Experimental Philosophy

CFP

Hi fellow experimentalist,

The 2nd annual Interdisciplinary Approaches to Philosophical Issues Conference is currently accepting submissions. This year's theme is perception, action, and consciousness. Submissions that broadly meet any of these categories are encouraged. For the CFP, see here.

Last year's meeting was well attended by the X-Phi community, and we are hoping for another solid turnout.

This year's keynote speaker is Marcel Kinsbourne.

We are also hosting a series of special invited speakers that will include John Bickle, Andrea Scarantino, and Daniel Weiskopf.

The conference will be held on Sept. 25 & 26 at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, AL.

Sad News...

Steve Stitch asked me to pass along the following:

There is some sad news.  Nicola Knight, a gifted young researcher who worked at the intersection of anthropology, psychology and philosophy, died of a heart attack on June 9, at the age of 33.  Nicola had done collaborative work with Justin Barrett, Scott Atran, Dick Nisbett and others.  His groundbreaking study of the patterns of justification that people offer for their moral judgments is currently under review.  There is a brief memorial notice by Dan Sperber online here.

 

What Situationist Experiments Show

Long time reader; first time poster.   I'm breaking my silence because we've just finished a paper on virtue ethics and the person-situation debate that might be of interest to some X-Philes.  There aren't many philosophers (or psychologists for that matter) who would be interested in a paper about the true meaning of the correlation coefficient and how it relates to the person-situation debate.  But, given the discussion here, I'm guessing that some of you might be.

Here are the details.

What Situationist Experiments Show.

John Campbell, Sarah Meerschaert, Anthony Chemero

Abstract:  Recent critiques of virtue ethics presume that the situationist side is the clear winner in the person-situation debate in psychology. This widely shared presumption is based on some striking findings on the power of situations to influence behavior. However, careful consideration of the empirical evidence and, especially, the nature of correlation coefficients shows that personality traits also account for a large proportion of the variability in human behavior. So the presumed victory for the situationist side is premature at best.

http://edisk.fandm.edu/tony.chemero/campcoughchemsubmit.pdf

Comments most appreciated.

cheers, tony

X-phi on the BBC

The BBC programme Analysis has a show on moral x-phi this Sunday. But the pre-publicity is not very encouraging.

Thought Experiments

Studies have shown that if the smell of fresh bread is in the air we are far more generous than otherwise. In the past few years, a fascinating range of experiments has begun to shed light on the moral choices humans make. Philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards asks whether the results can tell us not just how we tend to behave, but how we should behave.

You can find the show at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00l55xp and there is a podcast

Conference on Conditionals

Thanks to Richard Dietz for sending me the following conference announcement:

Conditionals and Conditionalization Conference
Formal Epistemology Project (FEP), Centre for Logic and Analytic Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, Sept 4-6, 2009
Organizers: Richard Dietz and Igor Douven

While it strikes most as obvious that there exist close conceptual connections between conditionals and conditionalization, it is far less obvious what these connections precisely are. The aim of the workshop is to investigate these connections from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on recent work in philosophy and experimental psychology. The time is ripe for such an approach, given that both linguists and psychologists working on conditionals are increasingly turning to the probabilistic theories of conditionals that philosophers have been developing over the past forty years or so. On the other hand, various philosophical claims have been made about conditionals – in particular concerning their semantics and pragmatics – apparently on no other basis than the linguistic intuitions of the philosophers making these claims. It would be interesting, and from a methodological perspective desirable, to subject these claims to more rigorous testing, which is where experimental psychologists could help (and, to some extent, have already helped).

Speakers:

Horacio Arlo-Costa (Carnegie Mellon)
Jean-François Bonnefon (Toulouse)
Richard Bradley (LSE)
John Cantwell (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm)
Richard Dietz (Leuven)
Igor Douven (Leuven)
Shira Elqayam (De Monfort University, Leicester)
David Etlin (Leuven)

Alan Hájek (ANU)

James Hawthorne (Oklahoma)

Janneke Huitink (Frankfurt/M.)

