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

Submission deadline: April 30, 2026

Details

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?

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