Category: Metaphysics

Call: “Method and Convergence 2025”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Organized by the research project “Appearance and Reality in Physics and Beyond,” this year’s “Method and Convergence” conference will take place at the University of Helsinki from June 25 to 27, bringing “together thinkers exploring philosophical methodology from different viewpoints. The focus is on the question of what kind of methodology could foster progress in philosophy, and on the question of how philosophy could foster progress in science.” Experimental philosophy is also taken into account (see below).

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until March 15. The call reads:

Method and Convergence 2025 conference brings together thinkers exploring philosophical methodology from different viewpoints. The focus is on the question of what kind of methodology could foster progress in philosophy, and on the question of how philosophy could foster progress in science, as characterized below, after the sumission instructions. However, we welcome contributions about all important aspects of philosophical methodology.

Abstract submission

Submit your max. 1 page abstract using this template (link can also be found below).

Send your abstract to avril.styrman(at)helsinki.fi by March 15 2025. You will be informed of the approval of your speech in the conference by March 31. After the conference, each speaker may submit an article to the conference proceedings.

The conference team will arrange the peer review process of the articles. The articles accepted by the conference team will be submitted to Acta Philosophica Fennica, whose editors will review the articles independently of the conference team.

How can philosophy foster progress in science?

We invite case studies about ways in which philosophy has fostered progress in special sciences, and about ways in which philosophy could foster scientific progress.

How can scientific methods foster progress in philosophy?

The 20th and 21st century philosophical literature and the PhilPapers 2009 and 2020 surveys show that philosophy lacks processes that efficiently yield consensus on solutions to long-standing problems and preferences among competing theories (Chalmers 2009; Slezak 2018; Dellsén et al. 2024). In this sense, philosophy differs significantly from the special sciences. Sometimes the non-convergence into consensus stems not from the topics themselves, but from the methods of analysis. This raises the question of whether scientific methods could foster science-like convergence in philosophy, enabling more systematic accumulation of results and increasingly complete answers to fundamental questions, much like sciences where historical debates become irrelevant (Gutting 2016, pp. 323–5). This leads us to strongly interrelated naturalist themes.

Methodology and progress of philosophy

We invite case studies about what kind of progress has taken place in philosophy, and what kind of progress has been absent, and what kinds of methods, alone or together, could foster progress in the field. Although the focus is on the interplay of philosophy and science, we welcome insights about any known (and yet unknown) philosophical methods such as phenomenology, pragmatism, conceptual analysis, hermeneutics, analysis of language, discourse analysis, transcendental method, and thought experiments.

– Evaluation criteria of philosophical theories. We seek contributions that examine criteria for philosophical theories, preferably with case examples demonstrating how such criteria guide theory selection. From the naturalist viewpoint, we may ask whether science provides criteria that could make the selection between rival philosophical theories with the same function more objective and unequivocal than, for instance, plain intuition and reflecting equilibrium? The frequently cited virtues of scientific theories include accuracy, explanatory depth, internal consistency, ontological simplicity and unity, diachronic virtues (or fruitfulness over time), and external coherence (consistency and inferential relations with background knowledge or other well-regarded theories) (Kuhn 1977; McMullin 1982, 2014; Keas 2018). Brenner’s (2017) defense of simplicity as a criterion in metaphysics exemplifies this approach.

– Invention of ontological commitments. Ontological commitments are indispensable in the buildup of metaphysical theories, and we need the element of discovery if we want new sciences to emerge from philosophy. We invite contributions examining the invention or induction of new ontological commitments (Norton 2021; Schurz and Hütteman 2024; Arenhart and Arroyo 2021), as well as those addressing how strongly philosophers should adhere to ontological commitments of contemporary scientific theories, given Kuhn’s view that science advances through paradigm shifts.