Peter Milne (Stirling)

David Over (Durham)

Niki Pfeifer (Salzburg)

Gerhard Schurz (Duesseldorf)

Sara Verbrugge (Leuven)

Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto)


There is no registration fee. However, if you would like to attend talks, lunches and/or dinners, please send an email to richard.dietz@hiw.kuleuven.be by August 15 at the latest.

Further particulars will be circulated nearer the time. For further information, please contact Richard Dietz under the above email address.

Hopefully, some of the readers of this blog can make it.  If so, please post something afterwards to let us know how it went!

New Philosophy of Science Journal

Some readers of this blog may be interested by this new journal:

The European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) has signed a contract with Springer concerning the establishment of a new journal: the European Journal for Philosophy of Science (EJPS). The Editorial Team is a group of excellent philosophers of science with a variety of backgrounds and fields of expertise. The Editor-in-Chief is Carl Hoefer (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain) and the deputy editor is Mauro Dorato (University of Rome III, Italy). Franz Huber (Konstanz, Germany) Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh, USA), Michela Massimi (London, UK), Samir Okasha (Bristol, UK) and Jesús Zamora (UNED, Spain) are Associate Editors. The Editorial Team will be assisted in its work by an Editorial Board of highly reputed philosophers of science from around the world.

EJPS is the official journal of EPSA and will appear three times a year, beginning in January 2011. EJPS will aim to publish first-rate research in all areas of philosophy of science. Information concerning submissions to EJPS will be announced in the forthcoming weeks by the Editorial Team.

EJPS will be publishing (among other things) articles in the philosophy of psychology, cognitive science, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.

X-phi on Twitter

X-phi twits may be interested in the x-phi Twitter stream.

Are Ethicists Any More Responsive to Undergraduate Emails Than Are Other Professors?

Short answer: no.

More details here at The Splintered Mind.

Alternatives to the Burning Armchair

suggested by Tamler Sommers over at The Splintered Mind.

Do Intuitions about Reference Really Vary across Cultures?

In an intriguing paper ("Are Cantonese Speakers Really Descriptivist?"), Barry Lam (Vassar, philosophy) challenges the claim that intuitions about reference in Kripke's Gödel case vary across cultures. He reports several studies As he puts it,

Native Cantonese-speaking immigrants from a Cantonese diaspora in Southern California do not have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names when presented with a Cantonese story and Cantonese questions about reference and truth-value.

This is an interesting and puzzling result. In recent work with Max Deutsch and Cathy Carroll, Justin Sytsma and I have replicated our original findings (and extended them) with vignettes written in Hong-Kong subjects' native language. 

So, what's going on?

Edouard

Experimental Logic

Consider the sentence: 

(1) The circle is near the square, and it isn't near the square.

This sentence appears to be a contradiction, and it therefore seems that defenders of classical logic would have to say that it was false. However, there are other logics -- Graham Priest's dialetheist logic LP, for example -- in which sentences like this one can turn out to be true. 

A question now arises as to what ordinary folks think of sentences like (1). Do people take the apparently classical view that such sentences have to be false, or do they think that sentences like (1) can actually turn out to be true? 

In a surprising new paper, David Ripley shows that people are actually extremely willing to express agreement with apparently contradictory sentences like this one. In cases at the vague borderline between 'near' and 'not near,' people felt that it was perfectly acceptable to consider an object 'both near and not near.' In fact, they were just as willing to say that an object was 'both near and not near' as they were to say that it was 'neither near nor not near.' 

This is one of the first studies to systematically examine people's ordinary intuitions about the status of contradictions, and so far, it is looking like people think that contradictions can actually be true!

intuitions & curve-fitting

From a very interesting post at Overcoming Bias:

In the ordinary practice of fitting a curve to a set of data points, the more noise one expects in the data, the simpler a curve one fits to that data.  Similarly, when fitting moral principles to the data of our moral intuitions, the more noise we expect in those intuitions, the simpler a set of principles we should use to fit those intuitions....

