Measuring the Mind - Conceptual Issues in Psychology, Psychiatry and Cognitive Science

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 29-31

Format: mixed (in‑person and online)

Contact email:[email protected]

Organizers: 

Drd. Daniela Nica

Drd. Sandra Branzaru

Conference programme / Agenda Day 1

09:00 – 10:00 (Keynote speaker)
Laurențiu Staicu (in person) — University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy, Romania
Are Mental Disorders Natural Kinds?

10:00 – 11:00 (Keynote speaker)
Markus Eronen (online) — Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Causal Complexity and Psychological Measurement

11:00 – 12:00 (Keynote speaker)
Marco Viola (online) — Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy

The Fox and the Grapes. The Impact of Neuroimaging Data on Cognitive Ontology

12:00 – 12:30
Diogo Telles-Correia / Elena Popa (online) — University of Lisbon, Psychiatry Department, Lisbon, Portugal / Universidad de Sevilla, Department of Philosophy

Competing yet Persistent Paradigms in Psychiatry: Pluralism and the Dynamics of Scientific Change

12:30 – 14:00
Lunch break

14:00 – 15:00 (Keynote speaker)
Jana Uher (online) — School of Human Sciences, University of Greenwich, United Kingdom
Measuring the Mind? Psychometrics versus Genuine Measurement

15:00 – 16:00 (Keynote speaker)
Jolien Francken (online) — Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Cognitive Ontology and the Search for Neural Mechanisms: Three Foundational Problems

16:00 – 17:00 (Keynote speaker)
Andrei Miu (in person) — 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?

17:00 – 17:30
Daniela Nica (in person) — University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy, Romania

Naïve Realism in Scientific Psychology

18:00 – 19:00 (Keynote speaker)

Steven Gouveia (in person) — Mind, Language and Action Group, University of Porto, Portugal
Measuring Predictive Minds and AIs

Day 2

09:00 – 09:30
Aidan Runagall-McNaull (online) — Uehiro Institute, Oxford University, United Kingdom
Dynamic, Context-Sensitive Evaluative Attitudes

09:30 – 10:00
Volodymyr Tymoshenko (in person) — University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy, Romania
Why Theory of Mind Fails as a Framework for Understanding Autism

10:30 – 11:00
Päivi Häkkinen (online) — University of Eastern, Finland
What Becomes of Identity: Measuring Psychological Constructs – The Case of Shyness

11:00 – 11:30
Eric Lampe (in person) — Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Germany
Metaphysical Commitment and the Explanatory Power of Structuralist Methodologies in the Mind Sciences

12:00 – 14:00
Lunch break

14:00 – 14:30
Daniela Nica (in person) — University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy, Romania

Variation Thinking in Psychology

14:30 – 15:00

Cristiano Bacchi / Giacomo Piselli Fioroni (in person) — 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

15:00 – 15:30
Kardelen Küçük (online) — The University of Western Ontario, Canada
How Should We Understand Precision in Psychiatry?

16:00 – 16:30
Tobias Sandoval (online) — University of Texas, Austin, United States of America

Background Conditions and Emotional Kinds

17:30 – 18:00

Ilir Isufi (online) — University of Cincinnati, United States of America
What to Make of Replication Failures in Linguistic Relativity Research?

18:00 – 19:00 (Keynote speaker)
Ingo Brigandt (online) — Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Representing and Explaining Cognitive Diversity

Day 3 (online only)

09:00 – 09:30
Alexandra-Ioana Dim (online) — University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy, Romania
Are ToM Tests Language-Biased and Anthropomorphized? ToM and LLMs

09:30 – 10:00
Ari Belenkiy (online) — Independent researcher
The Role of Algebraic Topology in Our Intuition of Numbers

11:00 – 11:30
Sorin Moisescu (online) — Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest 

Self-Knowledge and Second-Order Knowledge by the Lens of Sensation

12:00 – 12:30
Gina Săndulescu (online) — University of Bucharest, Department of Philosophy, Romania
Measuring Noise Sensitivity. Psychometric Limitations and the Micro-Phenomenological Perspective

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