Category: Philosophy of Mind

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

Talk: “Philosophical Thought Experiments Elicit Conflicting Intuitions” (Joshua Knobe and Ivar Hannikainen)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

As part of the Experimental Philosophy Talk Series, Joshua Knobe and Ivar Hannikainen will give a talk titled “Philosophical Thought Experiments Elicit Conflicting Intuitions” on April 2 from 14:00–16:00 UTC (16:00–18:00 CEST). The session can be accessed via Zoom (Meeting ID: 680 676 8837, Code: xphi123). The abstract reads:

Existing research on intuitions about philosophical thought experiments typically finds that different participants give different answers. Some people say that the correct answer is A while others say it is B. One possible explanation of this finding is that individual participants actually have conflicting intuitions. That is, many of the participants who ultimately select option B may have an intuition drawing them toward option A, and vice versa. Two studies explored the possibility that people have such conflicting intuitions using self-report (Study 1) and mouse-tracking (Study 2) methods. Both studies found evidence for conflicting intuitions, and yet they also uncovered systematic variation: Across fifteen different thought experiments, the popularity of the answer one does not give predicts one’s tendency to feel conflicted. That is, the more common a particular answer, the more likely participants are to feel drawn to it intuitively – even if they ultimately decide it is incorrect.

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

Call: “Folk Epistemology and Science Skepticism”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From August 10 to 14, 2026, the Cologne Summer School will take place at the University of Cologne. This year’s topic will be “Folk Epistemology and Science Skepticism,” with special guest Mikkel Gerken.

Proposals for brief presentations on Gerken’s work can be submitted until April 15, 2026. The call reads:

The Cologne Summer School is an annual, week-long, event at which leading epistemologists present their current work in a series of lectures, defend their views against critical comments, and discuss their work with participants. The Summer School mainly aims at professional philosophers and graduate students, but anyone is welcome to apply. In 2026 our special guest will be Mikkel Gerken (University of Southern Denmark).

Gerken works in epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. In Epistemic Reasoning and the Mental (Palgrave 2013), Gerken considers how externalism in philosophy of mind bears on the nature of the epistemology of inference. In On Folk Epistemology (OUP 2017), he argues that folk epistemological heuristics explain patterns of intuitive judgments that have mistakenly been taken to motivate epistemic contextualism, pragmatic encroachment, and knowledge-first epistemology. Doing so involves engagement with cognitive psychology as well as methodological considerations about the relationship between folk epistemological intuitions and epistemological theorizing. In Scientific Testimony (OUP 2022), Gerken argues that testimony is a vital part of science and articulates epistemic norms governing it. Furthermore, he considers scientific testimony to the lay public and empirically informed science communication strategies for addressing science skepticism. In addition to the monographs, Gerken has published on epistemic injustice, epistemic norms of action and assertion, transcendental arguments, the necessary a posteriori, philosophical skepticism, philosophical methodology etc.

Cologne Summer School Themes: The 2026 Summer School will address a range of issues from foundational to applied social epistemology. Many of the discussions will revolve around an important real-life problem – namely, science skepticism. For example, we will examine how science skepticism is related to varieties of philosophical skepticism. Furthermore, we will consider how folk epistemological heuristics and conversational norms may fuel public skepticism about science. We will also consider ways in which epistemologists and philosophers of science may play a role in combating science skepticism. Thus, some of the discussions overlap with issues in philosophy of science. Throughout, there will be an emphasis on philosophical methodology and epistemology’s relationship to empirical research in the social and cognitive sciences.

Topics will include

  • Philosophical skepticism and real-life (science) skepticism
  • Folk epistemology and its relation to epistemology
  • Epistemic norms of assertion and science communication
  • Internalism and externalism in epistemology and mind
  • Intuitive judgments and philosophical methodology
  • The epistemic roles of science in society

The Summer School is free but limited to 50 participants. Online application is possible through April 15. Please supply a short letter that sketches your academic background and main motivation for participating in the Summer School. If you are interested in giving a brief presentation (approx. 20 minutes) related to Gerken’s work, please also send an abstract of no more than 1,000 words.

Apply via email to:
summerschoolphilosophy@uni-koeln.de

Talk: “Normality and Norms” (Josh Knobe)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Center for Philosophy and the Health Sciences at Aarhus University is hosting a lecture by Joshua Knobe. It will take place on Thursday, January 29, 15:15–16:45 (UTC+1) via Zoom. The abstract reads:

The notion of normality plays a role in the way people understand many different scientifically important concepts. For example, normality figures in people’s understanding of what it is for a trait to be innate, what it is for one event to cause another, and what it is for the state to count as a disease. I will be presenting a theory about ordinary attributions of normality and then exploring the application of this theory to all three of these types of judgments. The theory is that ordinary attributions of normality involve a mixture of statistical judgments (how frequent something is) and evaluative judgments (how good something is). Thus, the key claim is that both statistical and evaluative judgments play a role in people’s ordinary understanding of innateness, causation and disease.