– From pluralism to syntheses. The Vienna Circle Pamphlet dictates: “The goal ahead is unified science. The endeavor is to link and harmonize the achievements of individual investigators in their various fields of science.” However, the opposite trend has dominated philosophy since logical positivism: system-building has given way to analyzing details. In contrast, in many other areas of science and life, it is considered natural to build functional totalities out of parts. We invite submissions exploring how to better leverage the wealth of detailed philosophical investigations by counterbalancing specialization with unification. For instance, Ingthorsson (2019) argues that multiple theories of truth can be considered complementary views instead of considering them as rivals. Can you make a similar argument concerning other sets of theories or views that are typically considered as rivals?

– Philosophical theories as axiomatic systems. We invite submissions exploring ways to clarify concepts and to unify detailed aspects of topics by formulating metaphysical theories as axiomatic systems (De Jong and Betti 2010), with ontological commitments as primitive axioms/postulates, concepts defined in terms of them, and semantics mapped to them. In logic, an axiomatic system is expressed in a formal language and typically coupled with a proof system. However, a philosophical theory does not always need to be formal and typically does not require an explicit proof system, no more than Euclid’s Elements and Newton’s Principia did.

– Causal-mechanical explanations in philosophy. Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular changes from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions (Machamer et al. 2000). The core idea of mechanistic accounts is that causation is the activities of compound parts of organized wholes that produce changes in either whole and/or parts (Ingthorsson 2024). Causal-mechanical explanation and the axiomatic method play together very well. For instance, Newtonian mechanics is an axiomatic system that postulates hypothetical laws of nature that function in the context of an overall mechanism, namely, Keplerian Solar System. We invite contributions about the role of causal-mechanical explanations in metaphysics, or similar non-causal-mechanical explanations in metaphysics, such as in Trogdon (2018).

– Experimental philosophy typically investigates philosophical questions through methods of behavioral and social science. What kind of progress has taken place in different domains of experimental philosophy, such as rational thinking and moral judgment, mean? For instance, has experimental philosophy enhanced conceptual analysis and how? How has experimental philosophy influenced non-experimental philosophy? Are empiricists overlooking any philosophical tools that could enrich their interpretation of experimental results?

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”

Faces of X-Phi: Ivar Rodríguez Hannikainen

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

In our “Faces of X-Phi” series, experimental philosophers from all around the globe answer nine questions about the past, present, and future of themselves and the field. Who would you like to see here in the future? Just leave a suggestion in the comments! Today, we present Ivar Rodríguez Hannikainen.

The Past

(1) How did you get into philosophy in the first place?

I started out studying music as an undergrad. I loved playing guitar but then quickly became disillusioned with the prospect of a career in music. Then I took a couple of philosophy classes and found myself really enjoying them. But the kind of philosophy I was attracted to then was pretty different from what I most enjoy now: It involved diagnosing the ills of present-day capitalism and calling for a radical ontological/metaphysical shift to uproot the cause of all social and political evils.

(2) And how did you end up doing experimental philosophy?

I had been doing theoretical metaethics during my MA in Madrid, writing about whether moral judgments are inherently motivating or not. Then, in my first week as a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, I was extremely lucky that Stephen Laurence had organized a conference with a line-up of excellent philosophers, psychologists, and economists. I asked Fiery Cushman a few questions after his talk, and that developed into the opportunity to visit the Moral Psychology Research Lab at Harvard. I had no experience whatsoever running experiments, but Fiery was the best mentor you could possibly ask for. Then, back in Sheffield, Steve would get me thinking about how the empirical work we were doing brought to bear on questions in philosophy. So, it was a combination of luck and Steve and Fiery’s diligence and mentorship.

(3) Which teachers or authors have influenced you the most on your philosophy journey – and how?

Besides Steve and Fiery, Blanca Rodríguez López and Noel Struchiner had a huge influence on me. Blanca turned me on to empirically-informed ethics when I was an MA student in Madrid and I wasn’t sure whether there was a place for me in philosophy. Years later, Noel proposed many of the ideas about how moral psychology underpins the law that have become a focus of my research and helped to establish what we now call experimental jurisprudence.

The Present

(4) Why do you consider experimental philosophy in its present form important?

For two reasons.

