Category: Calls

Call: “Do Experiments Replicate?”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From September 22 to 23, 2026, the workshop “Do Experiments Replicate? Philosophical Reflections on the Use and Misuse of Statistics and Econometrics” will take place at the Jagiellonian University, Poland.

Abstract submissions are possible until June 1, 2026. The call reads:

The workshop “Do experiments replicate? Philosophical Reflections on the Use and Misuse of Statistics and Econometrics” aims to provide a forum for exchanging ideas on the replicability of randomized experiments, such as randomized field experiments in economics, randomized controlled trials and preclinical studies in medicine, and psychological experiments.

The workshop promotes philosophical and methodological discussions of conceptual and methodological issues in statistical analysis, econometric modeling, and the methodology of experimentation.

Keynote Speakers:

  • Barbara Osimani
  • Samuel Fletcher

Experimental results are considered reliable because, under comparable conditions, they are expected to yield similar outcomes. However, this assumption has recently been challenged by numerous replication efforts that report results differing from those of the original studies in psychology, medicine, biology, the social sciences, and economics. A surprisingly large fraction of published findings have been found to be non-replicable. Replicability rates range from 11% for in vitro and in vivo preclinical research to 60–90% for clinical trials. Experimental economists fall within this range and, like psychological experimenters, achieve around 60% replicability.

The replication crisis has called into question the credibility of published findings and undermined trust in science. However, the replication crisis, with few exceptions, has received only limited attention from philosophy of science. Despite the efforts of several pioneers, the philosophical and conceptual problems in randomized controlled trials, randomized field experiments, laboratory experiments, econometric modeling, and the statistical analysis of experimental data remain largely uncharted territory in the philosophy of science. The workshop aims to establish a forum for exchanging ideas among philosophers of medicine and economics, philosophers of statistics, and methodologically inclined researchers interested in the conceptual problems of the replication crisis.

The Workshop “Do experiments replicate? Philosophical Reflections on the Use and Misuse of Statistics and Econometrics” invites contributions that focus on experimentation and statistical analysis in economics and medicine, as well as problems that trouble statistical inference from experiments, broadly construed.

Some exemplary topics of talks:

  • The design of randomized experiments in medicine and economics.
  • Statistical hypothesis testing.
  • Non-frequentist approaches to comparing treatment and control group outcomes.
  • Comparisons of design-based and model-based inference.
  • Estimating statistical models.
  • Measuring replication success and replicability rates.
  • Assessing the quality of empirical evidence.
  • Making inferences from the literature review with conflicting results.
  • Other problems in philosophy of statistics related to the replication crisis.

Abstracts no longer than 500 words (including references) should be submitted in an attachment, not including author details, by email with the subject ‘replication workshop’ sent to: mariusz.maziarz@uj.edu.pl.

Deadline for submission: June 1st, 2026

Decisions will be announced by June 15th, 2026.

This activity was supported by a grant funded by the Strategic Program Excellence Initiative at the Jagiellonian University.

Call: “Group Agency and Metaethics”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From September 9 to 11, 2026, the workshop “Group Agency and Metaethics” will take place at the University of Vienna.

Abstract submissions are possible until May 31, 2026. The call reads:

We invite submissions for the workshop Group Agency and Metaethics. Metaethics concerns the study of the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic and psychological presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk and practice. However, the answers to these various questions are typically developed with a focus on individuals. The possibility that groups are normative or moral agents in their own right is rarely considered within metaethics. The aim of this workshop is to explore the significance of the possibility of group agency for debates in metaethics, and vice versa. The workshop will focus on group agency in connection to topics such as naturalism/non-naturalism; realism/anti-realism; cognitivism/non-cognitivism; the nature of normativity and norms; normative reasons; rationality; and experimental metaethics. We further welcome submissions on related issues that may be significant for these topics. By exploring groundbreaking topics at the intersection of metaethics and social ontology, the workshop hopefully will set the stage for future debates.

