Third Project Meeting in Karlsruhe

The third MoWiKo project meeting took place in the inspiring atmosphere of Karl9 – Science Bar for Technology and Society. The agenda included initial results and plans for further collaboration. After about one and a half of the three project years, we were able to discuss our findings so far and plan further collaboration together.

The communication science team provided insight into the findings of a representative survey on the energy transition and addressed the question of how moral convictions and knowledge about the energy transition are related.

The linguistics subproject presented the results of an analysis of German media headlines on the topic of artificial intelligence and a pilot study on moralizing speech acts. In order to reflect on possibilities for corpus creation and to find out which method is best suited for creating a thematic corpus, the linguistics team submitted a paper evaluating various methods and metrics. In addition, Janine Dengler's dissertation project was presented, which combines corpus and psycholinguistic studies to investigate which linguistic structures have a moralizing effect.

The philosophy team presented a coding scheme for recording forms of moralization in the discourse on genetic engineering. The descriptive taxonomy of forms of moralization is supplemented by a normative assessment scheme, which is currently being worked on.

A central topic was the concrete planning of the output – both within the disciplines and in interdisciplinary exchange. In doing so, we consciously take into account the dynamics of the research process and flexibly integrate new findings into our planning.

We look forward to the next steps—with curiosity, a critical eye, and a healthy dose of interdisciplinary team spirit.

Anna Klassen