Category: Calls

Call: “5th European Experimental Philosophy Conference”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The next “European X-Phi Conference” is coming! Experimental philosophers from all over Europe (and the world) will meet from July 10 to 12, 2025, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. Emma Borg (University of London), Susan Gelman (University of Michigan), Nat Hansen (University of Reading), and Joshua Knobe (Yale University) have been confirmed as keynote speakers.

From July 9 to 10, 2025, a satellite workshop on “Experimental Argument Analysis – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Verbal Reasoning” will also be held, featuring a keynote address from Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh).

Abstracts for talks, posters, and symposia can be submitted until March 1, 2025. The call reads:

The conference welcomes contributions from all areas of experimental philosophy. We welcome three kinds of contributions: talks, posters, and symposia.

Talks will be allocated 30-minute slots and should leave 5–10 minutes for discussion. Symposia will be allocated 2 hours and should consist of three talks and a panel discussion involving the three speakers and possibly up to two further discussants, all addressing one overarching question or topic from different perspectives. We encourage adversarial collaboration for this format.

Deadline: March 1st, 2025

Submission link​

Decisions by April 1st, 2025.

Submitting authors need to have or create a profile on OpenReview. Whereas new profiles with an institutional email will be activated automatically, new profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks.

Abstracts for talks and posters should be anonymised for review and not exceed 500 words. References and figure captions do not count towards the word limit.

Abstracts for symposia should be submitted as a single file, name the symposiasts, and consist of a 500-word introduction that sets out the questions and rationale of the symposium as well as 500-word abstracts for each talk and a shorter abstract for the panel discussion, indicating the guiding questions to be discussed and the discussants involved. References and figure captions do not count towards the word limit.

Submitted symposia contributions will automatically be considered for inclusion as regular talks, if the symposium submission cannot be accepted. Submitted talks will be automatically considered for poster presentations, if they cannot be accepted as talks.

The number of submissions for talks is capped at one per corresponding author. For joint papers, the submitting/corresponding author should always be the first author. A corresponding author may be named as a co-author of joint papers submitted for talks by other corresponding authors. For accepted talks, the submitting/corresponding author should be the main presenter of the talk at the conference. There are no limitations on poster submissions.

Please note the separate CFA for the satellite workshop. We are delighted to be able to subsidise the accommodation costs of speakers presenting submitted talks at the satellite workshop.

For more information, visit the conference’s website or email xphieurope2025@gmail.com​.

Call: “EPITHETS & STAL-2025 Workshop”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The next workshop by the project “Explaining Pejoratives in Theoretical and Experimental Terms” (EPITHETS) and the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will take place in Genoa, Italy, from May 7 to 8, 2025.

Abstracts for contributions can be submitted until December 10. The call reads:

We invite contributions on issues concerned with the positive, negative or ambivalent valence of expressive terms. In particular, we encourage:

  • empirical studies (experimental, corpus and field studies) concerned with the valence of expressive terms (incl. slurs, pejoratives, amelioratives);
  • analyses of how the valence of a term can shift (as, for example, in slur reclamation).

Call: “The Puzzle of Social Behavior – Game Theory and Beyond”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Mantas Radzvilas and Wolfgang Spohn organize a workshop on “The Puzzle of Social Behavior – Game Theory and Beyond” at the University of Bielefeld. It will take place from April 3 to 5, 2025.

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until January 6, 2025. The call reads:

There are up to 5 further slots of 40 minutes (30 minutes talk, 10 minutes discussion) for presentations. Everyone interested in presenting themselves is invited to apply for participation. Early-career researchers and scholars from underrepresented groups are particularly encouraged to apply.

For this purpose, please submit an abstract of your talk of at most 1000 words (2 pages) and a CV till January 6, 2025. Decisions on the submissions will be made within four weeks. Those selected will be invited to participate including a coverage of travel and accommodation costs.

Please send your application both to: mantas.radzvilas@uni-konstanz.de and wolfgang.spohn@uni-konstanz.de

Abstract: The workshop will be co-organized by the Reinhart-Koselleck project “Reflexive Decision and Game Theory” of Wolfgang Spohn at the University of Konstanz and the Center of Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld. Its game-theoretic part is particularly concerned with foundational issues of game theory. Which is hence the topic of the second workshop of this project.

Social reality is built on the capacity of human beings to engage in social behavior – complex forms of intentional, coordinated actions involving more than one individual. For several decades, game theory has served as the primary conceptual framework for developing a variety of theories aiming to explain social behavior, such as social norms, prosocial preferences, virtual bargaining, and team reasoning theories. All of these theories converge on the idea that social behavior is sustained by sufficiently aligned interests and beliefs of the interacting individuals, yet they disagree on how these necessary alignments of interests and beliefs come about. A number of game-theoretic accounts of social behavior can claim substantial amounts of experimental results as supporting evidence. In many cases, experimental evidence supports multiple accounts equally, thus creating a problem of underdetermination. To conclude, after a number of decades of intensive development, a unified mathematical framework of game theory has not been able to produce a unified account of social behavior.