The workshop will feature four keynote speakers:

  • Prof. Carla Bagnoli (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)
  • Prof. Bart Streumer (University of Groningen)
  • Asst. Prof. Asya Passinsky (Central European University)
  • Prof. Hans Bernhard Schmid (University of Vienna)

The workshop will take place at the University of Vienna from 9 to 11 September 2026. If you are interested in presenting at the workshop, please send your anonymized abstract to niels.de.haan@univie.ac.at with the subject line: Abstract Group Agency and Metaethics. The anonymized abstract should be approximately 500 words. Each speaker will be allotted 1 hour (incl. Q&A). The deadline for submissions is 31 May, 2026. We aim to send out the notifications of acceptance around 15 June, 2026.

There are bursaries available for students or precariously employed participants with a lack of available funding to (partially) cover accommodation and flights. If you would like to be considered for one of the bursaries, please indicate this in the email. If your submission is successful, you will be asked to provide a short description of your funding situation to ensure we can distribute the bursaries fairly.

The workshop is sponsored by the International Social Ontology Society (https://isosonline.org/) and the University of Vienna.

Call: “Translation – Semiotics – Music”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Anna Rędzioch-Korkuz and Małgorzata Grajter edit a special issue of Studia Semiotyczne on “Translation – Semiotics – Music.”

Submissions are possible until September 30, 2026. The call reads:

Studia Semiotyczne (Semiotic Studies) invites submissions for a special issue of the journal. Papers should be written either in English or in Polish and prepared for blind review.

The field of translation and music has been attracting increased attention recently: this is evident in numerous monographs, research papers, and conferences focused on the complex relationship between words and sounds (see also Bennett, 2025: 1). As Susam-Sarajeva (2008: 189–190) has noted, this relationship appears at best challenging, since translation scholars are “more comfortable dealing with written texts,” and consequently, “end up sliding into a predominantly textual analysis.” Similarly, Desblache (2019: 58) argues that the two fields, which are genuinely interested in that relationship – namely, translation studies and musicology – remain separate because both are practice-oriented disciplines that primarily focus on either verbal translation or music.

Against this backdrop, we would like to bring the two fields together through semiotics-based research on musical texts, believing that this perspective has the potential to create resonance for general translation studies. It has been argued that semiotics is good for translation studies (Stecconi 2007; Marais 2019; Kourdis 2023), which means – at least potentially – that there is a good deal of methodological and theoretical capital that can be utilized. Research on translation and music can definitely espouse a movement away from words, verbal artefacts and textual research towards the understanding of the performative, enacted, embedded and embodied nature of meaning making within translation, i.e. towards a deeper understanding of material processes of cultural practices, which necessitate moving beyond the verbal fixation and concentrating on more semiotically-informed approaches.

In the special issue, we would like to see how the actual go-between of semiotics bridges the fields of translation studies and musicology. We encourage scholars from across the academy to explore and provide their unique insight within the suggested thematic focus of translation, music and semiotics. We welcome both conceptual and empirical research. Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following questions:

  • Can (and if yes, then how can) semiotics contribute to solving the conceptual confusion within translation studies as exemplified by translating musical texts?
  • How can translation and music capitalize theoretically on various theories of semiotics and vice versa?
  • Can we (and if yes, then how can we) apply conceptual frameworks developed by various schools, e.g. the Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics, Paris School, Eco’s interpretative semiotics, Groupe μ, Peircean semiotics, etc. to the study of translating musical texts?
  • What methodologies can we use to research the synergy of semiotic systems in musical texts?
  • How can the concept of “textuality” be rethought when applied to musical compositions as texts to be translated?
  • How can the study of translating musical texts through semiotics help to challenge the traditional hierarchy between linguistic and non-linguistic forms of meaning-making?
  • How can semiotics challenge the literal and the human in translating musical texts?
  • How can semiotic approaches account for the performative, enacted, embedded and embodied dimensions of musical translation?
  • How can semiotics bridge the disciplinary gap between musicology and translation studies?

In order to submit the paper, one is kindly asked to submit the manuscript by sending it to: annaredzioch@uw.edu.pl, malgra@amuz.lodz.pl and studiasemiotyczne@pts.edu.pl

All submitted papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed.

Call: “Workshop on Intuitions and Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

In March 2027, David Bordonaba-Plou and Martín Capece del Toro will host the 1st “Workshop on Intuitions and Experimental Philosophy” (WIEP) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.

