Category: Announcements

Hackathon: “Data-Driven Methods in Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Gregor Bös and Max Noichl organize a hackathon on “Data-Driven Methods in Philosophy,” which will take place in Utrech from October 16 to 18. Before and after, hybrid meetings will also take place.

Their announcement reads:

Computational methods have transformed academic research, including in the humanities. Philosophers have been comparatively slow to adopt them, but as contemporary language modelling techniques now enable much more sophisticated analyses, they are seeing increasing interest. We want to explore techniques from the digital humanities, linguistics and AI research (Betz 2022) that can support the study of philosophical and scientific corpora, with applications for philosophy of science (Lean, Rivelli & Pence 2021; Noichl 2023. See also the contributions to Pence & Rivelli 2022), the history of philosophy (Petrovich, Verhaegh, Bös et al. 2024; Verhaegh, Petrovich & Bös forthcoming), and metaphilosophy (Petrovich, 2022).

This activity is built around a “hackathon” – an extended period of collaborative programming and discussion. During the three-day in-person event, the participants develop their own projects, either individually or in small groups. The first two days start with keynote lectures that present state-of-the-art research. In the lead-up to the event, we organize two hybrid seminars, in which participants present recent research to each other, to get an idea of what’s possible in this space. During the seminars, participants brainstorm research ideas and discuss with seminar leaders how to apply digital methods, identify appropriate data sources, and determine which digital skills to develop. During the event, our keynote speakers Charles Pence and Gregor Betz contribute their expertise in argument representation, LLMs, digital methods for history and philosophy of science. They will also be available during the event to discuss research ideas, share practical knowledge, and support the seminar participants.

As an additional help for participants without programming experience or who have not yet used data-driven methods in their research, the organizers prepare coding templates and assist in using LLMs for writing code. More experienced participants can focus on exchanging ideas and developing their own projects. A few weeks after the hackathon, we reconvene in a hybrid event to discuss the results of the projects and avenues for further work.

The aim of the course is to offer an introduction to data-driven methods for philosophy and focuses on participant-designed research projects. At the end of the course, participants:

a) Know examples of state-of-the-art data-driven research methods in philosophy and are in a
good position to apply them.
b) Have gained experience in starting their own computational philosophy project
In the best case, the hackathon can be the starting point for a research project in the participants’
domain of expertise.

Workshop: “Data-Driven Methods for Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Gregor Bös and Max Noichl organize the Satellite workshop “Data-Driven Methods for Philosophy” at this year’s conference of the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie (GAP). The workshop will take place at the University of Düsseldorf from September 12 to 13.

Their announcement reads:

Computational methods have revolutionized most fields of academic research, including the humanities. More recently, they have also been put to use in the philosophy of science, history of philosophy, and metaphilosophy. In this satellite workshop, we discuss techniques from the digital humanities, network science, and artificial intelligence that can support the study of philosophical corpora.

The workshop comprises keynote lectures by Prof. Catherine Herfeld and Prof. Adrian Wüthrich that showcase computational methods in philosophical research. After these showcases, Gregor Bös and Max Noichl will assist the participants in developing their own initial research questions that make use of digital methods and explore first implementations. The organizers have prepared templates to support participants without programming experience or who have not yet used computational methods in their research. More experienced participants can use the sessions to exchange ideas and develop their own projects, presenting the state of their progress in the concluding session.

If participants already have project ideas when signing up, we encourage them to get in contact with the organizers to discuss potential data sources and methods. Participants are also very welcome to sign up to continue working on existing digital projects and to contribute to the exchange of approaches.

Conference: “Basel-Oxford-NUS BioXPhi Summit”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 2025 “Basel-Oxford-NUS BioXPhi Summit,” organized by Tenzin Wangmo, Brian D. Earp, Carme Isern, Christian Rodriguez Perez, Emilian Mihailov, Ivar Rodriguez Hannikainen, and Kathryn Francis, will take place from June 26 to 27 at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

The program consists of 15 talks and seven posters, framed by two keynotes.

June 26, 8:30–17:30 (UTC+2)

  • Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh): “Who Has an Expansive Moral Circle? Understanding Variability in Ascriptions of Moral Concern”
  • Eliana Hadjiandreou (University of Texas at Austin): “The Stringent Moral Circle – Self-Other Discrepancies in the Perceived Expansion of Moral Concern”
  • Daniel Martín (University of Granada): “Mapping the Moral Circle with Choice and Reaction Time Data”
  • Neele Engelmann (Max Planck Institute for Human Development): “Understanding and Preventing Unethical Behavior in Delegation to AI”
  • Yuxin Liu (University of Edinburgh): “An Alternative Path to Moral Bioenhancement? AI Moral Enhancement Gains Approval but Undermines Moral Responsibility”
  • Faisal Feroz (National University of Singapore): “Outsourcing Authorship – How LLM-Assisted Writing Shapes Perceived Credit”
  • Jonathan Lewis (National University of Singapore): “How Should We Refer to Brain Organoids and Human Embryo Models? A Study of the Effects of Terminology on Moral Permissibility Judgments”
  • Sabine Salloch (Hannover Medical School): “Digital Bioethics – Theory, Methods and Research Practice”
  • Markus Kneer (University of Graz): “Partial Aggregation in Complex Moral Trade-Offs”

June 27, 8:30–16:30 (UTC+2)

  • Federico Burdman (Alberto Hurtado University) and Maria Fernanda Rangel (University of California, Riverside): “Not in Control but Still Responsible – Lay Views on Control and Moral Responsibility in the Context of Addiction”
  • Vilius Dranseika (Jagiellonian University): “Gender and Research Topic Choice in Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine”
  • Jodie Russell (University of Birmingham): “Sartre and Psychosis – Doing Intersectional, Phenomenological Interviews with People with Experience of Mental Disorder”
  • Aníbal M. Astobiza (University of Granada): “Spanish Healthcare Professionals’ Trust in AI – A BioXPhi Study”
  • Nick Byrd (Geisinger College of Health Science): “Reducing Existential Risk by Reducing the Allure of Unwarranted Antibiotics – Two Low-Cost Interventions”
  • Rana Qarooni (University of Edinburgh; University of York): “Prevalence of Omnicidal Tendencies”
  • Lydia Tsiakiri (Aarhus University): “Responsibility-Sensitive Healthcare Allocation – Neutrally or Wrongfully Discriminatory?”
  • Edmond Awad (University of Exeter; University of Oxford): “Online Serious Games as a Tool to Study Value Disagreement”

For more information about the conference, visit https://ibmb.unibas.ch/en/public-outreach/projects-to-the-public/basel-oxford-nus-bioxphi-summit-2025/.

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.

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.

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”