Category: Methods

Call: “The Armchair on Trial”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From July 9 to 11, 2026, the Vienna Forum for Analytic Philosophy (WFAP) will host its 15th annual graduate conference, titled “The Armchair on Trial – A Graduate Conference on Philosophical Methodology.” Hilary Kornblith, Jennifer Nagel, and Christian Nimtz are confirmed as keynote speakers.

Proposals for presentations can be submitted until February 28, 2026. The call reads:

This year’s annual WFAP graduate conference is devoted to debates around philosophical methodology. It is centered around the question of whether philosophy is best done from the philosophical armchair or whether it can and should be done using empirical methods. The conference is focused on the extent to which the emergence of naturalistic approaches and of experimental philosophy (“X-Phi”) pose a problem to ‘traditional’ armchair methods (e.g. consulting intuitions, conceptual analysis, reflective equilibrium, conceptual engineering). We are interested both in work that focuses on individual methods or on the relations between them (e.g. their compatibility).

We aim to bring together early career and advanced researchers in order to discuss questions such as:

  • What is the role of intuition in philosophy?
  • What is the role of a priori knowledge in philosophy?
  • What is the role of X-Phi in philosophy?
  • What is the role of conceptual analysis in philosophy?
  • What is the role of conceptual engineering in philosophy?
  • What is the role of linguistic and conceptual competence in philosophy?
  • What is the role of formal methods in philosophy?
  • Is philosophy importantly distinct from other sciences?
  • How can advocates of armchair methods best respond to the challenges raised by X-Phi?
  • Are armchair philosophy and X-Phi reconcilable?
  • Considering the methodological discussions listed above, are professional philosophers epistemically better positioned for answering philosophical questions than lay people? E.g. Do they have better conceptual competence? Are they expert intuiters?

We welcome submissions that apply these methodological issues to other philosophical debates as case studies.

Call: “Theory and Practice After the Practice Turn”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On April 17, 2026, the Research Center Normative Orders at Goethe University Frankfurt will host an online workshop titled “Theory and Practice After the Practice Turn – Where Social Theory and Empirical Philosophy Meet.”

Proposals for contributions can be submitted until February 14. The call reads:

Sociology and philosophy have always shared a close relationship. Critical Theory famously tied the two disciplines together to unravel societal phenomena, and feminist philosophers regularly borrow sociological concepts to understand domination and power asymmetries. Similarly, sociologists often draw on philosophical concepts to sharpen their analyses. In recent years, this dialogue has gained new momentum through the so-called “practice turn” in epistemology and philosophy of science. Contemporary philosophy of science and applied epistemology increasingly incorporate empirical methods originally developed within the social sciences such as interviews and ethnographic studies. But while empirical approaches from sociology are frequently adopted, social-theoretical concepts remain rarely integrated within epistemology and philosophy of science.

It is the goal of this workshop to explore the potential of social theory for empirical approaches in philosophy of science and epistemology. What are instances of fruitful applications of social theory to philosophy of science and epistemological scholarship? How does social theory transform when it is resituated in a different disciplinary setting? What are caveats and best practices when using social theory as a philosopher of science/epistemologist?

We are looking for workshop contributions that are focused on but not limited to:

  • Examples of using social theory along with empirical methods in philosophy of science and
    epistemology.
  • Reflections on methodological and conceptual challenges when transferring social-theoretical
    concepts into philosophical work.

Workshop contributions will also be considered for publication in a special issue (target journal: Synthese) on social theory in empirical philosophy of science & epistemology.

Send submissions to: sophie.juliane.veigl@univie.ac.at; riegler@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Call: “The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Lake Forest College’s philosophy department is hosting “The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop” (FAX5), which will take place from March 20 to 21, 2026.

Abstracts for posters can be submitted until October 10. The call reads:

The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop (FAX5) at Lake Forest College brings together philosophers who use formal and experimental methods to address a wide range of philosophical questions. Although these methods have developed largely in isolation, they share data-driven foundations, often aim to answer similar questions, and can greatly enrich one another when integrated. Over two days, leading scholars and emerging researchers will share advances, explore collaborations, and develop new ways to combine empirical and formal methods. By fostering cross-methodological dialogue and building learning networks, FAX5 aims to strengthen, expand, and integrate these methods across the discipline.

