Paper submissions are invited for the special issue/collection of Topoi entitled: Linguistic Relativity and Post-Cognitivism. The special issue aims to explore the new interdisciplinary avenues that approaches post-cognitivist in the philosophy of mind have opened up for a rethinking of the classic problem of how linguistic diversity impacts on thinking and acting.

Special issue article publications often bring higher citations and visibility than regular papers and attract more relevant readership due to its scope. Topoi is indexed in the Web of Science under AHCI, currently in Quartile 1 and placed in the top-10 ranked Philosophy-Category journals, with a 2023 IF of 1,3 and CiteScore of 3,1.

Guest Editor(s):

• Filippo Batisti, Ca‘ Foscari University of Venice, filippo.batisti@unive.it

• Ulises Rodríguez Jordá, University of the Basque Country – IAS Research Centre, u.rodriguez.jorda@gmail.com

DESCRIPTION:

Linguistic diversity and its influence on thought is a largely overlooked topic within cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, where two contrasting theoretical orientations prevail. Whereas, on the one hand, Classic Cognitivism conceptualizes the mind as a computational machine, the more recent perspectives known as 4E Cognition claim that this dramatically underplays the constitutive role played by the body and the environment in cognitive processes. These latter approaches, however, have not yet converged into a unified research program and articulate their opposition to Cognitivism in diverse and often incompatible ways. As of today, none of them have properly thematized or even considered the cognitive impact of linguistic diversity.

This is precisely the focus of linguistic relativity, a field of research that explores how the languages we speak affect our view of and interaction with the physical and social world. After being discredited during the heyday of Generativist Linguistics, linguistic relativity was rehabilitated as a legitimate scientific question in the 1990s, reinterpreted in cognitivist terms. The new interest in the topic has generated a sizeable corpus of psycholinguistic research that has often confirmed the contrasting effects, albeit modest, of different languages in the same cognitive tasks.

Nevertheless, the Neo-Whorfian interpretation of linguistic relativity retains many cognitivist assumptions. While hardly surprising, given that classic cognitivism is still the standard approach in cognitive science, this raises more productive questions. Can we experimentally study the intricacies of language, thought, and culture while avoiding usual cognitivist assumptions such as a disembodied understanding of cognition, low ecological validity, non-sociality, etc.? Is it possible to isolate the constitutive role of language in a non-mechanistic way, for instance, through an enactive holistic understanding of cognition? Or, more generally, can a radically different understanding of mind and life reformulate the classic questions of linguistic relativity?

This special issue aims at kick-starting new lines of inquiry at a crossroads in the domains of philosophy of language and theoretical and applied psychology. We offer a non-exhaustive list of research questions as a starting point, as we welcome other related contributions:

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

- Approaches starting from situated and enculturated practices face the problem of distinguishing their constituents, i.e., all the relevant factors at play. Can language, thinking and culture really be extricated, both theoretically and empirically?

- Why have linguistic diversity and relativity been avoided in post-cognitivist discussions so far? Are there inherent tensions with fundamental tenets of the 4Es that explain this overlooking?

- Is linguistic relativity necessarily committed to an anti-realist conception of ontology? How does this relate to, for instance, the debates concerning realism and idealism in the enactive framework?

- Will it be enough to increase the ecological validity of psycholinguistic experiments to overcome the limitations of cognitivist methodology in the empirical study of linguistic relativity?

- Linguistic relativity, before being operationalized into a hypothesis, was, in the words of both Sapir and Whorf, more of a “principle”. Should it be first reinterpreted as such under post-cognitivist premises and, only after a sound theorical reframing, be operationalized again?

- How do contemporary “ecolinguistics” positions relate to post-cognitivism in philosophical psychology? Can linguistic relativity become a meeting ground for them? Can the notion of “affordance” possibly represent a key for empirical investigations that see languages as an ecological phenomenon?

- Is there a tension between embodiment and linguistic diversity as constitutive factors in cognition? Does the body act as a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural constraint on cognition? Does embodied cognition entail universalism?

INVITED CONTRIBUTORS:

• Ludger van Dijk & Giulia Di Rienzo (University of Antwerp)

• Nara M. Figueiredo (Federal University of Santa Maria) & Elena Cuffari (Franklin & Marshall College)

• Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen (University of Southern Denmark)

• Adam Głaz (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University of Lublin)

• Alexander V. Kravchenko (Baikal State University)

• Nancy Salay (Queen’s University) & Stephen J. Cowley (University of Southern Denmark)

Submission DEADLINE: Please submit your paper by August 1st, 2026. Should you not be able to meet this deadline, please contact the Lead Guest Editor Filippo Batisti, filippo.batisti@unive.it

https://link.springer.com/collections/ababdhaagi