This conceptually unsatisfactory state of affairs raises a number of important questions. Is there a methodology to select among the competing accounts? Should these accounts be viewed as competing theories of social behavior, or rather as theories that complement one another? Are there better unconsidered alternatives to existing theories? Is game theory truly the best approach towards explaining social behavior?

The purpose of the workshop is to advance the discussion on these and other philosophical questions related to the status of game-theoretic explanations of social behavior.

Call: “Agency and Intentions in Language”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The fifth instalment of “Agency and Intentions in Language” (AIL) is coming. Hosted by the University of Göttingen, it will take place online from January 29 to 31, 2025.

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until December 18, 2025. The call reads:

Call for Papers

On the linguistic side, we welcome submissions examining any grammatical phenomena sensitive to the degree of agency or interpretation of an action as intentional versus accidental, such as controller choice, subjunctive obviation, licensing of polarity items, aspect choice in Slavic, case marking in ergative split languages and ‘out-of-control’ morphology. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: ways in which natural languages manifest different degrees of agency or the distinction between intentional and accidental actions (morphological marking, syntactic structures, semantic denotations of verbs and adverbials, pragmatic and contextual differences); connections between agency, intentions, and event structure; relations between agency, intentions, and causation.

On the side of philosophy, we welcome submissions addressing any aspect related to philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, the nature of agency, intentions, and acting intentionally. Both theoretical and empirical research are welcome as they contribute to debates on various theories of action, free will, moral responsibility, nature of reasons, and practical rationality.

On the side of psychology, we welcome submissions that deal with agency, intentions, moral responsibility, and other related topics, broadly construed. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: issues in developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, clinical psychology (the sense of agency in individuals with schizophrenia, OCD, etc.), and adults’ perception of agency and responsibility.

Submissions

Anonymous abstracts, not exceeding 2 pages (including references and examples), with font no less than 11 Times New Roman, and 2 cm margins, should be uploaded on AIL5 OpenReview site.

If you are not registered on OpenReview, we recommend you use your institutional email for registration – in this case, your profile will be activated automatically. If you decide to use your non-institutional email, please allow two weeks for the profile to be activated.

We expect to notify authors of their acceptance in early January 2025. Presentations will be allotted 30 minute slots with 15 minutes for questions and discussion.

Call: “Experimental Philosophy Society at the APA-E”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Experimental Philosophy Society will host a session at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York, which takes place from January 8 to 11, 2025.

Papers or extended abstracts can be submitted until July 5. The call reads:

The Experimental Philosophy Society (XPS) will host a 3-hour session on the group program of the 2025 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, which will be held Jan. 8–11 at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel (811 7th Avenue 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019, USA), in midtown Manhattan.

The session will consist of three 55-minute slots (no commentators) in which researchers can present their latest work. Presentations on any topic in experimental philosophy are welcome. There is no specific theme for the session.

All presenters must register for the APA conference. Remote presentation or participation will not be possible.

Please submit your paper (preferred) or extended abstract (allowable) to James Beebe at jbeebe2@buffalo.edu by July 5, 2024.

Please do not submit a paper or abstract if you will not commit to participating, should your submission be accepted. In the past, the XPS has encountered difficulties when people see if their submission gets accepted, use the acceptance to apply for travel funding, and then decide whether they will attend only long after the deadline for making changes to the APA program.

Call (Extended): “2nd Meeting of the Society for Philosophy of Causation”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Society for Philosophy of Causation’s second meeting will be held at the University of Göttingen, Germany, from July 19 to 21. The society’s first meeting was held last year at Kyoto University, Japan, where the society was also founded.

While the initial deadline (April 23) has already passed, I was told that submissions will still be considered. The call reads:

Encouraged are submissions on philosophy, psychology, and computer science of causation, and effort will be made to balance these topics. That is, you shouldn’t be discouraged if your submission is more on the cognitive science or computer science side of causation, the name of the society notwithstanding.

The instructions haven’t changed much. Please submit an abstract of 300–1000 words to gosation@causation.science. Specifically, please send an email with your name, the title of your talk, and the abstract in the body of the email and submission as its title. If you have a (drafty or polished) paper, or your abstract can’t be easily pasted as text (e.g., it contains figures or symbols), please in addition attach a PDF of the paper or the abstract. Please mind that the more of the argument your abstract contains, the more likely it will be accepted.

For more information about the Society for Philosophy of Causation and their conference, visit https://causation.science.