Tag: Valence

Call: “The Identities of Action”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Society for Philosophy of Emotion and the Journal of Philosophy of Emotion are organizing a book symposium on Joseph Ulatowski’s “The Identities of Action – How the Normative Valence of Consequences Matters for Act Evaluation.” They are looking for commentators as well as for a session chair and guest editor.

Expressions of interest are possible until August 28, 2026. The call reads:

Abstract

Individuating action depends upon how people comprehend value judgements about the consequences of an action to distinguish – or not to distinguish – between them. The question “what is action?” cannot be fully addressed until it is established whether two action descriptions – whether in law, business, insurance policies, or ordinary conversation – refer to the same or different actions. This book approaches the problem of action individuation by arguing for a variantist account, where the moral valence of the consequences of an action plays a foundational role in distinguishing between actions. Actions with bad consequences are associated with the originating act from which the action arises; actions with positive consequences are separate from their originating act. When we consider whether a bad or good consequence is identical to an originating action, the normative valence of the consequences of the action matter. Drawing from an empirical assessment that tests non-philosophers’ intuitions about individuating actions, along with real-world examples, Joseph Ulatowski explores the practical and philosophical significance of how we distinguish between actions.

Author Bio

Joseph Ulatowski is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Assistant Vice-Chancellor of Sustainability at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. Besides Identities of Action, he is the author of Commonsense Pluralism about Truth – An Empirical Defence, co-editor of two forthcoming anthologies: Lynch and His Critics and Experimental Philosophy and Corpus Analysis, as well as special issues of the Asian Journal of Philosophy on cross-cultural analyses of the nature of truth, Synthese on Paul Horwich’s minimalism about truth, and an Australasian Philosophical Review with a lead article on the value of truth in a post-truth era by Gila Sher. His work largely focuses on the nature and value of truth, action theory, and the history of philosophy in Poland.

Overview

The Society for Philosophy of Emotion and the Journal of Philosophy of Emotion (JPE) are organizing a book symposium on Professor Ulatowski book, The Identities of Action: How the Normative Valence of Consequences Matters for Act Evaluation. We are looking for commentators and session chair/guest editor for the SPE’s 2027 Central APA (in-person) affiliated group session, and for a subsequent publication in the Journal of Philosophy of Emotion, including a JPE podcast edition. (No additional work beyond seeing your commentary through to publication with the JPE will be required for the podcast edition.) If you are interested in engaging in a critical discussion of Professor Ulatowski’s book, with the aim of moving forward the discourse on relevant topics highlighted by his book as they relate to the philosophy of emotion, or chairing the APA affiliated group session and guest editing this book symposium, please complete the APA Affiliated Group Session and JPE Book Symposium Interest Form. Because the JPE requires the use of Google workspace tools, you will be required to log-in with a Google account to access the form. If you do not use your Gmail account on a regular basis, we recommend you set your Gmail to forward your emails to the email that you regularly use so you do not miss any correspondence from us. If you are interested in participating as a commentator or session chair/guest editor, please complete the form, which includes uploading a copy of your CV, by August 28, 2026. We will contact you by September 4, 2026, with a decision regarding your expressed interest and any further details.

Society for Philosophy of Emotion

Accepted commentators will be invited to present their commentaries during the in-person book symposium, as a part of a Society for Philosophy of Emotion (SPE)-American Philosophical Association (APA) affiliated group session at the 2027 Central APA, which will be an in-person conference. Commentaries for this book symposium are due to the author six (6) weeks before the SPE-APA session date, and author replies are due (3) weeks before the session date, in accordance with the APA meeting participation guidelines and prior to the due date for the JPE book symposium. Commentators would also be required to register for the 2027 Central APA conference, and be a member of the SPE at the time of their participation (which includes a one-time JPE submission fee waiver). An annual SPE membership is $35, with a discounted rate of $10 for graduate students and underemployed scholars.

Guest editors would be invited to contribute an editorial introduction, including highlighting the significance of the discussions in the book symposium to the relevant scholarly discourses. Information on guest editor responsibilities can be found on the JPE’s Join the Team page. The session chair/guest editor would also be required to register for the 2027 Central APA conference, but they will receive a free one year SPE membership (which includes a one-time JPE submission fee waiver).

Please note that commentators and guest editors who agree to participate in this in-person book symposium will not be eligible for any funding assistance from the APA since only those who are presenting in an APA main program event are eligible for such funding. However, participants can also submit a paper or volunteer to comment on a paper for an APA main program event and apply for APA funding if they are accepted, since APA main program participants are allowed to also participate in affiliated group sessions without any restrictions. Organizers will also be informed to avoid any scheduling conflicts.

Journal of Philosophy of Emotion

Commentaries for the JPE will be due one month after the Society for Philosophy of Emotion (SPE)-American Philosophical Association (APA) affiliated group session for this book symposium. We encourage a diversity of scholars of all ranks who are interested in participating as a commentator to respond to this CFP, provided that they are willing and able to commit to fulfilling the expectations set by the JPE’s submission guidelines and the JPE’s double-anonymous peer review process. Please refer to past issues of the JPE for examples, and all submissions must adhere to the JPE’s style guideline (which includes a Google Doc manuscript template), and note that authors are responsible for providing all necessary DOIs and appropriately formatting their references. All contributors are also responsible for copyediting their own submissions and providing any requested citation information, although the JPE will also conduct a preliminary review and copyedit check of all submissions prior to sending them to peer review. No submission will be sent to peer review without the appropriate formatting, in accordance with the JPE style guidelines. The JPE also requires a submission fee of $35 or you can use your SPE one-time JPE submission fee waiver.

