Tag: Corpus Analysis

Talk: “Expressivity Cross-Linguistically” (Xavier Villalba)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, December 15, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Xavier Villalba’s talk “Expressivity Cross-Linguistically – A Corpus Study of Expressive and Evaluative Adjectives in Romance and Germanic” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

In this presentation, I argue that pure expressive adjectives (such as English fucking and damn) represent the final stage in a process of intersubjectivization (Traugott 2010; Traugott & Dasher 2002). This process begins with a descriptive qualifying adjective, moves through a stage of subjectivization – typical of both evaluative adjectives (e.g., pathetic, horrible) and mixed expressive adjectives (bloody, shitty) – and culminates in the pure expressives. This pragmatic shift is linked to semantic bleaching as well as syntactic changes traceable in our corpora. These changes involve features like gradation, function (modifier vs. predicative), and position (postnominal vs. prenominal modification). To support this claim, I will present two corpus studies: 1. A synchronic study designed to identify the most useful features for distinguishing each adjective class in Germanic and Romance languages; 2. A diachronic study, focused on English and Catalan, to trace the historical emergence of these features. The results of these studies will provide a more accurate and comprehensive cross-linguistic understanding of expressive adjectives. Furthermore, they will offer insights into the patterns of change involved and how the speed of this evolution varies across different items and languages.

The talk can be joined using Zoom. Please write an email to stalnetwork@gmail.com for the invitation link.

Hackathon: “Data-Driven Methods in Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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.

Their announcement reads:

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.

Workshop: “Data-Driven Methods for Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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.

Their announcement reads:

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.

Hot Off The Press: “The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Recently, “The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence,” a new entry in the “Cambridge Law Handbooks” series, has been published. It was edited by Kevin Tobia and contains no fewer than 38 chapters. See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – Foundations and Theory

  • Kevin Tobia: “Introduction”
  • Barbara A. Spellman, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, Janice Nadler, and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan: “Psychology and Jurisprudence Across the Curriculum”
  • John Mikhail: “Holmes, Legal Realism, and Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Frederick Schauer: “The Empirical Component of Analytic Jurisprudence”
  • Felipe Jiménez: “The Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Jonathan Lewis: “Competing Conceptual Inferences and the Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Joseph Avery, Alissa del Riego, and Patricia Sánchez Abril: “The Contours of Bias in Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Christoph Bublitz: “Experimental Jurisprudence and Doctrinal Reasoning – A View from German Criminal Law”
  • Bert I. Huang: “Law and Morality”
  • Brian Sheppard: “Legal Constraint”

Part 2 – Introductions

  • Guilherme da Franca Couto Fernandes de Almeida, Noel Struchiner, and Ivar Hannikainen: “Rules”
  • James A. Macleod: “Surveys and Experiments in Statutory Interpretation”
  • Thomas R. Lee and Stephen C. Mouritsen: “Corpus Linguistics and Armchair Jurisprudence”
  • Meirav Furth-Matzkin: “Using Experiments to Inform the Regulation of Consumer Contracts”
  • Doron Dorfman: “Experimental Jurisprudence of Health and Disability Law”
  • Jessica Bregant, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, and Verity Winship: “Studying Public Perceptions of Settlement”
  • Benedikt Pirker, Izabela Skoczeń, and Veronika Fikfak: “Experimental Jurisprudence in International Law”
  • Heidi H. Liu: “The Law and Psychology of Gender Stereotyping”
  • Christian Mott: “The Experimental Jurisprudence of Persistence through Time”
  • Lukas Holste and Holger Spamann: “Experimental Investigations of Judicial Decision-Making”
  • Christoph Engel and Rima-Maria Rahal: “Eye-Tracking as a Method for Legal Research”
  • Jessica Bregant: “Intuitive Jurisprudence – What Experimental Jurisprudence Can Learn from Developmental Science”