Abstracts can be submitted until November 1, 2026. The call reads:

Intuitions are a source of evidence that many people use to a greater or lesser extent. We rely on them to investigate a wide variety of issues, for example, moral, mathematical, or religious questions, or to examine other people’s opinions on a host of different topics. Although there is debate about what is an intuition, appealing to intuitions has been one of the most widely used methods in many areas within analytic philosophy. The accepted view (see Goldman, 2007; Weinberg, 2007; Williamson, 2007, p. 2; Baz, 2012, p. 87; Koopman, 2012; Kornblith, 2014) is that intuitions play a fundamental evidential role.

Besides, there has been a dispute within analytic philosophy between three different groups of philosophers during the last decades. First, the “autonomists” (see, e.g., Bealer, 1998; Liao, 2008; Sosa, 2013; Chalmers, 2014; Devitt, 2015) defend that introspection and appeal to intuition can be used to answer many philosophical questions. Second, those who defend that analytic philosophers do not employ intuitions as evidence in philosophical practice. Following Nado (2016, p. 782), we can call them “intuition deniers” (see, e.g., Williamson, 2007; Deustch, 2009; Cappelen, 2012). Third, those who think that analytic philosophers use intuitions as evidence but doubt this method, arguing instead for the need to apply more rigorous methods drawn from scientific disciplines such as psychology, the social sciences, or linguistics; we can call them “experimental philosophers” (see, e.g., Machery et al., 2004; Knobe and Nichols, 2007; Mallon et al., 2009; Alexander et al., 2010).

This workshop aims to include presentations addressing the relationship between intuitions and experimental philosophy. The presentations accepted are expected to develop novel perspectives or adopt novel approaches that shed light on traditional problems associated with intuitions in analytic philosophy. Both experimental and theoretical papers will be accepted, as well as explicit defenses of any of the above positions, papers that point out desiderata that all three should fulfill, or papers dealing with other issues related to intuitions and experimental philosophy.

Some possible topics that presentations may address are:

  • Intuitions and mental experiments.
  • Conflicting intuitions in questionnaires.
  • Intuitions and justification.
  • Calibration of intuitions.
  • Differences in the use of intuitions in different areas of analytic philosophy.
  • Empirical or theoretical analyses of the role of intuition talk in the arguments of analytic. philosophers.
  • Empirical or theoretical analyses of philosophical practices making use of intuitions.

Submission

Please submit an abstract including:

  • Title of the paper.
  • Abstract (400–500 words) clearly presenting the research question, theoretical framework, and main argument (in English or Spanish).
  • Institutional affiliation.

The deadline for submitting abstracts is 1 November 2026. Abstracts must be anonymized (also anonymize self-citations) and must have a section including the bibliographic references (not included in the word count). Abstracts should be sent to the following email: davbordo@ucm.es, specifying the following subject: 1st Workshop on Intuitions and Experimental Philosophy.

For any questions, please write to davbordo@ucm.es.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

  • María José Frápolli Sanz (Universidad de Granada, Spain; Institute of Philosophy. School of Advance Study, University of London, United Kingdom).
  • James Andow (University of Manchester, United Kingdom).

Call: “The New Measurement Heretics”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Following the “Measurement Heretics Workshop – Being, Meaning, and Measuring Well,” Rebecca Jackson, Michele Luchetti, Morgan Thompson, and Aja Watkins edit a volume on the topic.

Abstracts for contributions can be submitted until June 15, 2026. The call reads:

This edited volume stems from the Measurement Heretics Workshop – Being, Meaning, and Measuring Well, organized by Rebecca Jackson at Durham University on March 11–13, 2026. We warmly welcome proposals from researchers in the philosophy, history, sociology, and anthropology of measurement (broadly construed) who would like to address the themes in the description below.

Once the list of contributions is selected, the volume proposal will be submitted for consideration to Chicago University Press.

Topic description

What we measure, and how we measure, matters deeply. In the human sciences especially, the definition and status of what we call “measurement,” the distinguishing or desirable features of measurement, and whether (and when) we should measure at all, has seen a resurgence of interest and debate. This volume engages with scientific, medical, and social measuring practices of the past and present, inviting contributions that dissect and reform the meaning and desirability of fundamental notions in philosophy of measurement – or as we call them, measurement heresies.

