Renée Smith and Emily McGill prepare an edited volume with the working title “Philosophers on Philosophy – What is philosophy, how is philosophy done, and why do philosophy?”
Abstracts for chapters can be submitted until October 3. The call reads:
We invite chapter proposals for an edited volume exploring philosophers’ views on different aspects of metaphilosophy. The target audience is undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy and laypeople. These populations are often surprised that philosophers do not agree about what philosophy is, how it is done, whether it makes progress, what its value is, etc. Contributions to this volume will shed light on these topics and introduce the variety of metaphilosophical views contemporary philosophers hold.
Contributions will generally fit into one of the following topical areas and address several of the suggested subtopics; however, clearly there is the possibility of overlapping topics, and the following suggested subtopics are not exhaustive. Final essays should defend a particular view rather than merely describe it, be fewer than 2000 words, and be written for the target audience. Neither proposals nor final essays should make use of AI in any way.
What is philosophy? What distinguishes philosophy from other fields?
Topics, methods
Questions, disagreement
Goals, product
Philosophy, science, humanities
How is philosophy done? How do the methods in philosophy compare to those in other fields?
Logic, reason, analysis
Distinctions
Thought experiments, intuition
Experimental philosophy
The history of philosophy
Phenomenology
What does philosophy do? What is the goal/purpose of philosophy?
Progress in philosophy
Philosophical knowledge
Applied philosophy
What is the value of philosophy?
Philosophy in the undergraduate curriculum
Philosophy and society
Philosophy as a way of life
Philosophy, knowledge, understanding, uncertainty
The future of philosophy
Proposals
Please submit an abstract/proposal of approximately 200–300 words clearly identifying the overarching topic your essay will address and a current CV.
Antonio Gaitán Torres and Hugo Viciana organize a workshop on “Moral Epistemology and Social Progress – Experimental and Philosophical Perspectives,” which will take place at the Universidad de Sevilla from November 4 to 5.
Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until September 17. The call reads:
This focused workshop explores the intersection of empirical research on moral cognition and philosophical theories of social and moral progress. We bring together experimental philosophers and moral epistemologists to examine how empirical findings about moral intuitions, attitude change, and intellectual virtues inform our understanding of moral improvement at both individual and societal levels. The workshop features invited speakers alongside selected contributions from an open call for abstracts, fostering intimate discussion among researchers working at the forefront of experimental and theoretical approaches to moral progress. Submissions addressing experimental studies of moral judgment, philosophical accounts of moral progress, or the epistemology of moral improvement are particularly welcome.
We welcome submissions for 3–4 additional presentations at this workshop. Interested researchers should submit an abstract of 350–750 words addressing topics at the intersection of moral epistemology, experimental philosophy, and social progress. Abstracts might explore empirical studies of moral cognition, philosophical theories of moral improvement, experimental metaethics, intellectual virtues, the psychology of moral change, or related themes in moral epistemology. Please send your abstract to both hviciana@us.es and agaitan@hum.uc3m.es with the subject line “November Workshop.” The deadline for submissions is 17 September 2025. Selected presenters will have approximately 30 minutes for their presentation followed by discussion.
Gregor Bös and Max Noichl organize a hackathon on “Data-Driven Methods in Philosophy,” which will take place in Utrech from October 16 to 18. Before and after, hybrid meetings will also take place.
Computational methods have transformed academic research, including in the humanities. Philosophers have been comparatively slow to adopt them, but as contemporary language modelling techniques now enable much more sophisticated analyses, they are seeing increasing interest. We want to explore techniques from the digital humanities, linguistics and AI research (Betz 2022) that can support the study of philosophical and scientific corpora, with applications for philosophy of science (Lean, Rivelli & Pence 2021; Noichl 2023. See also the contributions to Pence & Rivelli 2022), the history of philosophy (Petrovich, Verhaegh, Bös et al. 2024; Verhaegh, Petrovich & Bös forthcoming), and metaphilosophy (Petrovich, 2022).
This activity is built around a “hackathon” – an extended period of collaborative programming and discussion. During the three-day in-person event, the participants develop their own projects, either individually or in small groups. The first two days start with keynote lectures that present state-of-the-art research. In the lead-up to the event, we organize two hybrid seminars, in which participants present recent research to each other, to get an idea of what’s possible in this space. During the seminars, participants brainstorm research ideas and discuss with seminar leaders how to apply digital methods, identify appropriate data sources, and determine which digital skills to develop. During the event, our keynote speakers Charles Pence and Gregor Betz contribute their expertise in argument representation, LLMs, digital methods for history and philosophy of science. They will also be available during the event to discuss research ideas, share practical knowledge, and support the seminar participants.
As an additional help for participants without programming experience or who have not yet used data-driven methods in their research, the organizers prepare coding templates and assist in using LLMs for writing code. More experienced participants can focus on exchanging ideas and developing their own projects. A few weeks after the hackathon, we reconvene in a hybrid event to discuss the results of the projects and avenues for further work.