Hot Off The Press: “The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

In “The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts,” Matt Lindauer argues for a strong connection between philosophical theory and its real-world applicability, also drawing on moral psychology and adjacent fields. The book’s summary reads:

Can philosophical concepts do real work in improving our world? Should we, when evaluating competing understandings of concepts like “justice,” “empowerment,” and “solidarity,” take into account whether these different understandings can actually help us to fight injustice, empower the oppressed, and promote solidarity between people? The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts is the first book-length attempt to argue that the answer to both of these questions is an emphatic “yes.” In doing so, it provides a bold new defense of a tight relationship between philosophical theory and practice. The book advances the view that moral and political philosophers should be interested in the “fruitfulness” of normative concepts – how well they help us to solve practical problems that we inevitably face as human beings interacting with one another. This view has broad implications for a number of important contemporary philosophical debates that the book examines, including debates over the nature of moral motivation, the duties of the global affluent to the global poor, the nature of justice in diverse multicultural societies, ideal versus non-ideal theory in political philosophy, and conceptual engineering. Drawing on cutting-edge research in moral psychology and adjacent fields, the book also demonstrates that we now have the scientific tools to concretely evaluate the practical value of moral and political concepts. It issues an important call to continue developing the use of these tools and methods to produce more philosophically and scientifically significant work on the distinctive value of normative thought and practice.

Call: “Valence Asymmetries”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Valence Asymmetries project, led by Isidora Stojanovic at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, is looking for expressions of interest from people who would like to join. The call reads:

We are interested in including new team members in our project. Before opening a new position, we are inviting those interested in joining us to express their interest.

The new team member(s) should have research interests that align directly with the objectives of the project, broadly understood. They will already have a very solid publication track, will cherish interdisciplinary research, and will want to combine theoretical and empirical methodology.

We are particularly interested in the following research profiles:

  • Decision theory, philosophy of rationality & framing effects
  • Formal value theory & formal semantics
  • Philosophy of emotions & social and/or moral psychology
  • Moral cognition & philosophy of well-being

Additionally, any other research profile that offers a novel perspective on the project’s objectives is potentially welcome.

The duration of the contract will depend on the range of project tasks that the new team member will be hired to work on, and in any case cannot exceed the duration of the project (i.e. July 2029).

In addition to prospective candidates who would like to join us for a longer duration, we are also inviting tenured faculty who have a demonstrably heavy teaching load to consider joining us for a one year period (assuming that they can get a leave of absence from their home institution) that they can devote to research.

The expected gross salary is approx. 31.000 gross per year (negotiable for senior and/or already tenured faculty).

NB: The project’s team members must live in Barcelona (region), they regularly meet in person, attend seminars and conduct in-person research. The position is incompatible with living and/or spending considerable periods of time elsewhere.

If you are interested in joining the project, please send an email to Isidora Stojanovic (PI), explaining your motivation and interests, together with a complete CV.

Conference: “Basel-Oxford-NUS BioXPhi Summit”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 2025 “Basel-Oxford-NUS BioXPhi Summit,” organized by Tenzin Wangmo, Brian D. Earp, Carme Isern, Christian Rodriguez Perez, Emilian Mihailov, Ivar Rodriguez Hannikainen, and Kathryn Francis, will take place from June 26 to 27 at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

The program consists of 15 talks and seven posters, framed by two keynotes.

June 26, 8:30–17:30 (UTC+2)

  • Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh): “Who Has an Expansive Moral Circle? Understanding Variability in Ascriptions of Moral Concern”
  • Eliana Hadjiandreou (University of Texas at Austin): “The Stringent Moral Circle – Self-Other Discrepancies in the Perceived Expansion of Moral Concern”
  • Daniel Martín (University of Granada): “Mapping the Moral Circle with Choice and Reaction Time Data”
  • Neele Engelmann (Max Planck Institute for Human Development): “Understanding and Preventing Unethical Behavior in Delegation to AI”
  • Yuxin Liu (University of Edinburgh): “An Alternative Path to Moral Bioenhancement? AI Moral Enhancement Gains Approval but Undermines Moral Responsibility”
  • Faisal Feroz (National University of Singapore): “Outsourcing Authorship – How LLM-Assisted Writing Shapes Perceived Credit”
  • Jonathan Lewis (National University of Singapore): “How Should We Refer to Brain Organoids and Human Embryo Models? A Study of the Effects of Terminology on Moral Permissibility Judgments”
  • Sabine Salloch (Hannover Medical School): “Digital Bioethics – Theory, Methods and Research Practice”
  • Markus Kneer (University of Graz): “Partial Aggregation in Complex Moral Trade-Offs”

June 27, 8:30–16:30 (UTC+2)

  • Federico Burdman (Alberto Hurtado University) and Maria Fernanda Rangel (University of California, Riverside): “Not in Control but Still Responsible – Lay Views on Control and Moral Responsibility in the Context of Addiction”
  • Vilius Dranseika (Jagiellonian University): “Gender and Research Topic Choice in Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine”
  • Jodie Russell (University of Birmingham): “Sartre and Psychosis – Doing Intersectional, Phenomenological Interviews with People with Experience of Mental Disorder”
  • Aníbal M. Astobiza (University of Granada): “Spanish Healthcare Professionals’ Trust in AI – A BioXPhi Study”
  • Nick Byrd (Geisinger College of Health Science): “Reducing Existential Risk by Reducing the Allure of Unwarranted Antibiotics – Two Low-Cost Interventions”
  • Rana Qarooni (University of Edinburgh; University of York): “Prevalence of Omnicidal Tendencies”
  • Lydia Tsiakiri (Aarhus University): “Responsibility-Sensitive Healthcare Allocation – Neutrally or Wrongfully Discriminatory?”
  • Edmond Awad (University of Exeter; University of Oxford): “Online Serious Games as a Tool to Study Value Disagreement”

For more information about the conference, visit https://ibmb.unibas.ch/en/public-outreach/projects-to-the-public/basel-oxford-nus-bioxphi-summit-2025/.