This is not the first time fundamental notions in measurement, or “dogmas,” have been challenged in disparate areas of study. The current wave of philosophically influenced history of measurement owes its roots to works such as Chang’s Inventing Temperature (2004), which troubled the dogma that accurate instruments require a prior foundation of true theories of what is being measured. Prior to this, sociological and historical work had already troubled the separation between the purity of numbers and the messiness of human knowers, showing that the growing emphasis on quantification in the 19th and 20th century was marked by the influence of bureaucracy and social agendas more than it mirrored the practice of physicists (Porter 1995; Collins 1975; Gould 1981). Looking further back, stances that today are well within the orthodoxy were once at the center of heated debates. The Kantian dogma of the non-measurability of psychological properties was challenged by Fechner’s “heretical” psychophysics, which on the one hand initiated a long and influential debate on the quantifiability of sensation and, on the other, inspired Mach’s relational theory of measurement in physics that seeded later developments in measurement theory and philosophical debates on the nature of measurement. Waves of reform and reaction in the 20th century included tension between physicists and psychophysicists (Campbell 1920; Stevens 1946), and theories of measurement as foundational to the project of logical positivism (Reichenbach 1927; Carnap 1966). When psychometric visions and techniques were first beginning to shape theory of measurement in psychology (Cronbach and Meehl 1955; Campbell and Fiske 1959), reformist projects led to the beginning of the representational theory of measurement in the physical sciences (Krantz et al. 1971; Suppes et al. 1989; Luce et al. 1990). Reconciling the two has proven difficult but philosophically productive, as several volumes and special issues have shown (Berglund et al. 2013; Vessonen 2017; Pendrill 2019; Mari et al. 2023; Uher 2025; Basso et al. 2026; Luchetti 2026). More recently, works on patient-centered and health measures have challenged the dogma that measurement can, and should, be carried out from a stance of aperspectival objectivity (Duque et al. 2024; McClimans 2024).

There is still much to be done to bring the dogmas of philosophers, inherited from the above mentioned 20th century reformist projects, to face the challenge of measuring in biomedical, clinical, and social contexts. A particular challenge here is to measure that which is unique or highly contextual, such as the lived experience of persons, and to measure moving targets that are more affected by, than reflected by, data meant to capture them (Godman & Marchionni 2022; Runhardt 2025; Zahle 2023). This work has been ongoing in medical humanities, sociological, historical, geographical, anthropological, and literary scholarship, as well as in geophysical and environmental sciences, in ways that have not yet been articulated together. This volume brings the heresies (and the heretics) together, to map the terrain of the current re-evaluation which is taking place in Measurement Studies more broadly.

The purpose of this book is to give space to critical re-evaluations of dogmas regarding fundamental notions about measurement and to invite novel interpretations of formal and informal measurement concepts. We invite contributions focusing on topics including (but not limited to) the following:

  • STANDARDISATION
  • COMPARABILITY
  • QUANTIFICATION, QUANTITIES, and/or MAGNITUDES
  • MEASUREMENT SCALES
  • PRECISION and/or RELIABILITY
  • VALIDITY and/or VALIDATION
  • ACCURACY and/or SENSITIVITY/SPECIFICITY
  • PROXIES

We also invite contributions that are critical of the activity of measurement in general:

  • What are the affective and real-world impacts of measuring and being measured on human and non-human subjects?
  • When is it worse to measure at all, and when is it worth it to measure (even badly) to provide voice to marginalized actors within a system?
  • What would it look like to gather evidence against measurement itself, as being an intervention?

Rather than chapters taking the form of a strictly circumscribed philosophical argument, we invite authors to address one of the above topics from their own disciplinary perspective. We expect chapters to reference a case or cases from past or present measuring practices. The editorial team will explicate the broader philosophical implications in the introductory and concluding chapters.

Confirmed contributors

  • Nicholas Binney (HHU Düsseldorf)
  • Femke Truijens (University of Rotterdam)
  • Riana Betzler (San José State University)

Submission details

Please submit an abstract aimed at an interdisciplinary audience (600–800 words, not including references) to the following email address: measurementheretics@gmail.com

The deadline for abstract submission is June 15th, 2026. Authors of selected contributions will be notified at the end of July. An authors’ workshop will take place online in November 2026, and the final submission of the chapters (6k–8k words) is planned for March 2027.

