and the connections between them. The contributions address various important topics in this line of inquiry, including the analysis of consequences of different philosophical theories of mental interpretation for our understanding of mental diversity; the link between mental (self-)interpretation and the constitution of mind and mental health; inter- and intra-cultural variability in mental interpretation; mental diversity and counternormative (e.g., mad, neurodivergent) interpretation practices; epistemic and discursive injustices related to mental interpretation; or the interplay of first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives in self-interpretation.
From June 9 to 10, 2026, the fourth workshop of the Empirical Epistemology Network will be held at the University of Stirling, UK.
The announcement reads:
This event considers how place-knowledge – especially in relation to cities – comes to be formed through sensory engagements, lived experiences, and interactions with environments through physical immersion, memory and imagination, and the role these play in giving rise to place(s). Combining academic papers with interactive activities such as storytelling, mapping, walking and artistic interventions, together we will explore the challenges and opportunities for place-based imagining and to reflect on how ways of knowing shape, and are shaped by, engagements with place.
Speakers:
Pablo Fernandez Velasco (Stirling)
Paola Di Giuseppantonio Di Franco (Durham, in-person only)
Rebecca Noone (Glasgow)
Christina Anderson (UCL)
Sofya Shahab (Stirling, in-person only)
Quill R. Kukla (Georgetown)
The overarching goal of the network is to build bridges between epistemologists and empirical researchers from various disciplines. Epistemologists will reflect about the practical relevance of their theoretical research on the nature of knowledge, and empirical researchers will consider whether some of the sharp conceptual tools of epistemologists are helpful for their own work. Participants will be drawn to identify the implicit or explicit assumptions of their work and field of research, assess whether those assumptions are warranted, and think about the consequences of challenging those assumptions. Remote participation, where feasible, is welcome. For more details about the network, up to date information about speakers and links to register, please visit https://empiricalepistemology.stir.ac.uk/index.php/events/.
Small travel and child-care bursaries available. Please note that in-person attendance is limited to 30. If you register and then realise you can’t attend, please let us know asap so that we can free the space for someone else. The Empirical Epistemology Network is run by Giacomo Melis (Stilring), Kirsten Blakey (Toronto), Jack Lyons (Glasgow) and Peter Graham (UC Riverside), and is supported by the Future Leaders Fellows Development Network (award PF 024).
The overarching goal of the network is to build bridges between epistemologists and empirical researchers from various disciplines. Epistemologists will reflect about the practical relevance of their theoretical research on the nature of knowledge, and empirical researchers will consider whether some of the sharp conceptual tools of epistemologists are helpful for their own work. Participants will be drawn to identify the implicit or explicit assumptions of their work and field of research, assess whether those assumptions are warranted, and think about the consequences of challenging those assumptions.
From May 7 to 8, 2026, the workshop “Philosophy – What and How?” will take place at the University of Vienna, Austria.
The announcement reads:
Views on what philosophy is and how it should be done vary widely. Is philosophy concerned with reality or with our concepts used for grasping aspects of reality? Does philosophy use a priori or empirical methods? What is the role of intuitions? And of the method of cases? What are philosophers trying to find out? Is Philosophy a descriptive or a normative discipline, or both?
Key information:
Dates: May 7–8, 2026, 09:00–18:00 Venue: Sky Lounge (DG), Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090 Wien, Austria
Here is a list of speakers and titles:
Max Kölbel: Philosophy as Conceptual Engagement
Yaokun Fu: The Arrovian Impossibility Theorem in Metaphysical Theory Choice
Sophie Veigl: Beyond Method? Philosophy of Science Between Analysis and Activities
Elijah Chudnoff: Intuition and Philosophical Progress
Matti Eklund: The Parochial, the Universal and the Alien
We (Sinéad Cleary, Joanna Demaree-Cotton, and Alexander Max Bauer) are excited to announce a new community resource to help experimental philosophers choose journals for their work.
After another recent round of identifying a suitable journal for one of our own recent experimental philosophy manuscripts (going through the process of identifying prospective journals with any record of publishing experimental studies, as well as basics – subfield, word count, etc.) we figured: why not pool the community’s knowledge and resources? The result is a crowd-sourced, interactive table compiling journals that publish experimental philosophy. The table includes links to official journal guidelines as well as existing crowdsourced metrics and sources, and lets users filter and sort by keywords and various categories.
This resource was partly inspired by the memory of a previous resource compiled by Justin Sytsma in 2018 (see here and here). However, some things have (happily for x-phi) changed since then. To give just one example, while in 2018 Justin noted only one experimental paper published in Ergo, this journal now has an area editor in the field of experimental philosophy (shout out to Pascale Willemsen!) and a number of great experimental philosophy papers have appeared on its pages in recent years. We have not attempted any analysis of change over time, nor have we attempted to replicate Justin’s efforts to quantify how much x-phi is published where. But we expect things have changed for other venues as well. Indeed, as of 2026 there’s a brand new dedicated journal for publishing experimental philosophy.
We have also designed the resource with the future in mind. We hope that continued crowd-sourced input from the x-phi community – from you! – will go into correcting, maintaining, and updating this resource, as inevitable errors are identified and things change in the field.
With that in mind, we would love the community to offer feedback in response to the following questions:
Are you aware of journals that publish x-phi work that are not currently included?
Some journals currently have empty entries under “Examples of x-phi papers recently published,” as we haven’t had the capacity to locate relevant papers. If you know of suitable examples, we’d be grateful if you could nominate references!
Do you have any additional notes or comments we should include about specific journals listed here (in the “Notes” column or otherwise)?
Do have other information that you believe should be included and would help researchers decide where to submit their work? If so, do you have ideas about how we might source this information?
One final caveat. We acknowledge that this resource is imperfect in many ways. We regard it as a works-in-progress – but one that does not pretend to aim at perfection (though we hope to correct any outright errors). It is a community resource based on crowdsourced information, not a formal analysis. We have tried to be transparent about where different pieces of information come from through consistent hyperlinking and attribution notes. Unsourced data can be assumed to be anecdotal or individual opinion. We have no doubt that some of the primary/sub-field classifications are up for debate. And we take no stand on such questions as to whether one should or should not pay attention to journal rankings or this-or-that metric when publishing (plenty of healthy debate on these issues exist in the academic blogosphere!). We include these sources or metrics because we know that many people do consider them, and consolidating these different sources into a single spreadsheet might save folks some time. Our hope is simply that this is a useful resource to the experimental philosophy community (at different career-stages, with different professional and research needs, with different views on publication).
Please comment or get in touch with your comments, feedback, or updates!
Special thanks go to Kevin Reuter, Edouard Machery, Carme Isern-Mas, and Eugen Fischer for invaluable feedback that helped us put this together.
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.
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.
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