Experimental Argument Analysis; Reasoning with Stereotypes

with Prof. Eugen Fischer and Dr Paul Engelhardt, University of East Anglia

Some philosophical arguments look compelling on the page but trade on hidden, unwarranted assumptions. The argument from illusion and the argument from hallucination are classic cases in the philosophy of perception: intuitively persuasive chains of reasoning that, on closer inspection, may work only because they exploit ordinary speakers’ stereotypical associations with words like “illusion” or “hallucination” rather than tracking anything philosophically necessary. This project, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and led by Prof. Eugen Fischer and Dr Paul Engelhardt at the University of East Anglia, asks how far such word-stereotype-driven fallacies of equivocation shape reasoning that philosophers have long treated as purely logical.

An Experimental Approach to Verbal Reasoning

Working with an interdisciplinary team of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists, I led the quantitative analysis for a series of large-scale experimental studies. We designed and administered questionnaire-based studies via Prolific and Qualtrics, recruiting members of the general public and generating and quality-controlling datasets of 1,000+ records per study. Annotation teams worked to establish shared coding criteria and resolve inter-rater disagreements, ensuring consistency across rounds.

On the analysis side, I conducted hierarchical cluster analysis, mixed-effects modelling, and regression analyses in R to test how the way an argument is verbally framed shapes the inferential judgements people actually draw from it, and where those judgements diverge from what the argument logically licenses.

Findings and Outputs

The results contribute to a manuscript, “When Stereotypical Inferences Prevail in Polysemy Processing: Explaining Fallacies of Equivocation,” currently under review at Mind & Language, alongside further outputs in preparation. I presented this work at the 5th European Experimental Philosophy Conference (Norwich, 2025) and the 6th Experimental Philosophy Conference (Sardinia, 2026). The collaboration with Prof. Fischer and colleagues continues beyond the funded post.

Fischer, E., Haket, N., Stanton, K., Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, D. & Engelhardt, P. When stereotypical inferences prevail in polysemy processing: explaining fallacies of equivocation. Mind & Language (under review; revisions submitted).

References