Please direct any inquiries to: conference-ile@unisg.ch

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Exploring Reasons, Rationality, and Rationalism International Conference on Inferentialism

10 – 13 September 2025

University of Zurich & University of St. Gallen

The University of Zurich’s Digital Society Initiative (DSI), Department of Philosophy, and Department of Computational Linguistics, together with the Institute of Law & Economics of the University of St. Gallen are pleased to announce their first international conference on Inferentialism, to be held from 10 to 13 September 2025 at the University of Zurich.

This four-day event will feature contributions from leading scholars in the field as well as selected presentations from emerging young researchers. We invite submissions of extended abstracts on any topic related to rationalism and inferentialism as developed in “Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons” as well as applications of inferentialism in AI and the field of law.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

 • Robert Brandom (University of Pittsburgh)
 • Ulf Hlobil (Concordia University, Montreal)
 • Damiano Canale (Bocconi University, Milan)

The publication of “Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons” (Brandom/Hlobil 2024) last year has marked a milestone for both the technical and the philosophical development of inferentialist logic. This conference offers a first take on the book’s reception and its potential operationalization in such diverse research fields as Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Legal Studies, and Natural Language Processing. We invite submissions of extended abstracts that fit one of the following topics:

Day 1: Are Reason Relations Universal? The first day of the conference is dedicated to the question whether reason relations, conceived as the set of all good, radically open reason relations capable of encoding material inferences in natural language use, can make up one single consistent set. Given expressivist commitments to logic as a means of explication, wouldn’t this imply the existence of a “master base vocabulary”, comprising all other possible base vocabularies as its subsets?

Day 2: Inferentialism in the Legal Sphere The legal discipline is characterized by complex and partly opaque argumentation structures. Inferentialism can help to reveal the reasons why courts and scholars may accept certain conclusions on legal issues and reject others. Our workshop aims to further develop ideas on how lawyers and legal scholars can improve their practice by better understanding the structure of reasoning in complex legal settings.

Day 3: Neuro-Symbolic Language AI inspired by Inferentialism Inferentialism, conceived, as a philosophical theory of the relationship between meaning and logical inference, has started to inspire innovative approaches in the area of language AI. Proposals encompass a broad range of methods, ranging from combinations of neural and symbolic methods that are informed by inferentialist semantics, to attempts at building neural architectures from scratch that are inspired by inferentialist ideas of rationalizing structures. The goal of our workshop is to bring together experts working in a broad range of language AI.

Submission Guidelines

 • Submissions should take the form of extended abstracts (maximum 500 words).
 • Abstracts must be submitted in English and prepared for anonymous review.
 • In addition to the abstract, authors must include their name, institutional affiliation, and contact information in the body of the email accompanying the submission.
 • Accepted abstracts will be allocated a 25-minute presentation slot, followed by discussion.
 • Please submit your abstract in PDF format to the following email address: conference-ile@unisg.ch

Important Dates

 • Submission Deadline: 31 May 2025 • Notification of Results: 30 June

Scientific and Organizing Committee

 • Reto Gubelmann (University of Zurich)
 • Peter Hongler (University of St. Gallen)
 • Ghassen Karray (University of Zurich)
 • Marco Toscano (University of Zurich)

For further inquiries, please contact the organizing committee at: conference-ile@unisg.ch