Selection Criteria and Peer Refereeing

Commentators will be selected not only based on their qualifications, but also based on their cooperative compliance and the consideration for the value of diversity and inclusiveness among equally qualified commentators. Potential contributors are also welcome to let us know in their letter of interest in refereeing this book symposium if for some reason they were not invited to contribute a commentary, but would still like to contribute to the book symposium, or if they would rather referee the book symposium. All referees may also choose to be publicly acknowledged in a subsequent winter issue of the JPE. Referee’s will also receive a free membership to the Society for Philosophy of Emotion, which includes a one time author submission fee waiver for the JPE, for the year of their membership.

Job: “Valence Asymmetries” (Barcelona, Spain)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, is hiring two postdocs to work on the research project “Valence Asymmetries.”

Applications are possible until May 29, 2026. The job announcement reads:

There is an open call for applications, with a deadline set at 29 May 2026, for two postdoctoral researchers.

The successful candidates will conduct tasks that are transversal to the different work packages of the project. Their research will seek to understand how emotion and affect impact and underlie cognitive processes such as belief formation, decision making, conceptual representation, as well as language production and interpretation. They will work in very close collaboration with Prof. Isidora Stojanovic (project PI) and the entire team.

This is a full-time research position, without any teaching requirements, with a gross annual salary of 31.196,40 €, in a dynamic interdisciplinary team, funded by Prof. Stojanovic’s ERC Advanced grant VALENCE ASYMMETRIES GA N. 101142133.

For further details and in order to apply, consult this offer through Interfolio. The official call, specifying all legal requirement, in Catalan, can be consulted at the Deparment’s website.

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.”

Call: “New – Experimental – Perspectives on Valence in Language”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Anouch Bourmayan, Pascal Ludwig, and Morgan Moyer are organizing a “Valence in Language” workshop at Sorbonne Université on June 13, 2025. Invited speakers are Diana Mazzarella (Université de Neuchâtel), Joshua Knobe (Yale University), and Nicole Gotzner (University of Osnabrück).

Abstracts for talks can be submitted before February 28, 2025. The call reads:

It is widely agreed that Frege’s On Sense and Reference set the foundations for contemporary philosophy of language, as well as formal semantics. It should not come as a surprise, then, that affective meaning, which tracks speakers’ subjective feelings and attitudes, has been almost completely dismissed in both disciplines as an unsuitable object of study. Indeed, Frege’s misgivings about the relevance of psychological aspects is one of the hallmarks of his approach to logic and formal language. A way of rephrasing Frege’s worries would be to say that the affective information associated with a word is necessarily subjective, and, as such, irrelevant to the study of meaning that aims at objective and hence shareable aspects of meaning.

This view has remained largely unchallenged, and the dismissal of the relevance of affective information sank even deeper down as this referentialist semantics approach to natural language reified in the mid 20th century with the melding of technical and philosophical advances from Tarski, Davidson, Montague, and Lewis, and then standardized with the formalism in Heim and Kratzer (1998).

However, the last 20 years have seen a flourishing of interest in such phenomena, including recent proposals by, e.g. McCready (2020) on expressives, Cepollaro (2020) or Hess (2021) on slurs, and Jeshion (2021) for a taxonomy of pejorative meaning. Nonetheless, the mainstream still views these phenomena as generally irrelevant to the study of meaning proper, in part since they are thought to manifest in a minimal or exceptional part of the lexicon.

In parallel, the field of cognitive psychology has extensively explored the significance of valence in language. Following an early idea from Wundt (1907), Zajonc (1980, 2000) has defended the general hypothesis that affective responses may precede conceptual recognition, that is, may be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing. Regarding language more specifically, as early as 1957 Osgood introduced the semantic differential technique which allowed him to define the affective connotation of words – not only specific classes of words but “plain vanilla” words – along three underlying dimensions, the first of which was valence. Other models of semantic differentials were subsequently developed, including those by Mehrabian and Russell (1974), Bradley and Lang (1999) and Warriner et al. (2013). Overall, all the studies confirmed that valence is the most significant dimension of the three parameters, being the most stable and the most informative one. Further, with advances in psycho- and neurolinguistic methodologies in the last decades, the Affective Primacy hypothesis found support at the level of linguistic content, comparing affective to descriptive dimensions of meaning (see, among others, Bargh et al. 1989, Kousta et al. 2009, Gaillard et al. 2006 or Ponz et al. 2014).

In this workshop, we would like to examine the idea that valence has a greater role in language than has been generally acknowledged. Indeed, a word’s valence might be an important aspect of the meaning of many more words than those that are recognized as “expressives”. That is, expressivity could be a broad and ubiquitous phenomenon rather than a feature specific to only certain terms.

Call: “EPITHETS & STAL-2025 Workshop”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The next workshop by the project “Explaining Pejoratives in Theoretical and Experimental Terms” (EPITHETS) and the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will take place in Genoa, Italy, from May 7 to 8, 2025.

Abstracts for contributions can be submitted until December 10. The call reads:

We invite contributions on issues concerned with the positive, negative or ambivalent valence of expressive terms. In particular, we encourage:

  • empirical studies (experimental, corpus and field studies) concerned with the valence of expressive terms (incl. slurs, pejoratives, amelioratives);
  • analyses of how the valence of a term can shift (as, for example, in slur reclamation).

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.

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.