CFP: THEORY-LADENNESS OF EXPERIENCE March 10-11 2011, Heinrich-Heine Universitaet Duesseldorf, Germany.

Organisers: Gerhard Schurz, Michela Tacca and Ioannis Votsis
Invited Speakers: William Brewer (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Allan Franklin (Colorado), Martin Kusch (Vienna), Athanassios Raftopoulos (Cyprus), Susanna Siegel (Harvard) and Markus Werning (Bochum).

The aim of the conference is to bring together philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists whose work contributes to our understanding of the scope and limits of theory-ladenness phenomena, where these are broadly construed to include the domains of perception, scientific evidence and language. We hope that the resulting synergy will help provide novel and fruitful answers to questions like the following: Is perception cognitively penetrable and, if so, how? Does the choice of scientific theory affect how we select, interpret and assess the evidential worth of
data from experiments? Under what circumstances can we doubt the veridicality of scientific instruments? Can we draw a sharp distinction between terms that are theoretical and those that are observational? We thus expect that the talks will deal with one or more of the following topics: the modularity of mind, nonconceptual content, the epistemology of evidence and the semantics of observational terms.

We invite abstracts of up to 500 words on any of the above or closely related topics. Please e-mail contributions to Ioannis Votsis ( votsis@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de ). Make sure to include your full name, institutional affiliation and e-mail address.
Submission Deadline: 01 NOVEMBER 2010
Acceptance Notification: 01 DECEMBER 2010

We hope to publish the proceedings of the conference in a reputable scientific journal. Upon completion of the conference, we will invite participants to submit written-up versions of their talks. Submitted papers will then be subjected to a peer-review process.

Speakers – Provisional Talk Titles:
William Brewer (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) 'Naturalized Approaches to Theory Ladenness: Evidence from Cognitive Psychology History, and the Ecological Validity Argument'
Allan Franklin (Colorado) 'Theory Ladenness and the Epistemology of Experiment'
Martin Kusch (Vienna) 'Modules and Microscopes'
Athanassios Raftopoulos (Cyprus) 'Cognitive Impenetrability, Nonconceptual Content, and Theory-Ladenness'
Gerhard Schurz (Duesseldorf) 'Ostensive Learnability as Criterion for Theory-Neutral “Observation” Concepts'
Susanna Siegel (Harvard) 'Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Belief'
Michela Tacca (Duesseldorf) 'Cognitive Penetrability and the Content of Perception'
Ioannis Votsis (Duesseldorf) 'The Observation-Ladenness of Theory'
Markus Werning (Bochum) 'The Role of Action in Perception'

Attendance is open to all. If you plan to attend please contact Ioannis Votsis ( votsis@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de ).