The aim of the course is to offer an introduction to data-driven methods for philosophy and focuses on participant-designed research projects. At the end of the course, participants:
a) Know examples of state-of-the-art data-driven research methods in philosophy and are in a good position to apply them. b) Have gained experience in starting their own computational philosophy project In the best case, the hackathon can be the starting point for a research project in the participants’ domain of expertise.
Gregor Bös and Max Noichl organize the Satellite workshop “Data-Driven Methods for Philosophy” at this year’s conference of the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie (GAP). The workshop will take place at the University of Düsseldorf from September 12 to 13.
Computational methods have revolutionized most fields of academic research, including the humanities. More recently, they have also been put to use in the philosophy of science, history of philosophy, and metaphilosophy. In this satellite workshop, we discuss techniques from the digital humanities, network science, and artificial intelligence that can support the study of philosophical corpora.
The workshop comprises keynote lectures by Prof. Catherine Herfeld and Prof. Adrian Wüthrich that showcase computational methods in philosophical research. After these showcases, Gregor Bös and Max Noichl will assist the participants in developing their own initial research questions that make use of digital methods and explore first implementations. The organizers have prepared templates to support participants without programming experience or who have not yet used computational methods in their research. More experienced participants can use the sessions to exchange ideas and develop their own projects, presenting the state of their progress in the concluding session.
If participants already have project ideas when signing up, we encourage them to get in contact with the organizers to discuss potential data sources and methods. Participants are also very welcome to sign up to continue working on existing digital projects and to contribute to the exchange of approaches.
Alex Davies and Nikolai Shurakov organize a conference on “Law’s Many Users – Legal Interpretation Within and Beyond Legal Institutions,” which will take place at the University of Tartu from November 12 to 14.
Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until August 12. The call reads:
Law is interpreted and implemented by many hands. Some of them belong to judges, legislators, or lawyers – but many belong to nurses, teachers, municipal officials, or department heads: professionals who encounter law not in courtrooms or casebooks, but in institutional documents, contracts, checklists, and internal protocols. These actors do not interpret law as legal theorists or as abstract “laypeople,” but as role-bound individuals embedded in specific organizational contexts. Their understanding of legal norms is shaped by institutional incentives, bureaucratic hierarchies, resource constraints, inherited routines, and pressures to defer to internal authorities. They are interpreters, but also implementers – conduits through which law acquires practical meaning.
While experimental jurisprudence has deepened our understanding of how legal concepts like causation, intention, or rights are grasped by legal experts and ordinary citizens, it has rarely focused on this middle terrain: how individuals interpret legal rules as part of their job, within the constraints and affordances of organizational life.
This conference is an occasion for exploring that terrain.
Call for Abstracts (submission deadline: August 12, 2025)
We invite submissions from scholars across disciplines interested in how laws and regulations are interpreted, implemented, and transformed in real-world institutional settings.
Legal meaning is shaped not only in courts or legislatures, but in offices, classrooms, clinics, and council chambers – by actors whose interpretations are framed by professional roles, organizational logics, and institutional incentives. This conference invites reflection on the interpretive practices that emerge in such contexts, and how these practices affect what law becomes in use.
We welcome work from experimental jurisprudence, philosophy of language, linguistics, law & economics, public administration, and related fields. Contributions may be theoretical, empirical, or methodological.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
Studies of how non-lawyers interpret and apply legal or regulatory texts
Experimental investigations of interpretation in institutional settings
Pragmatic and semantic analysis of policy and legal communication
Incentive structures and role-based reasoning in interpretation
Legal meaning as mediated through contracts, guidelines, or protocols
Interpretive drift and discretion in organizational environments
Extensions or critiques of experimental jurisprudence beyond traditional contexts
Interdisciplinary methods for studying law “in the wild”
Abstracts are applications for either 30-minute slots (20 minute talk + 10 minute discussion) OR 1-hour slots (30–40 minute talk + 30–20 minute Q&A). Abstracts (max. 600 words – excluding a list of references) should: (a) make clear the line of argument for the conclusion defended; (b) make clear the relevance of the envisioned talk to the conference theme; (c) make clear whether your applying for a 30-minute or 60-minute slot; and (d) be prepared for anonymous review.
Submitting Abstracts: Abstracts should be submitted with a separate coversheet (author, email, institution) to laws.many.users@gmail.com.
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.
The “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, continues. Anyone interested in presenting something can contact the organizers. They write:
We are delighted to announce the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The workshop is usually held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. Full details of 2025/26 season TBC.
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”
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.
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)
A few decades ago, it was pretty common to mush together priming effects and framing effects and see them as two closely connected parts of a single Bigger Truth about the human mind. Of course, everyone understood that the effects themselves were a bit different, but one common view was that they were providing evidence for the same larger picture. That larger picture said: People’s judgments are radically unstable, easily pushed around by subtle and almost unnoticeable factors.
Things have changed so much since then. Priming research in social psychology has experienced a series of truly spectacular replication failures, while research on framing effects continues to look very solid. In light of this change, we should rethink our understanding of what framing effects show about human cognition. We shouldn’t see them as part of a larger picture that also includes priming. We need an understanding of framing that allows us to situate it within a larger picture, according to which priming effects are not real.
