Category: Announcements

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/.

Conference: “Experimental Philosophy – Beyond Armchair Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 32nd “Philosophy Conference” of the University of Valladolid’s Department of Philosophy, organized by José V. Hernández-Conde, will take place from May 16 to 17 in Valladolid, Spain. This year’s instalment is all about experimental philosophy.

May 16, 9:00–18:30 (UTC+2)

  • Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “No Luck for Moral Luck”
  • María Jiménez-Buedo (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia): “What do we Measure in the Dictator Game? Constructs, Validity and the Threat of Methodological Artifacts”
  • Mikel Asteinza (University of the Basque Country): “Epistemic Determinants of Scientific Disclosure and Their Impact on the Legal Audience – The Case of De-Extinction”
  • Andrei Moldovan and Obdulia Torres (University of Salamanca): “Expertisia as a Contextual Property”
  • Fernando Aguiar (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Would You Hire a Person With an Intellectual Disability? An Experimental Study on Action and Compassion”
  • Francisco Calvo (University of Murcia): “Of Seahorses and Plants – An Experimental Journey out of Ignorance”
  • Fernando Sanantonio (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): “External Sanctions, Compliance and Avoidance in Vegetarianism as a Normative System”
  • Daniel Martín (University of Granada): “Attitudes Toward Moral Improvement Based on Virtual Assistance”

May 17, 9:15–14:00 (UTC+2)

  • Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “The Geography of Wisdom”
  • Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada): “What is ‘Consenting’?”
  • Javier Anta (University of Salamanca): “An Experimental Approach to the Ordinary Meaning of ‘Information’”
  • Rodrigo Díaz (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Describing (Erroneously) Recalcitrant Emotions”
  • David Rodríguez-Arias (University of Granada): “Contemporary End-of-Life Bioethics – Empirical and Experimental Contributions”

For more information about the conference, visit https://keama.uva.es/xxxii-philosophy-conference/.

Workshop: “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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

We are delighted to announce the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The worshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. The link to the Teams meetings is below.

February 14, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Renato Turco (University of Genoa): “An Experimental Approach to Empty Definite Descriptions”
  • Lucien Baumgartner (University of Zurich), Paul Rehren (Utrecht University), and Krzysztof Sękowski (University of Warsaw): “Measuring (Un)Intentional Conceptual Change in Philosophy – A Corpus Study”

March 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Isabelle Keßels (University of Düsseldorf), Paul Hasselkuß (University of Düsseldorf), and Daian Bica (University of Düsseldorf): “The Safety Dilemma Put to the Test”
  • José V. Hernández-Conde (University of Valladolid) and Agustín Vicente (University of the Basque Country; Ikerbasque): “A Comparative Analysis of the Knobe Effect – Assessing Moral, Aesthetic, and Alethic Reasoning in Autistic and Neurotypical Populations”

April 10, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Tingting Sui (Peking University), Sebastian Sunday (Peking University): “A Confucian Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles”
  • Ryan Doran (University of Barcelona; University of Cambridge): “True Beauty”

May 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • William Gopal (University of Glasgow): “Identifying & Rectifying the Instrumentalist Bias in Analytic Social Epistemology”
  • Giuseppe Ricciardi (Harvard University) and Kevin Reuter (University of Zurich): “Exploring the Agent-Relativity of Truth”

June 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Federico Burdman (Alberto Hurtado University), Gino Marttelo Carmona Díaz (University of the Andes), and María Fernanda Rangel Carrillo (University of the Andes): “Lay Perceptions of Control and Moral Responsibility in Addiction”
  • Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “A Cross-Cultural Study on the Ethics and Moral Psychology of HPV Vaccination”

Sessions can be joined using Microsoft Teams via https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NDdiNDRjNmQtMzI4Yi00MWM2LWFiYjMtYzE4YzE1ZTY2ODcz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22c152cb07-614e-4abb-818a-f035cfa91a77%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22680c6cfa-4e43-4962-9569-4828023e7f78%22%7d.

Talk: “Experimental Philosophy of Law – Biases in Mens Rea Attribution & How to Address Them” (Markus Kneer)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Wednesday, April 10, from 16:00–18:00 (UTC-5), Markus Kneer will be talking about “Biases in Mens Rea Attribution & How to Address Them” at the University of the Andes (Hemiciclo 001) in Bogotá, Colombia. Markus writes:

In this talk I aim to do three things: First, I’ll briefly introduce the new subdiscipline of Experimental Philosophy of Law. Second, I will explore legal conceptions of certain inculpating mental states (mens rea), in particular intention and negligence. To do so, I’ll show how experimental philosophy of law can help elucidate bias in their attribution and potential mismatch between legal and folk conceptions thereof. Third, I will discuss how biases in mens rea attribution could be alleviated.