The first has to do with communication and understanding. We all know the disappointing feeling of sitting through a talk (or being halfway through a paper) thinking, “I have no idea what this is about,” and being unable to engage. Then there is its mirror image: the frustration at the end of your own talk as you realize that, despite your best efforts, you did not make yourself understood. It’s sad because we all devote so much time and energy to carrying out this work, and a big reason to do so is so we can share it with our peers. In my opinion, experimental philosophy helps overcome this problem (as do many other disciplines) by establishing a regimented language. This language allows people to convey hours upon hours of intellectual labor in a 20-minute talk pretty effectively. It’s kind of miraculous and very rewarding to participate in that kind of exchange.

The second reason is the democratizing aspect of experimental philosophy. There are many influential publications authored by scholars from underrepresented countries and lower-ranking institutions – and I suspect this is because there is less weight placed on the name tag and the institution, and more on the ideas and the work themselves. Though, of course, things could always be better in this regard.

(5) Do you have any critical points to make about experimental philosophy in its current state?

My criticisms are along the lines of this, this, and this. These are criticisms I direct at my own research, and I think many experimental philosophers are already acutely aware of these issues. But maybe it’s worth saying anyway.

Experimental philosophy grew out of a concern about the limitations of the introspective (N = 1) method of elaborating on one’s own philosophical intuitions. As experimental philosophers, most of us probably rehash this concern over and over again when we introduce students to experimental philosophy or answer questions about what X-Phi is. That’s all well and good, but what are the limitations of that study you or I are working on right now in 2024? For the field to continue to develop, we should remain vigilant in this sense.

Here are just three examples of how people are doing this already:

  1. There is the concern that our experiments may not accurately capture how people use concepts spontaneously, which has led to an uptick in natural language processing research (see the work of Lucien Baumgartner or Piotr Bystranowski).
  2. There is the concern that what we have learned about folk morality, for example, based on people’s self-reports, may not have much to do with their actual behavior. Work by Kathryn Francis and Eric Schwitzgebel, among others, has contributed greatly to this question.
  3. And, of course, the concern that existing studies, most of which nowadays are conducted in English on Prolific, may not represent people’s intuitions and philosophical concepts in other languages or in non-Western cultures. As everyone knows, the cross-cultural work of Steve Stich and Edouard Machery (together with dozens of collaborators around the world) has been extremely fruitful in this regard.

(6) Which philosophical tradition, group, or individual do you think is most underrated by present-day philosophy?

Possibly every philosophical tradition that developed outside the mainstream European and English-speaking countries. There has to be so much neglected philosophy throughout history simply because it was written in a minority language. The Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy draw attention to a related problem that affects contemporary scholars. It also impacts up-and-coming students of philosophy who may be discouraged from going into academia by the thought that they won’t be able to convey their ideas as eloquently as they’d like.

The Future

(7) How do you think philosophy as a whole will develop in the future?

That is a hard question, so my answer is probably wrong, but I can offer some wild speculation: Philosophy will shift from being thought of as a discipline with a proprietary set of topics to being thought of as an approach or as a set of questions that can arise about many other existing academic disciplines and non-academic pursuits.

If we think of philosophy in the first way, it is tempting to give in to the idea that science is intruding in philosophy and philosophy is receding and surrendering its intellectual terrain. But when thinking of philosophy as an approach to existing disciplines or even specific phenomena, there is no reason to think that we will need less philosophy in the future: within artificial intelligence, a philosophy of artificial intelligence or a theory of personhood; within sustainability studies, an environmental or moral philosophy, and so on.

(8) What do you wish for the future of experimental philosophy?

Most of all, I would like to avoid The Bleak Future. The bleak future I’m thinking of is one where philosophy has been swept into the downward spiral of the humanities and plays an ever-smaller role in public affairs. The few remaining philosophers watch from the sidelines as teams of computer scientists and engineers – with the help of a few natural and social scientists – shape the future, generate awesome knowledge, and improve society.

So, my wish for the future is for experimental philosophers to help establish the value of philosophy within academia and beyond. I’m hopeful that this can be done; we have good exemplars already!

(9) Do you have any interesting upcoming projects?