The priming literature seemed to be showing that people’s judgment and decision-making are highly unstable and can be easily shifted around by small manipulations of the external situation. The thought was that if you just happen to be holding a hot coffee, or sitting at a dirty desk, or in a room that includes a picture of dollar bills, your whole way of thinking about things will be shifted in some fundamental respect. For example, you will end up making deeply different moral judgments.
The key lesson of more recent research is simple: these priming effects do not occur. More generally, we cannot shift people’s moral judgments around in some radical way just by making subtle changes in their situation. Your moral judgments will not shift around completely if you are seated at a dirty desk. That is not how the human mind works.
Okay, with all of that in mind, let’s rethink framing effects. For concreteness, we can focus on a famous study from Tversky and Kahneman (1981). In this study, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Participants in the gain framing condition read the following case:
A disease is expected to kill 600 people. You can choose between two options:
If you choose the first option, 200 people will be saved.
If you choose the second option, there is one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that 0 people will be saved.
Meanwhile, participants in the loss framing condition read:
A disease is expected to kill 600 people. You can choose between two options:
If you choose the first option, 400 people will die.
If you choose the second option, there is one-third probability that 0 people will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.
Clearly, the two descriptions are logically equivalent, but they tend to yield very different responses. Participants tend to be risk-averse in the first case, risk-seeking in the second.
During the heyday of priming research, many of us thought that this sort of effect should be understood within a larger picture of the mind that also included priming. Basically, the idea was something like this: “People’s judgments about a case can be shifted around but all sorts of little things, including everything from the decor in the room to the precise words used to describe it.” But in light of everything we know now, we need to revisit this view. Framing effects are very real, but that larger picture seems to be mistaken. We need to understand framing effects within a larger picture of the mind, according to which people’s judgments don’t just shift around randomly as a result of all sorts of little factors.
I’d be very open to different views about what the right picture is, but just as a first step in this direction, let’s consider a picture that emerges not from social psychology but rather from very traditional work in philosophy. This picture says that people often have a collection of different intuitions that are mutually inconsistent. These intuitions need not be unstable in any way. It might be that each individual intuition is completely stable; it’s just that the different intuitions contradict each other.
To illustrate, consider intuitions about free will. I might find myself having the following three intuitions: (a) All human behavior is completely explained by genes and environment, (b) If a person’s behavior is completely explained by genes and environment, that person’s behavior is not performed with free will, (c) Some human behaviors are performed with free will. These three intuitions are mutually inconsistent, so they cannot all be right. However, this does not mean that people’s free will intuitions have to be unstable in any way.
On the contrary, a single individual could easily have all three intuitions at the same time. For example, as a philosopher, I might start out a paper by explaining that each of these three claims seems intuitively to be true, that they are mutually inconsistent and hence cannot all be right, and that we therefore face an interesting philosophical problem. Alternatively, someone might simply have each of these three intuitions, but without noticing that they contradict each other. In such a case, the person would be failing to notice something important, but that would not mean that the person’s intuitions were unstable. Each of the three intuitions might be perfectly stable; it’s just that the three intuitions are not consistent.
Some philosophical problems seem to have very much the structure we see in framing effects. Consider the philosophical problem of moral luck. The problem starts with three intuitions: (a) An agent who doesn’t bring about any bad outcomes deserves relatively little blame, (b) An agent who performs the exact same behavior but who ends up bringing about a bad outcome deserves a lot of blame, (c) If the agent performs the exact same behavior in two cases and the only difference is in the outcome that ends up occurring, that difference by itself cannot be relevant to how much blame the agent deserves. I myself have all three of these intuitions. Since the intuitions are mutually inconsistent, they cannot all be right, but that does not mean that my intuitions are unstable. Each of the three intuitions is completely stable and emerges in all situations; it’s just that the three intuitions are in tension with each other.
Let’s now return to framing effects. In the days when it seemed like priming was real, I totally see why researchers would think that framing was a lot like priming. But in light of subsequent studies, maybe we should see it in a completely different way. Framing does not involve people’s judgments being unstable; it instead involves people having different intuitions that are mutually inconsistent.
Take the example described above. Looking at that example, I have the following three intuitions: (a) The correct answer in the first case is to take the non-risky option, (b) The correct answer in the second case is to take the risky option, and (c) It cannot possibly be the case that the correct answer in the first case is different from the correct answer in the second case. These three intuitions are mutually inconsistent, so they cannot all be right. However, each individual intuition can be perfectly stable. In fact, thinking about the problem right now, I find myself having all three intuitions at the same time.
Turning the traditional view about framing effects upside down, one might even see framing effects as an extreme case of stability. Just as we continue to experience a visual illusion even when we know that it is illusory, we continue to have the inconsistent intuitions that together constitute a framing effect even when we know that they cannot all be right.
[I discuss this issue in this paper, but please feel free to respond to this blog post even if you haven’t looked at the full paper.]
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
