CFP: Experimental argument analysis: Interdisciplinary perspectives on verbal reasoning (Philosophical Psychology)

The Special Issue of Philosophical Psychology, guest edited by Eugen Fischer and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga 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?