Part 3 – Applications

  • Corey H. Allen, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Jason Shepard, and Eyal Aharoni: “Moral Judgments about Retributive Vigilantism”
  • Karolina M. Prochownik, Romy D. Feiertag, Joachim Horvath, and Alex Wiegmann: “How Much Harm Does It Take? An Experimental Study on Legal Expertise, the Severity Effect, and Intentionality Ascriptions”
  • Gabriel Lima and Meeyoung Cha: “Human Perceptions of AI-Caused Harm”
  • Christopher Brett Jaeger: “Reasonableness from an Experimental Jurisprudence Perspective”
  • Lucien Baumgartner and Markus Kneer: “The Meaning of ‘Reasonable’ – Evidence from a Corpus-Linguistic Study”
  • Roseanna Sommers: “Commonsense Consent and Action Representation – What is ‘Essential’ to Consent?”
  • Neele Engelmann and Lara Kirfel: “Who Caused It? Different Effects of Statistical and Prescriptive Abnormality on Causal Selection in Chains”
  • Ori Friedman: “Ownership for and Against Control”
  • Andrew Higgins and Inbar Levy: “Examining the Foundations of the Law of Judicial Bias – Expert versus Lay Perspectives on Judicial Recusal”
  • Jacqueline M. Chen and Teneille R. Brown: “The Promise and the Pitfalls of Mock Jury Studies – Testing the Psychology of Character Assessments”
  • Piotr Bystranowski, Ivar Hannikainen, and Kevin Tobia: “Legal Interpretation as Coordination”
  • Janet Randall and Lawrence Solan: “Legal Ambiguities – What Can Psycholinguistics Tell Us?”
  • Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter: “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Rights for Future Generations”
  • Austin A. Baker and J. Remy Green: “The Right to Transgender Identity”
  • Enrique Cáceres, Christopher Stephens, Azalea Reyes-Aguilar, Daniel Atilano, Manuel García, Rosa Lidia López-Bejarano, Susana González, Carmen Patricia López-Olvera, Octavio Salvador-Ginez, and Margarita Palacios: “The Legal Conductome – The Complexity Behind Decisions”
  • Neil C. Thompson, Brian Flanagan, Edana Richardson, Brian McKenzie, and Xueyun Luo: “Trial by Internet – A Randomized Field Experiment on Wikipedia’s Influence on Judges’ Legal Reasoning”

Literature

Tobia, Kevin (ed.) (2025): The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. (Link)

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)

Workshop: “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Today, the “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, starts. 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 worshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. The link to the Teams meetings is below.

February 14, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Renato Turco (University of Genoa): “An Experimental Approach to Empty Definite Descriptions”
  • Lucien Baumgartner (University of Zurich), Paul Rehren (Utrecht University), and Krzysztof Sękowski (University of Warsaw): “Measuring (Un)Intentional Conceptual Change in Philosophy – A Corpus Study”

March 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Isabelle Keßels (University of Düsseldorf), Paul Hasselkuß (University of Düsseldorf), and Daian Bica (University of Düsseldorf): “The Safety Dilemma Put to the Test”
  • José V. Hernández-Conde (University of Valladolid) and Agustín Vicente (University of the Basque Country; Ikerbasque): “A Comparative Analysis of the Knobe Effect – Assessing Moral, Aesthetic, and Alethic Reasoning in Autistic and Neurotypical Populations”

April 10, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Tingting Sui (Peking University), Sebastian Sunday (Peking University): “A Confucian Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles”
  • Ryan Doran (University of Barcelona; University of Cambridge): “True Beauty”

May 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • William Gopal (University of Glasgow): “Identifying & Rectifying the Instrumentalist Bias in Analytic Social Epistemology”
  • Giuseppe Ricciardi (Harvard University) and Kevin Reuter (University of Zurich): “Exploring the Agent-Relativity of Truth”

June 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Federico Burdman (Alberto Hurtado University), Gino Marttelo Carmona Díaz (University of the Andes), and María Fernanda Rangel Carrillo (University of the Andes): “Lay Perceptions of Control and Moral Responsibility in Addiction”
  • Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “A Cross-Cultural Study on the Ethics and Moral Psychology of HPV Vaccination”

Sessions can be joined using Microsoft Teams via https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NDdiNDRjNmQtMzI4Yi00MWM2LWFiYjMtYzE4YzE1ZTY2ODcz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22c152cb07-614e-4abb-818a-f035cfa91a77%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22680c6cfa-4e43-4962-9569-4828023e7f78%22%7d.