Call for Poster Abstracts: The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop (FAX5) at Lake Forest College invites poster abstracts on topics in formal or experimental philosophy. Submissions (max 500 words) should be emailed as a single PDF and include: a title; an abstract; a full author list with the presenting author(s) in bold; and institutional affiliations. Please name your file “FAX5_Poster_LastName.pdf” (the first presenter’s last name) and use the subject line “FAX5 Poster Abstract Submission.” Send submissions to phenne [at] lakeforest [dot] edu. Posters will be selected for clarity, originality, and relevance to integrating or advancing formal or experimental methods in philosophy.

Call: “Experimental Argument Analysis”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Eugen Fischer and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga are preparing a special issue on “Experimental Argument Analysis – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Verbal Reasoning” in Philosophical Psychology.

Manuscripts can be submitted until April 30, 2026. The call reads:

The Special Issue will bring together researchers from experimental philosophy, cognitive psychology, and experimental linguistics, to open up the experimental philosophy of verbal reasoning as a new interdisciplinary field of study.

To help develop interdisciplinary experimental argument analysis as a fruitful successor project to traditional conceptual analysis that benefits from advances in cognitive psychology and experimental linguistics, this SI will address questions about methods, cognitive mechanisms, and philosophical applications.

Methods:

  • How can empirical studies support the reconstruction or evaluation of verbal reasoning?
  • Which conceptual and empirical tools can be adapted for this purpose, and how? How can formal and experimental methods be combined to facilitate normative evaluation?

Mechanisms:

  • How do automatic comprehension and production inferences shape verbal reasoning?
  • What biases affect such inferences? Which factors affect specifically the contextualization of default inferences?
  • How are irregular polysemes processed? What norms do people rely on for specific arguments of interest? How much individual variation is there in this respect?

Applications:

  • How can insights into language processing, and specifically polysemy processing, support the assessment of philosophical arguments?
  • How effective are verbal arguments at changing people’s minds?
  • Which aspects of automatic language processing influence the persuasiveness of verbal arguments? To what extent do such arguments contribute to philosophical puzzles and paradoxes?
  • How can insight into automatic language processing support the improvement of our conceptual tools?

Submission Instructions

The Special Issue accepts theoretical, experimental, and review papers that address the questions set in the Call for Papers, or directly related questions.

  • Papers should be concisely written and tightly argued.
  • Papers should ideally be ca. 10,000 words long, but there is no formal word limit.
  • Authors should bear in mind the interdisciplinary readership of Philosophical Psychology.
  • When submitting papers to ScholarOne, please select “Experimental Argument Analysis” as the special issue title.
  • Inclusion in the special issue is conditional on the outcome of peer review. Peer review is initiated upon submission.
  • Accepted papers will be published online without delay prior to being included in the special issue.

We encourage submission well in advance of the submission deadline. Please email the guest editors if you have any further queries.

How People Cite Old Papers in Philosophy vs. Psychology

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

Philosophers and psychologists have very different practices when it comes to citing papers that were written decades ago. In philosophy, the norm is that you are supposed to carefully read those papers and accurately explain what they say. By contrast, in psychology, people typically make less of an effort to accurately summarize the ideas in decades-old papers, and it’s pretty common to cite something without ever having read it. (Of all the many psychologists who have cited Gordon Allport’s 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, how many have read even a single page?)

Looking at this difference in practices, the obvious first thought would be that what the philosophers are doing is clearly better. After all, the philosophers are the ones accurately describing the papers they cite! What could be more obvious than the claim that it’s better to be accurate than inaccurate? I certainly see the force of this point, but in my view, the situation is more complex. There is at least something to be said on the other side.

As a first step into this question, consider cases where people go much farther in the direction of what psychology does right now. In talking about math, we might speak of a “Riemann integral,” a “Galois group,” the “Peano axioms,” but no one would think that this kind of talk needs to accurately capture what these mathematicians said in their original papers. It would be seen as absurd if someone tried to object to the content of an ordinary calculus lecture by quoting from one of Riemann’s original texts and arguing that the lecture wasn’t faithful to it.