Experimenting With Guesses

Posted on by Tadeg Quillien

A five-horse race is about to start. The probabilities that each horse will win are:

  • Ajax: 40%
  • Benji: 38%
  • Cody: 18%
  • Dusty: 3%
  • Ember: 1%

Can you guess who will win?

There are several reasonable guesses you could make. For example, “Ajax” is a good guess, but “Ajax or Benji or Cody” is fine too. But some guesses, like “Cody or Ember,” are terrible.

What are the norms that govern guessing in this kind of context? Philosophers have become interested in that question recently (e.g., Holguín 2022, Dorst and Mandelkern 2022, Linnemann and Azhar 2025; our opening example is from Skipper 2023). It is a surprisingly rich question, because the answer does not obviously fall out of standard probability theory. For example, “Ajax or Ember” is a terrible guess, but the probability that either Ajax or Ember will win is higher than the probability that Ajax will win, and “Ajax” is a great guess.

With my colleagues Neil Bramley and Chris Lucas, I recently collected experimental data on how people guess. Our task was very simple. Participants looked at a box with colored balls, like this one:

Then we asked them to guess what color would come out if someone drew a ball at random. They could compose their guess by clicking on four buttons:

For example, to compose the guess “red or green,” you would click on “Red” and then “Green.” You could include any number of colors from one to four in your guess.

Here are the results! In this figure, each panel displays data for a different box. The numbers above the panel represent the proportion of colors – for example, “6 4 1 1” would correspond to the box shown above, with six red balls, four green balls, one blue, and one yellow ball.

We can see that for a box where all colors have equal proportions (3 3 3 3), almost all participants mention all colors (they guess, for example, “red or green or blue or yellow”). But for a box where one color dominates (9 1 1 1), most people only mention one color (for example, they guess “blue” if nine balls are blue). But between these two extremes, there is a lot of diversity in people’s guesses. For example, for the box “6 3 2 1,” about half of the participants mention one color, and half mention two colors.

Of course, the interesting question is whether theories of guessing proposed by philosophers can account for the data. We looked at an account by Kevin Dorst and Matt Mandelkern (2022). Abstracting from the mathematical details, their idea is that people want to make guesses that have a high probability of being true, but also do not mention too many possible outcomes. In other words, guessing is a trade-off between accuracy and specificity. The predictions from the theory are in green, alongside people’s data in white:

The theory fits the data pretty well.

Chris, Neil, and I also proposed another theory of how people might guess. Our idea is that a guess like “red or green” can be seen as implicitly encoding a probability distribution where red and green are both more probable outcomes than the other colors. And people make guesses that encode a distribution that is “close” to the actual distribution. So, if there are, for example, six red and four green balls in the box, the distribution encoded by “red and green” is close enough to the actual probability distribution that it is a good guess. The predictions from our theory are in purple:

The theory also gives a good account of the data. As you can see, the trade-off account and our account make fairly similar predictions. But there are some cases where they differ. For example, in the box “5 3 3 1,” we predict that people will either mention one color, or mention three colors. But the trade-off theory predicts that most people will mention two colors. Aligning with our prediction, people mostly mentioned either one or three colors. To see why this is an intuitive result, imagine a box with five red, three blue, and three yellow balls, as well as one green ball. It seems strange to guess “red or blue” in that context. According to our theory, this is because the guess “red or blue” encodes a distribution where blue is more likely than yellow, which isn’t the case here.

Of course, this is an active area of research, and other researchers might propose new theories of guessing in the future. Our data (freely available at https://osf.io/wz649/) give them a nice opportunity to see how their account compares with people’s intuitions.

For more details (and more experiments!), you can read our forthcoming paper at https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/gy2fv_v3.

Literature

Dorst, Kevin, and Matthew Mandelkern (2022): “Good Guesses,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105(3), 581–618. (Link)

Holguín, Ben (2022): “Thinking, Guessing, and Believing,” Philosophers’ Imprint 22, 6. (Link)

Linnemann, Niels, and Feraz Azhar (2025): “Better Guesses,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 110(2), 661–686. (Link)

Quillien, Tadeg, Neil Bramley, and Christopher G. Lucas (forthcoming): “Lossy Encoding of Distributions in Judgment Under Uncertainty,” Cognitive Psychology. (Link)

Skipper, Mattias (2023): “Good Guesses as Accuracy-Specificity Tradeoffs,” Philosophical Studies 180(7), 2025–2050. (Link)