Psychology\, psychiatry\, and cognitive science increasingly rely on sophisticated measurement technologies while remaining tied to inherited assumptions about what is being measured. Many constructs&mdash\;emotion\, memory\, attention\, intelligence\, disorder&mdash\;are still treated as if they were stable\, homogeneous\, mind‑independent natural kinds with latent quantitative essences\, even as empirical work reveals pervasive heterogeneity\, context‑sensitivity\, and replication failure across domains such as affective neuroscience\, psychopathology\, and social cognition. At the same time\, related debates in the philosophy of biology\, metaphysics\, and cognitive ontology emphasize conceptual relativity and the need to re‑engineer scientific categories in light of concept‑laden evidence.
\nThis conference asks what follows for \;measurement \;and \;classification \;if psychological and psychiatric categories are better understood as populations of variable\, situated instances or relational patterns\, rather than as tokens of fixed types. How should we think about constructs\, latent variables\, and diagnostic entities if variation is ontologically primary and averages are statistical abstractions? When do our instruments partially constitute the phenomena they purport to detect? To what extent do replication &ldquo\;failures&rdquo\; reveal construct instability or ontological mismatch rather than methodological error?
\nWe invite contributions from philosophy of psychology and psychiatry\, philosophy of cognitive science\, philosophy of biology\, metaphysics and metametaphysics\, as well as empirically oriented work in psychology\, psychiatry\, and neuroscience that engages these conceptual issues. Topics include\, but are not limited to: cognitive and psychiatric ontology\; natural kinds\, homeostatic property clusters and relational or internal realism\; measurement theory\, psychometrics and the &ldquo\;quantitative imperative&rdquo\;\; classification and re‑classification in psychiatry and cognitive science (e.g.\, RDoC\, HiTOP)\; construct instability and the replication crisis\; predictive processing and constructionist theories of mind and emotion\; and the concept‑ladenness of evidence and data‑driven ontology re‑engineering.
\nOur aim is to articulate and critically assess conceptual frameworks that could underpin a &ldquo\;variation‑first&rdquo\; science of mind\, in which explanation\, generalization\, and measurement are explicitly aligned with the heterogeneous\, context‑bound phenomena they target.
\nThe conference is organised by the Faculty of Philosophy\, University of Bucharest\, and is open to \;MA and PhD students\, early PhDs and postdocs\, as well as established researchers in philosophy of psychology\, psychiatry\, cognitive science\, philosophy of biology\, and related empirical fields.
\nDate: May 29-30
\nFormat: mixed \;(in‑person and online)
\nContact email:measuringthemind@gmail.com
\nOrganizers: \;
\nDrd. Daniela Nica
\nDrd. Sandra Branzaru
\nKeynote Speakers:
\nIngo BRIGANDT \;(Professor at the Department of Philosophy\, University of Alberta\, Edmonton\, Canada)
\nRepresenting and Explaining Cognitive Diversity
\nMarkus ERONEN \;(Philosopher of science and Associate Professor at the Department of Theoretical Philosophy\, University of Groningen\, The Netherlands)
\nCausal Complexity and Psychological Measurement \;
\nJolien FRANCKEN \;(Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Neuroscience at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences\, University of Amsterdam)
\nCognitive ontology and the search for neural mechanisms: Three foundational problems \;
\nSteven GOUVEIA \;(PhD in (Neuro)Philosophy\, Researcher Fellow of the Mind\, Language and Action Group at the University of Porto and Honorary Professor of the Faculty of Medicine\, University André\;s Bello\, Viñ\;a Del Mar\, Chile)
\nMeasuring Predictive Minds and AIs \;
\nAndrei MIU \;(Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory\, Department of Psychology\, Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education\, Babeș-Bolyai University\, Cluj-Napoca\, Romania)
\nEmotion and cognition: More similar than different? \;
\nLaurențiu STAICU \;(Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Biology at the University of Bucharest\, \;Faculty of Philosophy\, Romania)
\nAre Mental Disorders Natural Kinds? \;
\nJana UHER \;(Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Research\, working at the School of Human Sciences\, University of Greenwich\, UK)
\nMeasuring the mind? Psychometrics versus genuine measurement \;
\nMarco VIOLA \;(Assistant professor and Researcher at Università\; degli Studi Roma Tre\, Italy)
\nThe fox and the grapes. The impact of neuroimaging data on Cognitive Ontology \;
\nSpeakers:
\nCristiano Bacchi / Giacomo Piselli Fioroni \;(School of Psychology\, University of Padua | Berlin School of Mind and Brain\, Humboldt-Universitä\;t zu Berlin / University of Perugia) - \;What is 'disordered' in 'mental disorder'? Questions of boundaries
\nAri \;Belenkiy \;(Independent) - \;The Role of Algebraic Topology in our Intuition of Numbers
\nAlexandra-Iona Din (University of Bucharest\, Faculty of Philosophy) - Are ToM tests language-biased and anthropomorphized? ToM and LLMs
\nAriel Gonç\;alves (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais / Université\; Grenoble Alpes) - \;Episodic simulation: A case report of theory-ladenness in cognitive neuroscience.
\nPä\;ivi Hä\;kkinen \;(University of Eastern Finland) - \;What Becomes of Identity: Measuring Psychological Constructs &ndash\; The Case of Shyness
\nIlir Isufi (University of Cincinnati \, United States) - \;What to make of replication failures in linguistic relativity research?
\nKardelen Kü\;ç\;ü\;k (University of Western Ontario\, Canada) - \;How Should We Understand Precision in Psychiatry?
\nEric Lampe \;(Otto-von-Guericke-Universitä\;t Magdeburg\, Germany) - \;Metaphysical Commitment and the Explanatory Power of Structuralist Methodologies in the Mind Sciences
\nSorin Moisescu \;(University of Bucharest\, Romania) - \;Self-Knowledge and Second-Order Knowledge by the Lens of Sensation
\nAidan Runagall-McNaull (Uehiro Institute\, Oxford University\, UK) - \;Dynamic\, context sensitive evaluative attitudes
\nTobias Sandoval (University of Texas at Austin\, United States) - \;Background conditions and emotional kinds
\nGina Săndulescu \;(University of Bucharest\, Department of Philosophy) - \;Measuring Noise Sensitivity. Psychometric Limitations and the Micro-Phenomenological Perspective
\nDiogo \;Telles-Correia (University of Lisbon\, Psychiatry Department\, Portugal) - \;Competing yet Persistent Paradigms in Psychiatry: Pluralism and the Dynamics of Scientific Change
\nVolodymyr Tymoshenko (University of Bucharest\, Faculty of Philosophy) - \;Why Theory of Mind fails as a framework for understanding autism
\nRanjeet Kumar Verma \;(Indian Institute of Technology\, Dhanbad\, India) - \;Measuring the Mind or Constructing It? A Vedāntic Critique of Psychological Measurement
\nRegister below:
ORGANIZER;CN=Daniela Nica;CN=Sandra-Catalina Branzaru: METHOD:PUBLISH END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR