CFP: Experimental argument analysis: Interdisciplinary perspectives on verbal reasoning

The Special Issue of Philosophical Psychology 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.

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 SI will address questions about methods, cognitive mechanisms, and philosophical applications.

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?

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?

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?