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?