Category: Announcements

Conference: “Social Ontology and Empirical Inquiry”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From April 11 to 12, 2026, the conference “Social Ontology and Empirical Inquiry – Conflicts and Connections” will take place at the University of Pittsburgh. The conference page reads:

We are pleased to announce a two-day interdisciplinary workshop hosted by the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing on the intersection of social metaphysics and empirical research in the social sciences.

The workshop aims to foster dialogue between philosophers and social scientists who are interested in the nature of social reality and in how conceptual and empirical approaches to understanding it can be fruitfully integrated.

Social scientists and philosophers have long sought to clarify what it means for entities such as races, genders, institutions, and social structures to exist and to act. Meanwhile, empirically-oriented social scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated methods for measuring, modeling, and explaining such phenomena. This workshop will bring these conversations together to explore the conflicts and connections between conceptual–theoretical frameworks and empirical–methodological practices in the study of the social world.

Organizing Committee

Confirmed Keynotes

The program will include keynote talks and panels by both philosophers and social scientists, including scholars such as:

Guiding Questions

  • What kinds of things are social entities – individuals, groups, institutions, norms, and categories such as race and gender?
  • How can such entities be both socially constructed and real?
  • What is the relationship between social ontology and social measurement?
  • How should metaphysical theories about the nature of the social world inform, or be informed by, empirical research designs?
  • Do social explanations involve forms of causation, mechanism, or structure that differ from those in the natural sciences?
  • How can philosophical analysis of social kinds enrich empirical debates about classification, comparability, and operationalization?

Format

The workshop will include:

  • 30-minute contributed presentations (20 minutes presentation + 10 minutes Q&A)
  • Keynote lectures by invited speakers
  • A roundtable discussion on future directions in social ontology and empirical research

Talk: “I wasn’t thinking about that!” (Franz Berto and Aybüke Özgün)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On April 15, 16:00–18:00 UTC (18:00–20:00 CEST), Franz Berto and Aybüke Özgün will give a talk titled “I wasn’t thinking about that!” as part of the PhiLang Seminars on Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the University of Lodz. The session can be accessed via Teams after registration via the online form. The abstract reads:

Framing effects occur when someone believes only one of two necessarily equivalent propositions, P and Q. Framing is well known and widely studied in economics, the social sciences, cognitive psychology, etc. We want a logic of framing.

Of course, we often find ourselves framed because of the guise under which propositional contents are presented to us. But if one has a hyperintensional conception of propositions – one according to which P can sometimes differ from Q even if they are true in the same possible worlds – then one can think that sometimes we are framed because of a difference in content.

In this paper we argue that this kind of framing is structural and pervasive. It depends on the distinction between working memory and long-term memory – a structural one, accepted in psychology for decades. The basic idea: sometimes we believe P without believing a necessarily equivalent Q because, whereas P concerns a topic we have activated in working memory, Q concerns something else: a topic that we have left dormant in long-term memory.

We then introduce a simple propositional modal language with belief operators, a class of possible-worlds models supplemented with topics, and a sound and complete axiomatization with respect to this class, in order to represent reasoners who can be framed in the way described above.

Talk: “Philosophical Thought Experiments Elicit Conflicting Intuitions” (Joshua Knobe and Ivar Hannikainen)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

As part of the Experimental Philosophy Talk Series, Joshua Knobe and Ivar Hannikainen will give a talk titled “Philosophical Thought Experiments Elicit Conflicting Intuitions” on April 2 from 14:00–16:00 UTC (16:00–18:00 CEST). The session can be accessed via Zoom (Meeting ID: 680 676 8837, Code: xphi123). The abstract reads:

Existing research on intuitions about philosophical thought experiments typically finds that different participants give different answers. Some people say that the correct answer is A while others say it is B. One possible explanation of this finding is that individual participants actually have conflicting intuitions. That is, many of the participants who ultimately select option B may have an intuition drawing them toward option A, and vice versa. Two studies explored the possibility that people have such conflicting intuitions using self-report (Study 1) and mouse-tracking (Study 2) methods. Both studies found evidence for conflicting intuitions, and yet they also uncovered systematic variation: Across fifteen different thought experiments, the popularity of the answer one does not give predicts one’s tendency to feel conflicted. That is, the more common a particular answer, the more likely participants are to feel drawn to it intuitively – even if they ultimately decide it is incorrect.

Talk: “Autonomous Systems, Moral Responsibility and Control Architectures” (Markus Kneer)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On March 20, from 16:00–18:00 (UTC), the Permanent Seminar in Analytic Philosophy (PSAP) of Università Roma Tre will host a talk by Markus Kneer about “Autonomous Systems, Moral Responsibility and Control Architectures.” The hybrid session can be accessed via Teams. The abstract reads:

Matthias (2004) and Sparrow (2007) have argued that the use of self-learning systems can engender “responsibility gaps” – situations in which nobody is morally responsible for a potential harm. In this talk, I will present empirical evidence as to whether laypeople are sensitive to such alleged “responsibility gaps” or whether their retributive dispositions might get in the way (see Danaher, 2016). I will also present new data concerning the question whether we can avoid such situations by imposing tight control architectures to ensure meaningful human control (see e.g. “human-in-the-loop v. on-the-loop,” Docherty, 2012; “tracking & tracing,” Santoni de Sio & van den Hoven, 2018).