Together with colleagues in the Psychology Department in Granada, Neele Engelmann and I are studying how people apply rules using the letter vs. spirit framework, asking whether participants’ decisions can be modeled using the same tools that cognitive psychologists use to explain behavior on simple visual interference tasks like the Stroop or Flanker test.

I’m also excited about the research a group of us at the University of Granada is doing on how law and morality mutually influence each other by triangulating legal corpora, experiments, and time-series data. So far, we have focused specifically on euthanasia, but the long-term goal is to pursue this question in a more general way.

A third, early-stage project is inspired by research on action understanding as inverse planning. We know that when people do something bad, we quite naturally want to infer whether they did so intentionally (“Given that they did x, did they have bad intentions?”), perhaps as a step in deciding whether they are to blame. Applying the “inverse planning” idea, we are examining whether these intentionality inferences are themselves carried out by spontaneously inverting the conditional probability and asking oneself, “Supposing they did have bad intentions, would they do x?” as a form of Bayesian reasoning.

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.

Hot Off The Press: “The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

“The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy,” a new entry into the “De Gruyter Reference” series, brings together experimental philosophers from around the globe to provide interested readers with insights into many topics currently researched in X-Phi. See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – The Philosophy of Experimental Philosophy

Part 2 – Topics from Theoretical Philosophy

Part 3 – Topics from Practical Philosophy

Literature

Bauer, Alexander Max, and Stephan Kornmesser (eds.) (2023): The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter. (Link)

The Revolver Case Revisited

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

This text was first published at xphiblog.com on June 22, 2021. It has been slightly updated.

I still remember how I sat on the porch last year, somewhen around April, reading Jonathan’s and Justin’s “Actual Causation and Compositionality” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020) for an upcoming session of X-Phi Under Quarantine, when suddenly – halfway through it – this idea struck me: There is something odd about the way subjects were asked by Jonathan and Justin, I thought.

But first things first. For those of you unfamiliar with the paper, I will give you a little rundown. Jonathan and Justin argue that theories of actual causation often endorse the Compositionality Constraint of Actual Causation (CCAC): For a series of individual events – say, c, d, and e – the CCAC states that if c caused e, then it did so either directly or it did so indirectly via at least one intermediary d. This intermediary then is itself an effect of c and a cause of e.

The CCAC’s validity does not solely rest upon experts’ intuitions. With the “Folk Attribution Desideratum” (FAD) (Livengood, Sytsma, and Rose 2017), it can be demanded “that what a theory of actual causation says about concrete, everyday cases [has to] accord with ordinary causal attributions” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 48).

Now, research has already shown that causal attributions can be influenced by normative judgements. This gives reasonable doubt that ordinary causal attributions accord with concrete cases. Jonathan and Justin hypothesize that, thus, “ordinary causal attributions will tend to violate the compositionality constraint for cases in which someone or something is responsible for an effect by way of an intermediary that does not share in the responsibility” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 48). To investigate whether this was the case, they conducted a series of vignette studies. One of them, the Revolver Case (RC), introduces subjects to the following story:

Trent has decided to kill his father, Brad. He aims his loaded revolver at Brad and pulls the trigger, releasing the hammer. The hammer strikes the cartridge, igniting the gun powder. The gun powder explodes, driving the bullet from the gun. The bullet hits Brad in the head. He dies instantly.

(Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 59)

After being introduced to this vignette, subjects had to state their agreement or disagreement with the four statements (1) “Trent caused Brad’s death,” (2)“The hammer caused Brad’s death,” (3) “The gun powder caused Brad’s death,” and (4) “The bullet caused Brad’s death” on a seven-point scale from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 7 (“strongly agree”).

Now, in case the causal attributions of laypeople would comply with the CCAC, subjects should agree to all statements of the RC: Not only was Brad’s death caused by Trent, but also by the hammer, the gun powder, and the bullet.

Here comes the first twist: In this study (and the remaining studies reported in their paper), subjects tended to rate statements about intermediaries as rather low. In the RC, responses indicate that Trent caused Brad’s death, while the hammer and the gun powder did not. Hence, the CCAC is clearly violated and does not meet the FAD.

