Experimental argument analysis: Interdisciplinary perspectives on verbal reasoning

The workshop ‘Experimental argument analysis: Interdisciplinary perspectives on verbal reasoning (EAA 2025)’ will directly precede the 5th European Experimental Philosophy conference in Norwich, UK. Held on July 9-10, 2025, the workshop will bring together researchers from experimental philosophy, cognitive psychology, and experimental linguistics, to open up the experimental philosophy of verbal reasoning as a new interdisciplinary field of study.

There will be 3 slots for submitted papers that address the research questions below. Accommodation will be covered for the 3 presenters. Any papers not accepted to the workshop will automatically be considered for the experimental philosophy conference. Papers will be allocated a 40-minute slot and should leave 10-15 minutes for discussion.

Abstracts of up to 500 words (not counting references or figure captions) should be submitted by March 1st, 2025, via https://openreview.net/group?id=XPhi/2025

To help develop interdisciplinary experimental argument analysis as a fruitful successor project to traditional conceptual analysis that benefits from advances in cognitive psychology and experimental linguistics, this workshop will address questions about methods, cognitive mechanisms, and philosophical applications:

a.     Methods: How can empirical studies support the reconstruction or evaluation of verbal reasoning? Which conceptual and empirical tools can be adapted for this purpose and how? How can formal and experimental methods be combined to facilitate normative evaluation?

b.     Mechanisms: How do automatic comprehension and production inferences shape verbal reasoning? What biases affect such inferences? Which factors affect specifically the contextualization of default inferences? How are irregular polysemes processed? What norms do people rely on for specific arguments of interest? How much individual variation is there in this respect?

c.     Applications: How can insights into language processing, and specifically polysemy processing, support the assessment of philosophical arguments? How effective are verbal arguments at changing people’s minds? Which aspects of automatic language processing influence the persuasiveness of verbal arguments? To what extent do such arguments contribute to philosophical puzzles and paradoxes? How can insight into automatic language processing support the improvement of our conceptual tools?

Preliminary Programme:

Tuesday 9th July 2025

Reasoning with polysemous words: Detecting and processing ambiguity

9:30: 10:30: Agustin Vicente (Basque Country): How to decide whether a (philosophical) term is polysemous: Linguistic tests may not be enough

10:30-11:00: Coffee Break

11:00-12:00: Lucy Macgregor (Cambridge): What’s your jam? Cognitive and neural mechanisms of semantic ambiguity resolution

Reasoning with polysemous words: Mechanisms, biases and fallacies

12:00-13:00: Richard Breheny (UCL): Modelling salience and modelling pragmatic inference – what’s the connection?

13:00-14:00: Lunch

14:00-15:00: Valentina Bambini (IUSS Pavia): Inferring metaphorical meanings: How typical and atypical brains use multimodal information

15:00-16:00: Francesca Ervas (Cagliari): Experimenting with metaphors in conditional reasoning

16:00-16:30: Coffee Break

Empirical tools for normative evaluation

16:30-17:30: Kevin Reuter (Zurich): Verbal reasoning and rational communicators: Experimental and theoretical perspectives

17:30-18:30: Niels Skovgaard-Olsen (Freiburg): Markov Violations and Hidden Mechanisms

Thursday 10th July 2024

09:30-11:30 Submitted paper session

09:30-10:10 Paper 1

10:10-10:50 Paper 2

10:50-11:30 Paper 3

11:30-12:00 Coffee Break

12:00-13:00 Eugen Fischer (University of East Anglia): ‘Experimental argument analysis: Research program and paradigm’ (with Paul Engelhardt & Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga)

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:00 Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh): Why can’t philosophers agree? The psychological sources of irremediable plurality of views in philosophy

Organizers: Eugen Fischer, Paul Engelhardt, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga

For any questions about conference or workshop, please email: [email protected]

We thank the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for generous support of the workshop.