[PHILOS-L] CFP: "After “Consciousness”: Conceptual Engineering for AI, Mind, and Moral Standing" (Special Issue, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy)
Inquiry Editorial Board
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Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy invites submissions for a Special Issue edited by Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne.
Overview
What happens if we deliberately set aside the term “consciousness” in our thinking about artificial intelligence - and explore what grows in the conceptual space it once occupied?
This Special Issue treats that question as a structured experiment in conceptual engineering. Debates about AI and consciousness often generate persistent verbal disputes with limited theoretical or practical payoff: the term may be defective, culturally parochial, or only weakly connected to what ethically, politically, or scientifically matters. At the same time, scientific and computational research - ranging from global workspace and higher-order models to predictive processing, recurrent processing, integrated information theory, and attention schema theory - can proceed by specifying mechanisms and capacities with or without invoking consciousness-talk.
We invite contributions that (i) assess whether “consciousness” should be abandoned, quarantined, or deflated in AI discourse, (ii) articulate and evaluate candidate replacement vocabularies (scientific, philosophical, or normative), and (iii) develop genuinely non-anthropocentric or AI-specific concepts suitable for theory, practice, and governance. Comparative work drawing on non-Western conceptual resources is especially welcome, alongside careful attention to translation hazards and the politics of conceptual choice.
Guiding questions include (but are not limited to):
- Foundations: Should we stop using “consciousness” in AI discourse, and with what scope (AI only, or more broadly)? What about neighboring terms such as sentience, subjectivity, awareness, and experience?
- Replacement: What qualifies as a genuine replacement vocabulary? Must it target the same phenomena, or may it re-carve the conceptual territory? What distinguishes replacement from simply changing the subject?
- Alien concepts: Which AI-relevant properties lack clear human analogues, and how should they be named and measured without anthropomorphism?
- Traditions and translation: What do non-Western frameworks make salient, and what are the risks of importing new defective concepts or reinforcing political exclusions?
Illustrative topics include:
- Concept-defect arguments; illusionism and their implications for AI
- What matters for ethics and governance without the “consciousness question” (e.g., deception, trust, welfare-relevant patterns, moral standing)
- Mechanistic vocabularies without label competition (broadcast and gating, meta-representation and calibration, feedback depth and error-correction, etc.)
- Philosophy of AI mind and language without the “consciousness detour” (speech acts, intentions, representation, agency)
- Reference and measurement for novel AI properties; operationalization for policy and regulation
- Anthropomorphism and “hidden humanism” in apparently neutral terms
- Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, Vedantic, Indigenous, and other traditions; translation hazards; power and politics of conceptual choice
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 1 June 2026.
- Submissions should be made via 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 this Special Issue, please contact: inquirye...@gmail.com
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