Talk: “Cognitive Foundations of Geometry” (Véronique Izard)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

As part of the IHPST’s Séminaire PhilSciCog at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Véronique Izard will talk about “Cognitive Foundations of Geometry” on March 26, 2026, from 02:00–03:30 (UTC). The hybrid session can be accessed via Zoom (Meeting ID: 950 6108 6376, Code: 535047). The abstract reads:

From the first months of life, young children can perceive numeric quantities and perform additive or multiplicative operations on quantities. These abilities support the acquisition of number concepts later in life, and have been proposed to enable humans’ arithmetic cognition. What about geometry, another major branch of mathematics? In this talk, I will present two recent studies assessing the scope and the limits of human geometric intuition. The first study focused on Euclidean geometry, and found that children and adults encode a rich repertoire of geometric properties, at several levels of abstraction. The second study probed intuitions for non-Euclidean geometry and revealed the existence of a pervasive Euclidean bias in adults, identifying limits to the flexibility of human geometric intuition.

Talk: “Normality and Norms” (Josh Knobe)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Center for Philosophy and the Health Sciences at Aarhus University is hosting a lecture by Joshua Knobe. It will take place on Thursday, January 29, 15:15–16:45 (UTC+1) via Zoom. The abstract reads:

The notion of normality plays a role in the way people understand many different scientifically important concepts. For example, normality figures in people’s understanding of what it is for a trait to be innate, what it is for one event to cause another, and what it is for the state to count as a disease. I will be presenting a theory about ordinary attributions of normality and then exploring the application of this theory to all three of these types of judgments. The theory is that ordinary attributions of normality involve a mixture of statistical judgments (how frequent something is) and evaluative judgments (how good something is). Thus, the key claim is that both statistical and evaluative judgments play a role in people’s ordinary understanding of innateness, causation and disease.

Talk: “Expressivity Cross-Linguistically” (Xavier Villalba)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, December 15, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Xavier Villalba’s talk “Expressivity Cross-Linguistically – A Corpus Study of Expressive and Evaluative Adjectives in Romance and Germanic” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

In this presentation, I argue that pure expressive adjectives (such as English fucking and damn) represent the final stage in a process of intersubjectivization (Traugott 2010; Traugott & Dasher 2002). This process begins with a descriptive qualifying adjective, moves through a stage of subjectivization – typical of both evaluative adjectives (e.g., pathetic, horrible) and mixed expressive adjectives (bloody, shitty) – and culminates in the pure expressives. This pragmatic shift is linked to semantic bleaching as well as syntactic changes traceable in our corpora. These changes involve features like gradation, function (modifier vs. predicative), and position (postnominal vs. prenominal modification). To support this claim, I will present two corpus studies: 1. A synchronic study designed to identify the most useful features for distinguishing each adjective class in Germanic and Romance languages; 2. A diachronic study, focused on English and Catalan, to trace the historical emergence of these features. The results of these studies will provide a more accurate and comprehensive cross-linguistic understanding of expressive adjectives. Furthermore, they will offer insights into the patterns of change involved and how the speed of this evolution varies across different items and languages.

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

Workshop: “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

James Andow and Eugen Fischer have announced the first talks for this season’s “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series.” Talks will be held on Microsoft Teams. Anyone interested in joining can email james.andow@manchester.ac.uk.

November 26, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Qianyi Qin (CUNY Graduate Centre): “Imaginative Tendencies and Virtuality Tolerance – Re-Examining the Experience Machine”
  • Jumbly Grindrod (University of Reading): “Word Meanings in Transformer Language Models”

December 10, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Juan-Pablo Bermúdez (University of Southampton) and Gino Carmona (Universidad Externado de Colombia): “Goals and Plans in the Wild – The Effects of Poverty on Planning Agency”
  • Miklós Kürthy (University of Graz): “Care for Consistency”

January 14, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Monika Jovanović and Andrija Šoć (University of Belgrade): “A Matter of Taste? Toward Deliberative Experimental Aesthetics”
  • Markus Werning (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): t.b.a.

Talk: “Philosophical Arguments Can Boost Charitable Giving” (Eric Schwitzgebel and Kirstan Brodie)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Thursday, October 30, the first talk in the Experimental Philosophy Journal Series will take place on Zoom.

Celso de Oliveira Vieira, Alex Wiegmann, and Rodrigo Díaz write:

We are pleased to invite you to the first talk in the Experimental Philosophy Journal Series, the new journal dedicated to X-Phi.

In this session, Eric Schwitzgebel (California) and Kirstan Brodie (Cornell) will present their paper, “Philosophical arguments can boost charitable giving,” co-authored with Nemirow and Cushman. The preprint, in which the authors identify the elements of a range of philosophical arguments that boost charitable giving, is available here. The presentation will be followed by a commentary from Rodrigo Díaz (CSIC). He wrote “Do Moral Beliefs Motivate Action?,” accessible here. After that, the floor will be open for discussion. The authors will speak first, but the audience will be able to participate as well.

The session will take place online on October 30th at 10 AM PDT/6 PM CET.
Here is the Zoom link: http://tiny.cc/xphij1
For inquiries, please contact Celso Vieira at celso.deoliveiravieira@rub.de.

See you soon,
Celso, Alex, and Rodrigo

Talk: “Intentionality and Discrimination” (Nicole Gotzner and Kevin Reuter)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Tuesday, October 2, the XPRAG Wine Gatherings welcome Nicole Gotzner and Kevin Reuter to talk about “Intentionality and Discrimination” on Zoom. Kevin writes:

Experimental Pragmatics (XPrag) and Experimental Philosophy (XPhi) share a common vision: whenever our assumptions can be empirically tested against the world, we should rise to the occasion. On October 2nd, 2025, don’t miss a talk on “intentionality and discrimination” by Nicole Gotzner (University of Osnabrück) and Kevin Reuter (University of Gothenburg), followed by a discussion on how our communities can exchange ideas and spark new collaborations. We can’t wait to see you there!

The Zoom link and more information are available at the XPRAG Wine Gatherings’ website.