Psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science increasingly rely on sophisticated measurement technologies while remaining tied to inherited assumptions about what is being measured. Many constructs—emotion, memory, attention, intelligence, disorder—are still treated as if they were stable, homogeneous, mind‑independent natural kinds with latent quantitative essences, even as empirical work reveals pervasive heterogeneity, context‑sensitivity, and replication failure across domains such as affective neuroscience, psychopathology, and social cognition. At the same time, related debates in the philosophy of biology, metaphysics, and cognitive ontology emphasize conceptual relativity and the need to re‑engineer scientific categories in light of concept‑laden evidence.

This conference asks what follows for measurement and classification if psychological and psychiatric categories are better understood as populations of variable, situated instances or relational patterns, rather than as tokens of fixed types. How should we think about constructs, latent variables, and diagnostic entities if variation is ontologically primary and averages are statistical abstractions? When do our instruments partially constitute the phenomena they purport to detect? To what extent do replication “failures” reveal construct instability or ontological mismatch rather than methodological error?

We invite contributions from philosophy of psychology and psychiatry, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of biology, metaphysics and metametaphysics, as well as empirically oriented work in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience that engages these conceptual issues. Topics include, but are not limited to: cognitive and psychiatric ontology; natural kinds, homeostatic property clusters and relational or internal realism; measurement theory, psychometrics and the “quantitative imperative”; classification and re‑classification in psychiatry and cognitive science (e.g., RDoC, HiTOP); construct instability and the replication crisis; predictive processing and constructionist theories of mind and emotion; and the concept‑ladenness of evidence and data‑driven ontology re‑engineering.

Our aim is to articulate and critically assess conceptual frameworks that could underpin a “variation‑first” science of mind, in which explanation, generalization, and measurement are explicitly aligned with the heterogeneous, context‑bound phenomena they target.

The conference is organised by the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, and is open to MA and PhD students, early PhDs and postdocs, as well as established researchers in philosophy of psychology, psychiatry, cognitive science, philosophy of biology, and related empirical fields.

Date: May 29-30

Format: mixed (in‑person and online)

Contact email:[email protected]

Organizers:

Drd. Daniela Nica

Drd. Sandra Branzaru

Keynote Speakers:

Ingo BRIGANDT (Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)

Representing and Explaining Cognitive Diversity

Markus ERONEN (Philosopher of science and Associate Professor at the Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands)

Causal Complexity and Psychological Measurement

Jolien FRANCKEN (Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Neuroscience at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam)

Cognitive ontology and the search for neural mechanisms: Three foundational problems

Steven GOUVEIA (PhD in (Neuro)Philosophy, Researcher Fellow of the Mind, Language and Action Group at the University of Porto and Honorary Professor of the Faculty of Medicine, University Andrés Bello, Viña Del Mar, Chile)

Measuring Predictive Minds and AIs

Andrei MIU (Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania)

Emotion and cognition: More similar than different?

Laurențiu STAICU (Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Biology at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy, Romania)

Are Mental Disorders Natural Kinds?

Jana UHER (Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Research, working at the School of Human Sciences, University of Greenwich, UK)

Measuring the mind? Psychometrics versus genuine measurement

Marco VIOLA (Assistant professor and Researcher at Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy)

The fox and the grapes. The impact of neuroimaging data on Cognitive Ontology

Speakers:

Cristiano Bacchi / Giacomo Piselli Fioroni (School of Psychology, University of Padua | Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / University of Perugia) - What is 'disordered' in 'mental disorder'? Questions of boundaries

Ari Belenkiy (Independent) - The Role of Algebraic Topology in our Intuition of Numbers

Alexandra-Iona Din (University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy) - Are ToM tests language-biased and anthropomorphized? ToM and LLMs

Ariel Gonçalves (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais / Université Grenoble Alpes) - Episodic simulation: A case report of theory-ladenness in cognitive neuroscience.

Päivi Häkkinen (University of Eastern Finland) - What Becomes of Identity: Measuring Psychological Constructs – The Case of Shyness

Ilir Isufi (University of Cincinnati , United States) - What to make of replication failures in linguistic relativity research?

Kardelen Küçük (University of Western Ontario, Canada) - How Should We Understand Precision in Psychiatry?

Eric Lampe (Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Germany) - Metaphysical Commitment and the Explanatory Power of Structuralist Methodologies in the Mind Sciences

Sorin Moisescu (University of Bucharest, Romania) - Self-Knowledge and Second-Order Knowledge by the Lens of Sensation

Aidan Runagall-McNaull (Uehiro Institute, Oxford University, UK) - Dynamic, context sensitive evaluative attitudes

Tobias Sandoval (University of Texas at Austin, United States) - Background conditions and emotional kinds

Gina Săndulescu (University of Bucharest, Department of Philosophy) - Measuring Noise Sensitivity. Psychometric Limitations and the Micro-Phenomenological Perspective

Diogo Telles-Correia (University of Lisbon, Psychiatry Department, Portugal) - Competing yet Persistent Paradigms in Psychiatry: Pluralism and the Dynamics of Scientific Change

Volodymyr Tymoshenko (University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy) - Why Theory of Mind fails as a framework for understanding autism

Ranjeet Kumar Verma (Indian Institute of Technology, Dhanbad, India) - Measuring the Mind or Constructing It? A Vedāntic Critique of Psychological Measurement

Register below:

https://measuringthemind.com/