Call: “New Methods in Semantics of Artefacts”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From September 15 to 16, 2026, the conference “New Methods in Semantics of Artefacts – Meaning Beyond Linguistic Signs” will take place at the Cité de la Mode et du Design, Paris.

Abstracts can be submitted until May 25, 2026, 12:00 CEST. The call reads:

Conference details

Our organizing committee, with the support of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE–Paris Sciences Lettres) and the Institut Français de la Mode (IFM), invites submissions to the New Methods in Semantics of Artefacts: Meaning beyond linguistic signs conference, to be held on 15–16 September 2026 at the Cité de la Mode et du Design in Paris.

We are delighted to announce our invited speakers:

Philosophy: Enrico Terrone (University of Genova), Nicola Di Stefano (CNR Italy); Cognitive psychology: Charles Spence (University of Oxford); Linguistics: Philippe Schlenker (École Normale Supérieure / NYU), Pritty Patel-Grosz (University of Oslo); Musicology: Ben Curry (University of Birmingham).

Topic of the conference

Objects such as perfumes, works of art, and creations in design, gastronomy, or entertainment often give rise to mental representations that go beyond the objects themselves. Through perception and interaction, individuals attribute meanings, associations, and symbolic values to such objects, even when these meanings are not explicitly expressed in language. Understanding how such meanings emerge is a shared challenge for philosophy, linguistics, and the cognitive sciences, and this conference aims to put these complementary approaches into dialogue.

The philosophical tradition has long sought to ground what one would ordinarily call the meaning of objects in a general theory of signs – an approach exemplified, within contemporary naturalized philosophy, by Millikan’s work (Beyond concepts, 2017), as well as by more targeted theories addressing the meanings of particular kinds of objects. Pursuing the formalization of such a general theory of signs, the super-linguistics program (Schlenker, Patel-Grosz, among others) holds that formal linguistic theory can be productively extended across various domains of non-linguistic signs, drawing on notions such as the constituency (or grouping) principle central to syntax, the use of logical variables for object tracking, and the variety of inference types investigated in semantics and pragmatics. Finally, several theoretical frameworks in psychology may help address the origins of artefact meaning: in addition to the cognitive foundations of such meaning – cross-modal associations, conceptual representations, affordances, technical reasoning, and intention-based accounts – psychology can illuminate the transmission and cultural learning of the meanings that objects come to bear.

We aim to take stock of the experimental methods and conceptual tools used to study the semantics of objects, and to foster epistemological transfers from the semantics of one domain to another – music, design objects, fragrances, images, food, dance, and so forth – with particular attention to the plurality of sensory modalities through which these objects are perceived.

Submission guidelines

Each selected contributor will be invited to give a 45-minute presentation, including Q&A.

We welcome contributions that place particular emphasis on:

  • the choice and clarification of the semantic concepts employed; and/or
  • attempts at formalization; and/or
  • the originality of the empirical methods applied.

Contributions will be selected from submitted abstracts. Abstracts should be between 400 and 500 words in length, including footnotes but excluding references, and must be suitable for blind review.

The submission deadline is 25 May 2026, 12:00 noon (Paris time).

All abstracts should be submitted to: semanticsofartefacts.conference@gmail.com.

Authors will be notified of acceptance by 18 June 2026.

If your abstract is accepted for presentation, we will cover coffee breaks and lunches during the two-day conference. At present, our funding does not allow us to reimburse travel and accommodation expenses.

Call: “Law Observed”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Marco Mazzocca and Miriam Ferraro organize a workshop on “Law Observed – Sociological Methods and Empirical Research on Law,” which will take place at the IVR World Congress in Istanbul from June 28 to July 3, 2026.

Abstracts can be submitted until May 30, 2026. The call reads:

We invite abstracts for the Special Workshop SW42 “Law Observed: Sociological Methods and Empirical Research on Law,” to be held at the IVR World Congress 2026 in Istanbul.

The workshop addresses the relationship between legal theory and empirical inquiry, with particular attention to the methodological and epistemological implications of studying law as a socially embedded practice. It seeks to foster dialogue between legal philosophy, socio-legal studies, and empirical legal research.

