CFP: Unreal Beliefs: An Anti-Realist Approach in the Metaphysics of Mind

CFP: Unreal Beliefs: An Anti-Realist Approach in the Metaphysics of Mind

Guest editors:

Agata Machcewicz-Grad, Maciej Tarnowski (University of Warsaw)

Deadline for submissions:

1st of May 2025

Description

Studia Semiotyczne (Semiotic Studies) invites submissions for a special issue devoted to the critical discussion of Krzysztof Posłajko’s book Unreal beliefs: An Anti-Realist Approach in the Metaphysics of Mind (Bloomsbury, 2024). Papers should be written in English and prepared for blind review.

Recent years brought a revival of interest in the metaphysics of beliefs. Significant contributions have been made on strongly realist (Quilty-Dunn & Mandelbaum 2018, Porot & Mandelbaum 2020), so-called superficialist ( Molder 2010, Schwitzgebel 2021, Curry 2021) and anti-realist (Toon 2023, Parent 2022, Demeter 2022) sides of a debate. The issues concerning the taxonomy of mental states posited by folk psychology and the attribution of beliefs to non-human agents provoke considerations about the nature of belief and the criteria of belief attribution. The book by Krzysztof Posłajko provides us with a novel way of framing the anti-realist position on the metaphysics of beliefs. While drawing negative ontological conclusions from the arguments against realism, the author refrains from adopting the eliminativist or fictionalist position. Instead, he proposes a view called ‘minimal non-realism’ which, on the one hand, denies the existence of beliefs understood as natural properties and, on the other hand, allows for true belief attributions understood in a deflationary way.

We hope that the special issue of Studia Semiotyczne will further strengthen the scholarly interest in anti-realist approaches in the metaphysics of mind and provide a platform to discuss the ideas present in Posłajko’s book. We plan the issue to have a form of a book symposium accompanied by responses from professor Posłajko. The symposium will consist of both openly submitted papers and invited contributions from the following authors:

- Brice Bantegnie (UC Riverside, University of Southampton)

- Devin Sanchez Curry (West Virginia University)

- Witold Hensel (University of Warsaw)

- Amir Horowitz (Open University of Israel)

- Annemarie Kalis (Utrecht University)

- Joanna Komorowska-Mach (University of Warsaw)

- Piotr Kozak (University of Białystok)

- Bruno Mölder (University of Tartu)

- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)

- Tad Zawidzki (George Washington University)

 

We seek original contributions engaging with the contents of Posłajko’s book, both critically assessing its project and extending it. The range of possible topics include

  • the relationship between anti-realism about beliefs, mental fictionalism and interpretivism;
  • the relationship between anti-realism about beliefs and eliminative materialism;
  • the relationship between anti-realism about beliefs and neo-dispositionalism;
  • the arguments for and against natural kind realism about beliefs;
  • the semantics and metasemantics of the term ‘belief’;
  • the relationship between folk psychological notion of belief and the notion of belief used in cognitive science;
  • the issue of causal efficacy and causal relevance of beliefs;
  • the relationship between dispositional and occurrent beliefs;

as well as the connection between these philosophical problems and psychology and cognitive science.

 

We warmly encourage submissions by early-career philosophers, authors whose first language is not English and by authors who belong to traditionally underrepresented groups in academia.

In order to submit the paper, one is kindly asked to submit the manuscript by sending it to:

a.machcewicz-grad@uw.edu.pl, tarmaciej@gmail.com and studiasemiotyczne@pts.edu.pl

All submitted papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed.