Workshop on “Reasoning, Argumentation, and Logic in Natural Language: Experiments and Models”

Organizers:
Markus Werning (BayesPrag@EEG, U Bochum), Matthias Unterhuber (BayesPrag@EEG, U Bochum), Maria Spychalska (ImpliPer, U Cologne), and Eugen Fischer (U East Anglia)

Time and venue:
April 3-5, 2019 in Bochum

Homepage:
https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/phil-lang/argumentation.html

Description:
The workshop aims to investigate reasoning, argumentation, and logic from the perspective of experimental pragmatics. Whereas these topics have long been at center stage in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics, the view of experimental pragmatics on those has only recently begun to be explored. Pragmatic phenomena such as (a) the disambiguation of polysemous words, (b) effects of contexts on the interpretation of content words, and (c) implicative properties of logical connectives (e.g., order effects associated with and) and quantifiers (e.g., the scalar implicature from some to not all) have a strong influence on what people take to be sound reasoning and valid arguments. The workshop will focus on experimental approaches as well as empirically driven models regarding these and other pragmatic phenomena in the domain of argumentation and reasoning.
The topics of the workshop include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Scalar and other implicatures of natural language quantifiers, connectives, and operators
  • Rational Speech Act Theory/Bayesian pragmatics and natural language reasoning
  • Polysemy and homonymy in the context of natural language argumentation
  • Neuro-cognitive modelling of comprehension, communication, and reasoning
  • EEG, fMRI, and eye tracking methods applied to comprehension, communication, and reasoning
  • Experimental pragmatics as applied to argumentation and reasoning

Keynote speakers:
Richard Breheny (University College London), Paul Engelhardt (UEA), Eugen Fischer (UEA), Yosef Grodzinsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Stefan Heim (RWTH Aachen University), Lucy MacGregor (Cambridge University), Ken McRae (Western University, London, Ontario), Milena Rabovsky (Free University Berlin), Maria Spychalska (University Cologne), Jakub Szymanik (University of Amsterdam), Matthias Unterhuber (Ruhr University Bochum) and Markus Werning (Ruhr University Bochum)

Deadline for Submissions: 20.2.2019
Notification of acceptance: 1.3.2019
Format: One-page abstract (pdf); a second page may contain references, graphs and tables.
Submissions can be made for presentations, posters, or both. Please submit abstracts here.

In case you need child care on site, please let us know.