Key questions include how empirical approaches to law can inform, challenge, or complement conceptual and normative accounts of legal systems, authority, and decision-making. Rather than presupposing a strict separation between normative and empirical perspectives, the workshop explores their points of interaction and tension.

We welcome abstracts engaging with, among others:

  • methodological and epistemological issues in socio-legal research
  • the concept of law as a social practice
  • legal reasoning, decision-making, and institutional practice
  • law, inequality, migration, and citizenship
  • biolaw and sociology of health
  • technology, AI, and the transformation of legal practices

Abstracts (300–400 words), together with affiliation and short bio, should be sent to miriam.ferraro@unife.it by 30 May 2026.

Selected contributors will be invited to present their work at the workshop. Contributions may be considered for publication in a collective volume or special issue.

Further information: https://coin-project.org

Call: “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Ben Gaskin and Simon McGregor organize a special session of The 2026 Artificial Life Conference titled “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy,” which will take place in Waterloo, Canada, from August 17 to 21, 2026.

Papers can be submitted until March 30, 2026. The call reads:

ALife has always had a markedly philosophical character – a fact not unnoticed by some philosophers. Daniel Dennett, for instance, saw in ALife the creation of testable thought experiments – in simulating a thing, you render explicit your assumptions. Despite this clear affinity, however, the engagement he foresaw has not materialised.

This is not for ALife’s lack of interest in or relevance to traditionally philosophical content, but perhaps rather for its practicing an alternate philosophy in which the reflexive relationship between pragmatic and theoretical is constitutive. Here philosophy and science are united, with thought in turn structuring and being structured by experimental practice. In this respect, ALife may be closer to the original tradition of natural philosophy than philosophy in its more modern disciplinary forms.

This session invites broad reflection on the nature of this relationship between philosophy and artificial life. What role do computational experiments play in philosophical inquiry – and what role should they? How does ALife address questions that philosophy also claims – agency, autonomy, emergence, individuality – and how does its treatment differ? The conference theme itself poses one such question: what is life, and what does it mean to be life-like?

Call for Papers

We welcome both experimental work whose philosophical motivations or implications are brought to the fore, and philosophical or theoretical work that engages directly with ALife methods and results. We are as interested in what can be said in principle as in what your work specifically reveals – and especially in work that does not sit neatly in either of these.

Questions of Interest

Questions we are interested in include:

  • What are we doing when we simulate a thing?
  • Where is emergence when it happens in a machine – how do silicon and simulations reshape the question of emergence?
  • What is the relationship in simulations between form, function, parameters, and dynamics?
  • If the rules are made up, what do they teach us – how do we reconcile tunability with the language of findings?
  • What are the laws of motion of living matter, and how does ALife relate to theoretical biology?
  • Is life just physics, or is there something more – what can ALife tell us about the relationship between vitalism and mechanism?
  • What is ALife’s precedent, what does it inherit, and how does it differ – from the automata of Hero to the gavra of Rava to Jābir’s takwīn?
  • Could artificial life ever really be alive – and if so, what are the implications?
  • How does wet ALife relate to these questions – does it change what counts as artificial, as alive, or both?

These are examples, not boundaries – we welcome any work that engages with the philosophical dimensions of artificial life. Contributions from across ALife, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and related fields are encouraged.

Submissions

Papers should be 3–8 pages in ALIFE format. We welcome experimental, theoretical, and position papers. Accepted papers will be published in the ALIFE 2026 proceedings (MIT Press). The conference is hybrid – presentations can be given in person or online. Please select the “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy” special session when submitting. For full formatting guidelines, see the ALIFE 2026 Call for Papers.

Call: “Measuring the Mind”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Daniela Nica and Sandra Branzaru organize a hybrid workshop on “Measuring the Mind – Conceptual Issues in Psychology, Psychiatry and Cognitive Science” that will take place at the University of Bucharest from May 29 to 30, 2026.

Submissions for contributions can be submitted until April 15, 2026. The call reads:

Psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science increasingly rely on sophisticated measurement technologies while remaining tied to inherited assumptions about what is being measured. Many constructs – emotion, memory, attention, intelligence, disorder – are still treated as if they were stable, homogeneous, mind‑independent natural kinds with latent quantitative essences, even as empirical work reveals pervasive heterogeneity, context‑sensitivity, and replication failure across domains such as affective neuroscience, psychopathology, and social cognition. At the same time, related debates in the philosophy of biology, metaphysics, and cognitive ontology emphasize conceptual relativity and the need to re‑engineer scientific categories in light of concept‑laden evidence.

