Tag: Blame

Call: “Valence Asymmetries”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Isidora Stojanovic, Lorenza D’Angelo, Morgan Moyer, and Michelle Stankovic organizing a conference on “Valence Asymmetries,” which will take place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra from March 19 to 20, 2026.

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until September 30. The call reads:

The Valence Asymmetries ERC team is happy to announce that it will be organizing the first VALENCE ASYMMETRIES conference on March 19th–20th 2026 at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. The event is funded by Isidora Stojanovic’s ERC Advanced Grant “Valence Asymmetries: the positive, the negative, the good and the bad in language, mind and morality” (GA n° 101142133).

This interdisciplinary event will discuss themes which are central to the Valence Asymmetries project, including the role of valence asymmetries in perception, emotion, morality, language, and communication. Discussion will draw upon insights from philosophy, psychology, and linguistics.

There will be invited talks by Hans Alves, Frederique de Vignemont, Saif Mohammad, and Pascale Willemsen. There is also room for 4–6 additional talks, to be selected from open submissions. Each selected talk will be assigned a 50 min slot, including discussion.

We especially encourage submissions on the relation between value, valence, and polarity; theoretical and empirical accounts of valence asymmetries in language, including in negative strengthening, scalar inferences, and irony; the asymmetry between virtue and vice, and between praise and blame, in normative and applied ethics; as well as other discussions of valence asymmetries in linguistics, cognitive science, moral psychology, and cognate areas.

If you are interested in presenting your work at this venue, please submit a 2-page abstract to valence.asymmetries@upf.edu by Sep 30th, with the subject line “valence asymmetries submission.”

Hot Off The Press: “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Lying”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Alex Wiegmann has edited a new volume on “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Lying,” a further entry into Bloomsbury’s “Advances in Experimental Philosophy” series. See below for the table of contents.

  • Emanuel Viebahn: “What Does it Take to Tell a Lie?”
  • Romy Jaster and David Lanius: “The Concept of Fake News”
  • Jörg Meibauer: “The Concept of Bullshit”
  • Markus Kneer: “The Truth About Assertion and Retraction – A Review of the Empirical Literature”
  • Shirly Orr: “Truth Evaluators – A Different Point of View in the Lying/Misleading Distinction”
  • Alejandro Erut: “Cross-Cultural Studies on Concepts of Lying – Methodological Approaches and Their Findings”
  • Mailin Antomo: “Lying With Gestures”
  • Louisa Reins: “The Impact of Modality and Presentation Time on Judgments of Deceptive Implicatures as Cases of Lying – An Empirical Investigation”
  • Izabela Skoczeń: “From Lying to Blaming and Perjury – Deceptive Implicatures in the Courtroom and the Materiality Requirement”
  • Neele Engelmann: “Murderer at the Door! To Lie or to Mislead?”

Hot Off The Press: “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Edited by Karolina Prochownik and Stefan Magen, “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law,” a new entry into Bloomsbury’s “Advances in Experimental Philosophy” series, has recently been published. See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – Topics in Experimental General Jurisprudence

  • Raff Donelson: “Experimental Approaches to General Jurisprudence”
  • Guilherme de Almeida, Noel Struchiner, and Ivar Hannikainen: “The Experimental Jurisprudence of the Concept of Rule – Implications for the Hart-Fuller Debate”

Part 2 – Topics in Experimental Particular Jurisprudence

  • Kevin Tobia: “Legislative Intent and Acting Intentionally”
  • Lara Kirfel and Ivar Hannikainen: Why Blame the Ostrich? Understanding Culpability for Willful Ignorance”
  • Paulo Sousa and Gary Lavery: “Culpability and Liability in the Law of Homicide – Do Lay Moral Intuitions Accord with Legal Distinctions?”
  • Levin Güver and Markus Kneer: “Causation and the Silly Norm Effect”

Part 3 – (New) Methods and Topics in Experimental Jurisprudence

  • Justin Sytsma: “Ordinary Meaning and Consilience of Evidence”
  • Pascale Willemsen, Lucien Baumgartner, Severin Frohofer, and Kevin Reuter: “Examining Evaluativity in Legal Discourse – A Comparative Corpus-Linguistic Study of Thick Concepts”
  • Leonard Hoeft: “A Case for Behavioral Studies in Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter: “Experimental Longtermist Jurisprudence”

Literature

Prochownik, Karolina, and Stefan Magen (eds.) (2024): Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law, London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury. (Link)

Talk: “In Praise of Praise” (Pascale Willemsen)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, June 10, from 18:00–20:00 (UTC+2), Pascale Willemsen will be talking about “In Praise of Praise” at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Pascale writes:

Philosophers claim that an agent’s moral responsibility can come in two variations: A blameworthy agent deserves blame, and a praiseworthy agent deserves praise. It is also widely accepted that a central question in moral philosophy concerns the conditions under which an agent is or is appropriately held morally responsible for their behaviour. In contrast, a central topic in moral psychology concerns the conditions under which an agent is judged to be morally responsible for their behaviour and blamed for its negative consequences. While blame and praise are seen as two sides of the same coin, considerably more attention has been paid to blame. In general, moral responsibility researchers have mainly focused on understanding negatively-valenced moral phenomena. In contrast, the positive side of moral responsibility has only played a minor role in the research programmes of moral philosophers, psychologists, and experimental philosophers. As a result, we understand relatively little about what praise is, when it is ascribed, and how it is verbally expressed. This is surprising, as researchers strive to tell a story about human morality and moral responsibility as a whole, not merely half of it.

In this talk, I will do three things: First, I summarize the relatively scarce psychological literature which strongly suggests various asymmetries between blame and praise. Second, presenting a series of my own experiments, I demonstrate that blame and praise may differ in another important respect, namely in the way it is verbally expressed by negative and positive evaluative concepts. As a result of all this evidence, I conclude that praise is a unique moral judgment that deserves closer attention. Finally, taking a first stab at the linguistic dimension of praise, I show some pilot corpus studies which explore praise vocabulary.