CFP: "After “Consciousness”: Conceptual Engineering for AI, Mind, and Moral Standing" (Special Issue, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy)

Call for Papers – Special Issue of:

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy

After “Consciousness”: Conceptual Engineering for AI, Mind, and Moral Standing

Submission deadline: June 1 2026 

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Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy invites submissions for a Special Issue on the metaphysics and individuation of artificial systems, edited by Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne.

Overview

What happens if we deliberately set aside the term “consciousness” in our thinking about AI—and explore what grows in the conceptual space it used to occupy?

This special issue treats that question as a structured experiment in conceptual engineering. Debates about AI and “consciousness” often generate verbal dispute without clear payoffs: the term may be defective, culturally parochial, or weakly connected to what ethically and politically matters. Meanwhile, scientific and computational work (e.g., global workspace models, higher-order approaches, predictive processing, recurrent processing, IIT, attention schema theory) can proceed by specifying mechanisms and capacities with or without “consciousness”-talk.

We invite contributions that (i) assess whether “consciousness” should be abandoned, quarantined, or deflated in AI discourse, (ii) articulate and evaluate replacement vocabularies (scientific, philosophical, normative), and (iii) develop genuinely non-anthropocentric or AI-specific concepts for theory, practice, and governance. Comparative work drawing on non-Western conceptual resources is especially welcome, alongside careful attention to translation hazards and the politics of conceptual choice.

Guiding questions

1. Foundations: Should we stop using “consciousness” in AI discourse, and with what scope (AI only, or more broadly)? What about neighboring terms (sentience, subjectivity, awareness, experience)?

2. Replacement: What counts as a replacement vocabulary—must it target the same phenomena, or may it re-carve the territory? What distinguishes replacement from changing the subject?

3. Alien concepts: Which AI-relevant properties lack human analogs, and how should we name and measure them without anthropomorphism?

4. Traditions & translation: What do non-Western frameworks make salient, and what are the risks of importing new defective concepts or political exclusions?

Suggested topics (illustrative)

• Concept-defect arguments; illusionism and its implications for AI

• What actually matters for ethics/governance without the “C-question” (deception, trust, welfare-relevant patterns, moral standing)

• Mechanistic vocabularies without label competition (broadcast/gating, meta-representation and calibration, feedback depth/error-correction, etc.)

• Philosophy of AI mind and language without the “C-detour” (speech acts, intentions, representation, agency)

• Reference and measurement for novel AI properties; operationalization for policy

• Anthropomorphism and “hidden humanism” in seemingly neutral terms

• Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, Vedantic, Indigenous (and other) resources; translation hazards; power and politics of conceptual choice

Submission details

• Manuscripts should be around or under 10,000 words. Submissions will be considered on a rolling-review basis until the final deadline of 25 April 2026.
• Please submit through the journal’s website: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/sinq20
• When uploading your manuscript, select the Special Issue title from the drop-down menu on the submission form.

Queries
For questions regarding the Special Issue, please contact: [email protected]