This conference asks what follows for measurement and classification if psychological and psychiatric categories are better understood as populations of variable, situated instances or relational patterns in high‑dimensional spaces, rather than as tokens of fixed types. How should we think about constructs, latent variables, and diagnostic entities if variation is ontologically primary and averages are statistical abstractions? When do our instruments partially constitute the phenomena they purport to detect? To what extent do replication “failures” reveal construct instability or ontological mismatch rather than methodological error?

We invite contributions from philosophy of psychology and psychiatry, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of biology, metaphysics and metametaphysics, as well as empirically oriented work in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience that engages these conceptual issues. Topics include, but are not limited to: cognitive and psychiatric ontology; natural kinds, homeostatic property clusters and relational or internal realism; measurement theory, psychometrics and the “quantitative imperative”; classification and re‑classification in psychiatry and cognitive science (e.g., RDoC, HiTOP); construct instability and the replication crisis; predictive processing and constructionist theories of mind and emotion; and the concept‑ladenness of evidence and data‑driven ontology re‑engineering.

Our aim is to articulate and critically assess conceptual frameworks that could underpin a “variation‑first” science of mind, in which explanation, generalization, and measurement are explicitly aligned with the heterogeneous, context‑bound phenomena they target.

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, and is open to MA and PhD students, early PhDs and postdocs, as well as established researchers in philosophy of psychology, psychiatry, cognitive science, philosophy of biology, and related empirical fields.

Submission of abstracts up to 300 words is welcome via email: measuringthemind@gmail.com

  • Email subject line: “abstract submission”
  • Anonymity: Please include identifying information (name, affiliation, contact email) in the body of the email and submit an anonymized abstract as attachment.
  • Deadline for submissions: 15 April 2026
  • Notification of acceptance: on or before 10 May 2026

Date: May 29–30

Format: mixed (in‑person and online)

Contact email: measuringthemind@gmail.com

Organizers:

  • Drd. Daniela Nica
  • Drd. Sandra Branzaru

Call: “Toronto Workshop on Moral Psychology and Moral Theory”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Organized by Andrew Sepielli, the “Toronto Workshop on Moral Psychology and Moral Theory” will take place at the University of Toronto from November 7 to 8, 2026.

Submissions for contributions can be submitted until July 1, 2026. The call reads:

The workshop aims to bring together philosophers, psychologists, and legal scholars working on questions about the relationship between empirical research on moral cognition and the foundations of moral theory. The goal is to foster interdisciplinary discussion about how empirical work in fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory bears on moral judgment and the evaluation of moral beliefs.

Invited speakers include:

  • Paul Bloom (Psychology, University of Toronto / Yale University)
  • Joshua Knobe (Philosophy and Psychology, Yale University)
  • Liane Young (Psychology, Boston College)
  • Roseanna Sommers (Law and Psychology, University of Michigan)
  • Brendan de Kenessey (Philosophy, University of Toronto)

We invite submissions addressing topics at the intersection of empirical research and moral theory. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • experimental philosophy
  • the psychology of moral cognition
  • causal cognition and moral judgment
  • the neuroscience of moral judgment
  • evolutionary approaches to morality
  • empirical work bearing on normative ethics or metaethics
  • methodological questions about the role of empirical research in moral theory
  • debunking arguments and related challenges to moral belief

Five contributed papers will be selected. Contributed talks will consist of a 45-minute presentation followed by 45 minutes of discussion. The workshop is designed to be discussion-focused, with substantial time devoted to questions and conversation about each paper.

We welcome submissions from scholars in philosophy, psychology, law, and related disciplines. Submissions from early-career scholars are especially encouraged.

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit an abstract of 750–1000 words, along with a brief CV, to: torontomoralpsych@gmail.com 

Submissions should not be anonymized.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: July 1, 2026

Notification of decisions: August 1, 2026

Limited support for travel and accommodation may be available.

Questions about the workshop may be directed to the conference organizer, Andrew Sepielli (Philosophy, University of Toronto), at: torontomoralpsych@gmail.com