Two Upcoming Talks on Philosophy and AI

By David Strohmaier

I will give two talks about Philosophy and AI in the next few weeks (February 2025).

Workshop on Contrafactives

  • When: February 6-7, 2025
  • Where: University of Düsseldorf

The workshop “How we do (not) talk about mistaken beliefs” will bring together researchers interested in the phenomenon of contrafactive predicates: ascription verbs that denote attitudes by which people get things wrong. According to current knowledge, no such ascription verbs are lexicalised.

At this workshop, I will present the most recent results and some general conclusions from my long running research project into the learnability of contrafactives (joint work with Simon Wimmer). We tested whether transformer networks can acquire contrafactive predicates. The answer is positive but attend the talk (or wait for future publications) to learn about the bigger lessons.

If you are interested, our previous papers on this topic are:

  1. Contrafactives and Learnability (2022)
  2. Contrafactives and Learnability: An Experiment with Propositional Constants (2023)
  3. Contrafactives, Learnability, and Production (2025)

Non-Human Entities and AI

  • When: February 20-22, 2025
  • Where: University of Heidelberg

At Heidelberg, I will join the symposium on “Artificial Intelligence and Non-Human Entities: In Search of Synergies from Various Philosophical Debates”. I will draw on my previous research on social ontology to compare organisations and LLMs. Without giving too much away, my talk will discuss how our ascriptions from the intentional stance play different roles in the cases of organisations and LLMs.

Interestingly, at the end of my paper, I found myself discussing some of the memes swirling around in the twitter AI debate. So if you want to see me draw the connection between social ontology, LLMs, and the Leviathan with a smiling face, this will be your opportunity.

My previous research in this area includes:

  1. Ontology, neural networks, and the social sciences (2020)
  2. Organisations as Computing Systems (2021)
  3. Social-Computation-Supporting Kinds. (2020)
  4. Two theories of group agency (2020)
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