Tag: Psycholinguistics

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)

Call: “ESPP 2025”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 2025 conference of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology will take place in Warsaw, Poland, from September 2 to 5, hosted by the Polish Academy of Sciences. As keynote speakers, Emma Borg, Cameron Buckner, Nora Newcombe, and Petra Schumacher are confirmed.

Abstracts for papers, posters, and symposia can be submitted until March 3. The call reads:

The Society invites the submission of papers, posters and symposia. Submissions are refereed and selected on the basis of quality and relevance to psychologists, philosophers and linguists. If you have any questions, contact us by writing an email to espp2025@gmail.com.

Travel scholarships for PhD Students

Thanks to support from IFiS/GSSR, via the NAWA grant PROM Short-term academic exchange (in Polish, PROM Krótkookresowa wymiana akademicka; BPI/PRO/2024/1/00020/DEC/1), we can award up to 10 travel grants for PhD students at universities outside Poland to attend the conference and present a talk or poster. Please see the Call for Applications for these scholarships, which promotes equal opportunity for people with disabilities, and adequate gender representation. Successful applications will be selected on the basis of: (i) quality of the proposed talk or poster, as judged by the ESPP expert reviewers’ report on the anonymised abstract you submit when applying to present at the conference; (ii) NAWA PROM’s eligibility rules (see the Call for Applications).

Submission instructions for papers, posters and symposia

The deadline for all submissions is 3rd March 2025. Submissions should be made online via EasyChair.

Papers should be designed to be presentable within 20 minutes (for a total 30 minutes session). Submissions should consist of a long abstract of up to 1000 words (excluding bibliography). If required, an additional page of tables and/or graphs may be included. A submission for a poster presentation should consist of a 500-word abstract.

When submitting your paper or poster online, please first indicate the primary discipline of your paper (philosophy, psychology, or linguistics) and whether your submission is intended as a paper or a poster. Submitted papers may also be considered for presentation as a poster if space constraints prevent acceptance as a paper or if the submission is thought more suitable for presentation as a poster. All paper and poster submissions (whether abstracts or full papers) should be in DOC or PDF format and should be properly anonymized in order to allow for blind refereeing.

Each person may present only one paper during the conference’s parallel sessions, though you may be a co-author of more than one paper. If you submit multiple single-authored papers only one will be accepted. This includes contributions to submitted symposia.

Symposia are allocated a two-hour slot and consist of a set of four linked papers on a common theme or three linked papers with an introduction. Symposia should include perspectives from at least two of the three disciplines represented in the society (philosophy, psychology and linguistics). Submissions should be made by symposium organizers (not speakers).

When submitting a symposium proposal online, your submissions should include the following three elements in a single PDF:

  1. A list of 3 or 4 speakers which indicates representation of at least two disciplines (individual speakers may also represent multiple disciplines).
  2. A general abstract of up to 500 words, laying out the topics to be addressed and indicating connections among the talks.
  3. Individual abstracts of up to 500 words and provisional titles for each talk. Please do not submit more than one PDF file per symposium.

General Aim

The aim of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology is to promote interaction between philosophers and psychologists on issues of common concern. Psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, computer scientists and biologists are encouraged to report experimental, theoretical and clinical work that they judge to have philosophical significance; and philosophers are encouraged to engage with the fundamental issues addressed by and arising out of such work. In recent years ESPP sessions have covered such topics as theory of mind, attention, reference, problems of consciousness, introspection and self-report, emotion, perception, early numerical cognition, spatial concepts, infants’ understanding of intentionality, memory and time, motor imagery, counterfactuals, the semantics/pragmatics distinction, comparative cognition, minimalism in linguistic theory, reasoning, vagueness, mental causation, action and agency, thought without language, externalism, hypnosis, and the interpretation of neuropsychological results.

Talk: “In the Thick of It” (Matteo Colombo and Giovanni Cassani)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, October 14, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+2), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Matteo Colombo and Giovanni Cassani’s talk “In the Thick of It – Do Thick Terms Constitute a Distinctive Class of Affectively-Charged Language?” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

Words like “courageous”, “clever”, “gullible”, “smelly” and “tasty” are examples of what philosophers call thick terms, which have a significant degree of descriptive content and are evaluatively loaded, too. Thick terms have been contrasted with purely evaluative terms like “good”, “bad”, “positive” and “negative”, and descriptive terms like “Dutch”, “tall” and “pink”. Despite the amount of attention thick terms have received in philosophy, however, it is unclear whether they constitute a homogeneous class of evaluative terms with characteristic psycholinguistic properties, and whether the psycholinguistic properties of thick terms are reducible to their “valence norms” (i.e., the degree of pleasantness/unpleasantness elicited by a word). In this talk, we explore these two questions based on computational modelling and behavioural data in English, Dutch and Italian. Our results indicate that, compared to other affectively-charged words, thick terms have characteristic psycholinguistic and information properties irreducible to valence norms.

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

Call: “Agency and Intentions in Language”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The fifth instalment of “Agency and Intentions in Language” (AIL) is coming. Hosted by the University of Göttingen, it will take place online from January 29 to 31, 2025.

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until December 18, 2025. The call reads:

Call for Papers

On the linguistic side, we welcome submissions examining any grammatical phenomena sensitive to the degree of agency or interpretation of an action as intentional versus accidental, such as controller choice, subjunctive obviation, licensing of polarity items, aspect choice in Slavic, case marking in ergative split languages and ‘out-of-control’ morphology. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: ways in which natural languages manifest different degrees of agency or the distinction between intentional and accidental actions (morphological marking, syntactic structures, semantic denotations of verbs and adverbials, pragmatic and contextual differences); connections between agency, intentions, and event structure; relations between agency, intentions, and causation.

On the side of philosophy, we welcome submissions addressing any aspect related to philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, the nature of agency, intentions, and acting intentionally. Both theoretical and empirical research are welcome as they contribute to debates on various theories of action, free will, moral responsibility, nature of reasons, and practical rationality.

On the side of psychology, we welcome submissions that deal with agency, intentions, moral responsibility, and other related topics, broadly construed. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: issues in developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, clinical psychology (the sense of agency in individuals with schizophrenia, OCD, etc.), and adults’ perception of agency and responsibility.

Submissions

Anonymous abstracts, not exceeding 2 pages (including references and examples), with font no less than 11 Times New Roman, and 2 cm margins, should be uploaded on AIL5 OpenReview site.

If you are not registered on OpenReview, we recommend you use your institutional email for registration – in this case, your profile will be activated automatically. If you decide to use your non-institutional email, please allow two weeks for the profile to be activated.

We expect to notify authors of their acceptance in early January 2025. Presentations will be allotted 30 minute slots with 15 minutes for questions and discussion.