CFP: Special Issue on Inferences

Call for Papers

What are inferences? Reflections from philosophy and cognitive science

Estudios de Filosofía. No 76, June-December 2027

Inference lies at the heart of cognition, yet what counts as an inference —and how it ought to be analyzed— remains a contentious philosophical topic. The classical view frames it as a conscious, rule-governed transition between propositionally structured beliefs, carried out at the personal level and accountable to logic. New work across philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence reveals a more complex picture: sub-personal systems that draw conclusions without reflective oversight, non-linguistic representations, like maps, diagrams, and vector spaces, that underlie different reasoning processes, and ampliative or probabilistic transitions that escape from strict logical analysis. This special issue aims to explore the diverse forms that inference can take and to examine how this plurality challenges the core assumptions of the classical view (i.e., its commitments to propositional structure, logical form, and personal-level agency, among others).

Estudios de Filosofía (ISSN: 121-3628; ISSN-e 2256-358X) is the journal published by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Antioquia. The journal is indexed in SCOPUS. Since its creation in 1990, the journal has been characterized by its pluralism regarding the topics and traditions in philosophy it publishes. It is an international, open-access, electronic publication governed by a double-blind, anonymous arbitration system. It circulates semiannually on an ordinary basis.