[PHILOS-L] CFP: "Where Is the AI? Metaphysics, Individuation, and the Unity of Artificial Systems" (Special Issue, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy)
Inquiry Editorial Board
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Call for Papers – Special Issue of
Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
Where Is the AI? Metaphysics, Individuation, and the Unity of Artificial Systems
Submission deadline: 25th April 2026
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Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy invites submissions for a Special Issue on the metaphysics and individuation of artificial systems, edited by Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne.
Overview
When we say “the AI,” what entity are we referring to - if any? A trained parameter set? An abstract function? A runtime instance with a particular context window? A distributed socio-technical system spanning weights, servers, tools, users, and institutions? Questions concerning AI mind, agency, responsibility, and even consciousness may be ill-posed unless we first examine the more basic metaphysical question: what is the AI, and where are its boundaries?
This Special Issue invites contributions addressing the metaphysics, ontology, and individuation of AI systems, including persistence over time, identity conditions, part–whole structure, and the criteria by which we count “one system” rather than many. We particularly welcome work showing how different individuation choices reshape debates about memory, understanding, conversation, awareness, and moral or legal standing. In many practical domains - governance, liability, auditing, and public discourse - the question may not simply concern discovering AI boundaries but also stipulating them, much as we do for corporations and other institutional agents.
Guiding questions include (but are not limited to):
- What is the referent of “the model”? An abstract mathematical object, a concrete artifact, a parameter file, a deployed service, or a socio-technical assemblage?
- Individuation and counting: When are there many AIs versus one AI? Are users interacting with an instance, a product, a family of checkpoints, or a shared underlying model across deployments?
- Semantics of expressions used to refer to AI: What does Claude refer to when it uses “I,” and what do users refer to when they address Claude using “you”? What do speakers refer to when they say “I love Claude”?
- Boundaries and parts: What belongs to the system - context window, retrieval layers, tools, external memory, prompt, user, orchestrator, fine-tuning pipeline, monitoring stack?
- Unity of cognitive predicates: Which entity (if any) could be said to understand language, have a conversation, share memory, be aware, or be conscious? Can these predicates attach to different levels (instance vs model vs organization)?
- Persistence and change: Identity across updates, fine-tunes, distillations, merges, and tool integrations; when does “the same AI” cease to exist?
- Stipulation vs discovery: Is there a fact of the matter about system boundaries, or do we require conventional criteria - analogous to corporate individuation - for explanatory, ethical, and legal purposes?
Illustrative topics include:
- Ontology of models: types vs tokens; abstracta vs concreta; metaphysics of software objects
- Part–whole and boundary questions in distributed computation; analogies to extended or scaffolded cognition
- Context windows and conversations: who is the conversational participant - session, instance, service, or organization?
- Memory and identity: retrieval, long-term storage, personalization, and the metaphysics of “shared memory”
- Predicate attribution across levels: when (if ever) understanding, awareness, or consciousness apply - and to what
- Individuation for governance: auditing units, accountability boundaries, liability structures, and model registries
- Corporate analogies and disanalogies: legal fictions, operational criteria, and political stakes of boundary decisions
- Cross-cultural or historical approaches to personhood, artifact ontology, and collective entities
Submission details
- Manuscripts should be around or under 10,000 words. Submissions will be considered on a rolling-review basis until the final deadline of 25 April 2026.
- Please submit through the journal’s website: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/sinq20
- When uploading your manuscript, select the Special Issue title from the drop-down menu on the submission form.
Queries
For questions regarding the Special Issue, please contact: inquirye...@gmail.com
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