Category: Announcements

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.

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

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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

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

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

Workshop: “Methodological Trends and Challenges in Contemporary Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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

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

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

October 25, 9:00–17:30 (UTC+2)

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

October 26, 9:00–16:45 (UTC+2)

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

Talk: “In the Thick of It” (Matteo Colombo and Giovanni Cassani)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, October 14, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+2), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Matteo Colombo and Giovanni Cassani’s talk “In the Thick of It – Do Thick Terms Constitute a Distinctive Class of Affectively-Charged Language?” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

Words like “courageous”, “clever”, “gullible”, “smelly” and “tasty” are examples of what philosophers call thick terms, which have a significant degree of descriptive content and are evaluatively loaded, too. Thick terms have been contrasted with purely evaluative terms like “good”, “bad”, “positive” and “negative”, and descriptive terms like “Dutch”, “tall” and “pink”. Despite the amount of attention thick terms have received in philosophy, however, it is unclear whether they constitute a homogeneous class of evaluative terms with characteristic psycholinguistic properties, and whether the psycholinguistic properties of thick terms are reducible to their “valence norms” (i.e., the degree of pleasantness/unpleasantness elicited by a word). In this talk, we explore these two questions based on computational modelling and behavioural data in English, Dutch and Italian. Our results indicate that, compared to other affectively-charged words, thick terms have characteristic psycholinguistic and information properties irreducible to valence norms.

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

The “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, continues. They write:

We are looking forward to the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The workshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. Except for the opening keynote session, all sessions will have two presentations. Please email to register and receive the links (by the day before the session you hope to attend would be ideal).

October 9, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Shaun Nichols (Cornell University): “The PSR and the Folk Metaphysics of Explanation”

November 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Monica Ding (King’s College London): “Non-Factive Understanding – Evidence from English, Cantonese, and Mandarin”
  • María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “Digital Interventions to Boost Vaccination Intention – A Report”

December 11, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Elis Jones (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research): “The Problem of Baselining – Philosophy, History, and Coral Reef Science”
  • April H. Bailey (University of Edinburgh) and Nicholas DiMaggio (University of Chicago Booth School of Business): “Of Minds and Men”

January 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Ajinkya Deshmukh (The University of Manchester) and Frederique Janssen-Lauret (The University of Manchester): “Reincarnation and Anti-Essentialism – An Argument Against the Essentiality of Material Origins”
  • Ethan Landes (University of Kent) and Justin Sytsma (Victoria University of Wellington): “LLM Simulated Data – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

February 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė (University of Cambridge), Jasmina Stevanov (University of Cambridge), Ryan P. Doran (University of Cambridge), Katherine A. Symons (University of Cambridge), and Simone Schnall (University of Cambridge): “Transformed by Beauty – Exploring the Influence of Aesthetic Appreciation on Abstract Thinking”
  • Poppy Mankowitz (University of Bristol): “Experimenting With ‘Good’”

March 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Kathryn Francis (University of Leeds), Maria Ioannidou (University of Bradford), and Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh): “Does Dietary Identity Influence Moral Anthropocentrism?”
  • Jonathan Lewis (University of Manchester), James Toomey (University of Iowa), Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada), and Brian D. Earp (National University of Singapore): “Normative Authority, Epistemic Access, and the True Self”

Talk: “Slurs Across Syntactic Realizations” (Bianca Cepollaro, Filippo Domaneschi, and Isidora Stojanovic)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, September 23, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+2), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Bianca Cepollaro, Filippo Domaneschi, and Isidora Stojanovic’s talk “Slurs Across Syntactic Realizations – Experimental Evidence on Predicative vs. Ad-Nominal Uses of Slurs” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

The research on slurs has been largely striving to understand how slurs encode their pejorative meaning – whether via truth-conditional meaning, or conventional implicature, or presupposition, or otherwise. Less attention has been paid to the question of what kind of pejorative content slurs express or convey. It is the latter question that we undertake in the present talk, and we do so by means of an experimental study conducted over slurring terms in Italian, in line with our earlier studies on pejoratives in Italian (“When is it ok to call someone a jerk? An experimental investigation of expressives”, Synthese 2020, and “Literally ‘a jerk’: an experimental investigation of expressives in predicative position”, Language and Cognition, forthcoming). We explore three options: (1) pejorative content is agent-oriented, that is, reflects the negative attitudes of some salient agent, typically the speaker; (2) pejorative content is target-oriented, that is, brings to salience the negative properties of the person(s) referred to with the slur; (3) pejorative content is intersubjective, that is, reflects the negative attitudes of not only the agent but further conversational participants, or even a larger linguistic community. Crucially, we look at slurs both in predicative position (X is a -slur-) and adnominal position (That -slur- X is Y). Our results show that the agent-oriented option is the preferred one for adnominal uses, while the target-oriented option, for predicative uses: this suggests that the pejorative content encoded by slurs is not uniform but varies along a syntactic dimension.

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

Talk: “In Praise of Praise” (Pascale Willemsen)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, June 10, from 18:00–20:00 (UTC+2), Pascale Willemsen will be talking about “In Praise of Praise” at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Pascale writes:

Philosophers claim that an agent’s moral responsibility can come in two variations: A blameworthy agent deserves blame, and a praiseworthy agent deserves praise. It is also widely accepted that a central question in moral philosophy concerns the conditions under which an agent is or is appropriately held morally responsible for their behaviour. In contrast, a central topic in moral psychology concerns the conditions under which an agent is judged to be morally responsible for their behaviour and blamed for its negative consequences. While blame and praise are seen as two sides of the same coin, considerably more attention has been paid to blame. In general, moral responsibility researchers have mainly focused on understanding negatively-valenced moral phenomena. In contrast, the positive side of moral responsibility has only played a minor role in the research programmes of moral philosophers, psychologists, and experimental philosophers. As a result, we understand relatively little about what praise is, when it is ascribed, and how it is verbally expressed. This is surprising, as researchers strive to tell a story about human morality and moral responsibility as a whole, not merely half of it.

In this talk, I will do three things: First, I summarize the relatively scarce psychological literature which strongly suggests various asymmetries between blame and praise. Second, presenting a series of my own experiments, I demonstrate that blame and praise may differ in another important respect, namely in the way it is verbally expressed by negative and positive evaluative concepts. As a result of all this evidence, I conclude that praise is a unique moral judgment that deserves closer attention. Finally, taking a first stab at the linguistic dimension of praise, I show some pilot corpus studies which explore praise vocabulary.

Conference: “4th European Experimental Philosophy Conference”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 4th “European Experimental Philosophy Conference,” organized by Izabela Skoczeń, Tomasz Żuradzki, Piotr Bystranowski, Bartosz Janik, Maciej Próchnicki, and Vilius Dranseika, will take place from May 30 to July 2 at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

On May 30, there’s a pre-conference symposium on “LLMs for xPhi”. The conference program from May 31 to June 2, then, spans a total of 19 sessions and is complemented by three keynotes:

May 31, 9:30–10:45 (UTC+2)

  • Ivar Rodriguez Hannikainen (University of Granada): “Letter Versus Spirit – An Overview of Experimental General Jurisprudence”

June 1, 9:30–10:45 (UTC+2)

  • Katarzyna Paprzycka-Hausman and her team (University of Warsaw): “Reflecting on the Knobe Effect and the Epistemic Side-Effect Effect”

June 2, 13:00–14:15 (UTC+2)

  • Thomas Nadelhoffer (College of Charleston): “Measuring Free Will Beliefs – What Have We Learned?”

For more information about the conference, visit https://sites.google.com/view/xphi2024krakow/.