Exploring Reasons, Rationality, and Rationalism
2025-05-31 23:45 (Europe/Zurich) | Zürich, Switzerland
We invite submissions of extended abstracts that fit one of the following topics:

Day 1: Are Reason Relations Universal?

The first day of the conference is dedicated to the question whether reason relations, conceived as the set of all good, radically open reason relations capable of encoding material inferences in natural language use, can make up one single consistent set. Given expressivist commitments to logic as a means of explication, wouldn’t this imply the existence of a “master base vocabulary”, comprising all other possible base vocabularies as its subsets?

Day 2: Inferentialism in the Legal Sphere

The legal discipline is characterized by complex and partly opaque argumentation structures. Inferentialism can help to reveal the reasons why courts and scholars may accept certain conclusions on legal issues and reject others. During this second day, we aim to further develop ideas on how lawyers and legal scholars can improve their practice by better understanding the structure of reasoning in complex legal settings.

Day 3: Neuro-Symbolic Language AI inspired by Inferentialism

Inferentialism, conceived, as a philosophical theory of the relationship between meaning and logical inference, has started to inspire innovative approaches in the area of language AI. Proposals encompass a broad range of methods, ranging from combinations of neural and symbolic methods that are informed by inferentialist semantics, to attempts at building neural architectures from scratch that are inspired by inferentialist ideas of rationalizing structures. The goal of this third day is to bring together experts working in a broad range of language AI.

Submission Guidelines

• Submissions should take the form of extended abstracts (maximum 500 words).

• Abstracts must be submitted in English and prepared for anonymous review.

• In addition to the abstract, authors must include their name, institutional affiliation, and contact information in the body of the email accompanying the submission.

• Accepted abstracts will be allocated a 25-minute presentation slot, followed by discussion.

• Please submit your abstract in PDF format to the following email address:

conference-ile@unisg.ch

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: 31 May 2025

• Notification of Results: 30 June 2025

For further inquiries, please contact the organizing committee at:

conference-ile@unisg.ch