It’s easy to see what is so important about this aspect of our practices. In many cases, the great insights of centuries past were giving us a glimpse of something that was only fully appreciated later. So it’s deeply important that we allow these things to be refined over the decades rather than forcing students to learn them in the form in which they happened to appear when first introduced.

The key point now is that something similar might also be said about the sort of ordinary workaday research that many of us do all the time. As an illustration: it sometimes happens that I wrote a paper on some topic twenty years ago, but then subsequent work by other researchers showed that I didn’t get things quite right. In such cases, my papers tend to be cited in very different ways in philosophy vs. psychology. Philosophers read my papers and accurately explain the view I originally defended. By contrast, psychologists do something else, which sometimes involves citing my old papers without reading them. This practice might appear to be obviously lazy or sloppy when described in that way, but I do think there is something about it that is worth considering.

Caricaturing just a bit, the approach works like this: Psychologists first try to figure out what is actually true; then they write a sentence that they think captures the truth; then, after that sentence, they cite various previous papers. Some of those papers literally defend the view stated in the sentence itself, but others are cited just because the authors want to give credit to previous work that they see as a helpful stepping stone that led up to finding the truth. So, when it comes to my old papers, they might think that something I wrote decades ago was one of those stepping stones, but given all the research that’s been done subsequently, they might think it’s not worth it to go back and read that old paper now. So they might cite the paper without knowing precisely what it actually says.

I totally get why people would think there is something weird or fishy about this. Strictly speaking, there’s a sense in which the citation itself is inaccurate. (It seems to be saying that an old paper defended a particular view, when in reality that precise view was only articulated many years later.) But it also feels like the drive to be accurate about this stuff is moving us away from what we really should be caring about. Perhaps what we see in the seemingly slapdash way that psychologists cite old papers is a kind of half-formed and not fully acknowledged version of the practice that we see so clearly and explicitly in the non-scholarly use of people’s names for mathematical ideas.

Imagine an ethos in which people had very different expectations. When you publish a paper proposing a new theory, you hope that other researchers will improve on your theory. Indeed, you hope that these improvements will be so substantive that after a number of years there will be no need to read your original paper anymore. So the outcome you hope for is one in which people keep using your theory (and maybe citing your paper) but in which almost no one has an accurate understanding of what your original paper actually said.

Now that we’ve talked a little bit about these competing considerations, let’s return to our original question. What is truly the best approach to citing old papers? Something more like the scholarly approach favored in philosophy? Or something more like the non-scholarly approach favored in psychology? I honestly don’t know. My main goal has just been to argue that it’s a difficult question. It is a mistake to think: “Obviously, the best approach is to focus on carefully and accurately describing what those papers actually say.” The correct view is that it is not obvious what we should be doing. It’s very much worth thinking more about the different possible options, and I’d love to hear any further thoughts people might have. 

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?

Call: “Experimental Argument Analysis”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Immediately before the next “European X-Phi Conference,” a satellite workshop on “Experimental Argument Analysis – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Verbal Reasoning,” organized by Eugen Fischer, Paul Engelhardt, and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga​, will be held from July 9 to 10, 2025, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. It aims to “bring together researchers from experimental philosophy, cognitive psychology, and experimental linguistics, to open up the experimental philosophy of verbal reasoning as a new interdisciplinary field of study.”

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until March 1, 2025. The call reads:

There will be 3 slots for submitted papers that address the research questions below. Accommodation will be covered for the 3 presenters. Any papers not accepted to the workshop will automatically be considered for the experimental philosophy conference. Papers will be allocated a 40-minute slot and should leave 10–15 minutes for discussion. Anonymized abstracts of up to 500 words (not counting references or figure captions) should be submitted through the submission point for the 5th European X-Phi conference. Please indicate that you submit the abstract for a talk at the EAA workshop.

Deadline: March 1st, 2025.