Now, back to the beginning: What struck me as odd here was that there are a whole lot of statements about causation to be made from the vignettes used. But every time, Jonathan and Justin picked out only a small handful of them.

Take for example the RV, above. We can easily split the vignette up into eight events:

  • Event A: “pulling the trigger”
  • Event B: “releasing the hammer”
  • Event C: “striking the cartridge”
  • Event D: “igniting the gun powder”
  • Event E: “the gun powder exploding”
  • Event F: “driving the bullet from the gun”
  • Event G: “the bullet hitting Brad in the head”
  • Event H: “the death of Brad”

Next, we can combine those events to statements of the form “X caused Y.” Including all reasonable combinations of events to be made therefrom, this results in a total of 28 different items, including statements like, e.g., “Pulling the trigger caused the release of the hammer,” “Striking the cartridge caused the ignition of the gun powder,” or “The bullet being driven from the gun caused the bullet to hit Brad in the head.”

This is exactly what Jan Romann and I did in a small-scale study: First, subjects were presented the RV. Then, they were shown the 28 causal statements (in an ordered sequence). As in the original study, subjects had to state their agreement on a seven-point scale from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 7 (“strongly agree”).

52 non-native English speakers completed the survey. And here comes the second twist: This time (and in stark contrast to Jonathan’s and Justin’s data), an (oftentimes overwhelming) majority of subjects chose to “strongly agree” that “X caused Y” for every item, including those that are analogues to the four statements from Jonathan’s and Justin’s study, as can be seen in the Figure below.

White bars represent data from Jonathan and Justin (1 = “Trent caused Brad’s death,” 2 = “The hammer caused Brad’s death,” 3 = “The gun powder caused Brad’s death,” 4 = “The bullet caused Brad’s death”), black bars represent our data (A/H = “Pull- ing the trigger caused the death of Brad,” B/H = “Releasing the hammer caused the death of Brad,” D/H = “Igniting the gun powder caused the death of Brad,” E/H = “The explosion of the gun powder caused the death of Brad,” F/H = “The bullet being driven from the gun caused the death of Brad,” G/H = “The bullet hitting Brad in the head caused the death of Brad”). We assume that cases 1 and A/H, 2 and B/H, 3 and D/H, 3 and E/H, 4 and F/H, as well as 4 and G/H are analogous.

Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank tests (with p-values corrected) reject the hypothesis that the central tendency for any of the 28 combinations is smaller than or equal to the “neutral” answer of 4 on the scale.

I think that, first and foremost, this teaches us that when questioning people, we must be very careful not only in choosing our words but also in choosing our set of questions. The story they tell us, it seems, depends not only on our question’s wording but also on the catalogue of questions that we put together in the first place.

This study, I’m afraid, doesn’t tell us anything about the origin of this difference yet. This clearly must be addressed in future research. To be honest, I am not even sure what – of all the available attempts – might be the best (or my favourite) explanation.

Jonathan and Justin state that “even philosophers, such as Lewis and Menzies, explicitly giving analyses of the ordinary concept of causation have offered theories that entail the compositionality constraint.” They ask: “How could they have gotten things so wrong?” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 64f.) What I am sure about, now, is this: Their conclusion seems a bit hasty.

Our small study has been published as a discussion note in Philosophy of Science. You can find it here. And stay tuned: Of course, a more fleshed-out study – first reproducing the findings from Justin and Jonathan for their different vignettes and then applying various variations of the task – is already on its way!

Literature

Bauer, Alexander Max, and Jan Romann (2022): “Answers at Gunpoint. On Livengood and Sytsma’s Revolver Case,” Philosophy of Science 89 (1), 180–192. (Link)

Livengood, Jonathan, and Justin Sytsma (2020): “Actual Causation and Compositionality,” Philosophy of Science 87 (1), 43–69. (Link)

Livengood, Jonathan, Justin Sytsma, and David Rose (2019): “Following the FAD. Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8, 273–294. (Link)