Submission link​

Questions:

To help develop interdisciplinary experimental argument analysis as a fruitful successor project to traditional conceptual analysis that benefits from advances in cognitive psychology and experimental linguistics, this workshop will address questions about methods, cognitive mechanisms, and philosophical applications:

  • Methods: How can empirical studies support the reconstruction or evaluation of verbal reasoning? Which conceptual and empirical tools can be adapted for this purpose and how? How can formal and experimental methods be combined to facilitate normative evaluation?
  • Mechanisms: How do automatic comprehension and production inferences shape verbal reasoning? What biases affect such inferences? Which factors affect specifically the contextualization of default inferences? How are irregular polysemes processed? What norms do people rely on for specific arguments of interest? How much individual variation is there in this respect?
  • Applications: How can insights into language processing, and specifically polysemy processing, support the assessment of philosophical arguments? How effective are verbal arguments at changing people’s minds? Which aspects of automatic language processing influence the persuasiveness of verbal arguments? To what extent do such arguments contribute to philosophical puzzles and paradoxes? How can insight into automatic language processing support the improvement of our conceptual tools?

For the preliminary program, visit the workshop’s website.

Brief Changes to the Situation Don’t Have Much Impact on Judgments

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

There’s a certain kind of study we used to see all the time. The researchers ask all participants to make a judgment regarding the exact same question, but then they vary something in the external situation. They change the temperature in the room. Or the song that is playing in the background. Or they do something that’s supposed to make people have a particular emotion, or engage in more reasoning, or show more or less of some other psychological process.

A key lesson of post-replication crisis psychology is these sorts of manipulations don’t usually do much. For example, if you try to change the situation so that people feel more of certain emotions, their philosophical judgements remain pretty much unchanged, and if you try to change the situation so that people engage in more reasoning, their philosophical judgments also remain pretty much unchanged.

Within existing research, one sees a lamentable tendency to think about each of these results separately and give a completely separate explanation of each. Proceeding in this way, one might say that the former result indicates that emotions don’t impact people’s philosophical judgments… and then separately, one might say that the latter result indicates that reasoning doesn’t impact people’s philosophical judgments.

But this misses the larger picture. It sure looks like the reason why we don’t get a big effect when we try to manipulate people’s emotions isn’t due to something super specific about emotion in particular. Instead, we are getting growing evidence that this type of experimental manipulation just generally doesn’t do much.

Suppose you are thinking about what makes certain people more conservative, and you want to know whether it is a matter of some psychological state X (which might be a certain emotion, or a way of reasoning, or anything else). How do you test this hypothesis? The traditional idea was that you would run a study that lasted, say, five minutes in total, in which you temporarily increase the amount of state X and then show that this manipulation leads to a temporary increase in conservatism.

But it now seems like this whole approach just fundamentally does not work. The problem is not that we have the wrong X, or that we aren’t doing exactly the right thing to manipulate it, or anything like that. The problem seems to be that the human mind works in such a way that people’s judgments are stable across these sorts of temporary changes.

A few years ago, I wrote a paper about this topic, but that paper was mostly just about all the little details of the empirical data. I’m thinking that it might be helpful to zoom out a bit and think in a larger way about what we are learning from all of these studies. It seems like we face two different questions: one substantive, one methodological.

The substantive question is: What are we learning about the human mind from the fact that people’s judgments cannot be pushed around by these brief manipulations? I don’t know the answer to this question, but just to bring the key issue out a little more clearly, it might be helpful to consider a simple example.

It seems plausible that my dispositions to have certain emotions led to my interest in philosophy. But suppose we took a random person and, just for a single day, gave that person all the emotions that I typically have. Presumably, having these emotions for a single day would not lead the person to start philosophizing on that day (nor is it the case that if I stopped having these emotions for a single day, I would stop philosophizing for that day). If the emotions have any effect it has to be a much more long-term effect – with the philosophy I do today being shaped by the emotions I’ve had over the past twenty years.

How exactly is this to be understood? It does seem like we’re getting growing evidence that this happens, but I wouldn’t say that we already have a good understanding of how or why it happens.

The methodological question is: If this specific method does not work, how we can test claims about the causal impacts of psychological processes on judgments? Suppose we are wondering whether factor X has a causal impact on people’s judgments. One thing we can do is to check to see whether there is a correlation such that people who are dispositionally higher in factor X are more likely to make certain judgments. There are already lots of great studies of that form, and they have taught a lot about the relevant correlations. But one might legitimately wonder whether this approach provides a real test of the relevant causal claims.

The traditional solution was to try to temporarily manipulate factor X and check for a temporary effect on judgments. But if that doesn’t work, what should we be doing instead?

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.

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”