The fact that our moral intuitions depend greatly on how situations are framed, differ greatly across individuals within a culture, and vary greatly across cultures, suggests lots of noise in our moral intuitions.  The fact that moral philosophers don’t much trust the intuitions of non-moral-philosophers shows they agree error rates are high.  So I wonder: what moral beliefs should we hold in the limit of expecting very large errors in our moral intuitions?

The author, Robin Hanson, uses this idea to make a pretty radical argument in moral philosophy, but the question posed there is of much more general interest and relevance than that one argument, I think.

Sommers at The Splintered Mind

I thought some of the readers of this blog might like to know that Tamler Sommers has some interesting posts up as a guest blogger over at Eric's blog The Splintered Mind.  So, check it out!

experimental philosophy & philosophy of science at Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science

Karola Stotz organized a panel at the PSA a couple of years ago, on the connections between x-phi and the philosophy of science, and she has more recently gotten most of the papers from it placed in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science.  They are now available online:

Stotz, "Philosophy in the trenches: from naturalized to experimental philosophy (of science)" [this is an introduction to the other three articles]

Weinberg and Crowley, "The x-phi(les): unusual insights into the nature of inquiry"

Stotz, "Experimental philosophy of biology: notes from the field"

Knobe, "Folk judgments about causation"

Filosofia Experimental

I just wanted to welcome our two newest contributors--Carlos Mauros and Susana Cadilha--to the blog and post a link to the exciting blog they have recently launched called Filosofia Experimental.  Here is how Carlos explained the project to me:

We are members of a research group in philosophy named MLAG –Mind Language and Action Group (http://web2.letras.up.pt/ifilosofia/mc/mlag ) from the University of Porto, Portugal. More specifically we are the coordinators of a MLAG project entitled Action, Agency and Rationality. We are very interested in the X-Phi movement and we are also working in some experiments on akrasia and decision. Our intention is to diffuse and discuss experimental philosophy across the Portuguese-speaking countries and in order to do that we have created a blog, in Portuguese, through which we expect to explain what experimental philosophy is, and what is its function and objectives, to state the discussions around it, and to announce the most recent publications on the matter.

Obviously, this is a really exciting development for the field.  Now, if only I spoke Portuguese....

On the Burning Armchair

Soon-to-be-Jaded Dissertator (STBJD), over at The Philosophy Smoker, recently posted about the burning armchair (which has become something of a logo and anthem for X-phiers) and the tension that it and similar things can create. It's an interesting issue. STBJD ultimately concludes that the burning armchair shouldn't pose a problem. It's probably right that it shouldn't. But I wonder whether it does give the wrong impression to many people and whether that should be taken into account.

UNM fMRI Crash Course

I thought I would share the following information for those of you who might be interested.  I am already enrolled, so it would be great if some other x-philes were there to play along:

THE MRN fMRI COURSE:  The Mind Research Network and the University of New Mexico are pleased to announce the next upcoming fMRI Image Acquisition and Analysis course to be held June 15th-17th, 2008 at the Mind Research Network on the campus of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM. The course will include overview of both SPM2 and SPM5.  The course faculty include: Kent Kiehl (The Mind Research Network and the University of New Mexico), Vince Calhoun (The Mind Research Network and the University of New Mexico),  and Tor Wager (Columbia University, NY).  The course will cover experimental design, image acquisition, introductory MR physics, optimized image processing, statistical analysis (i.e., SPM2/5 with General Linear Model and Statistical Nonparametric Mapping (SnPM)) and Independent Component Analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. The course is designed for fMRI researchers who range from beginning to intermediate skill levels. The course will be small, having only 30-40 students. There will be many opportunities to work closely with the faculty.   Students will be trained to analyze example data on their laptops in SPM2, SPM5, GIFT (ICA toolbox), and related toolboxes.  Please visit http://www.mrn.org/courses/the-mrn-fmri-course.html for more course and registration information.

quote of the day

"Many philosophers in epistemology seem to suppose that they own the rights to usage of the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief.’ Such philosophers are vastly outnumbered by ordinary people who are not impressed by claims to trademark these terms."

--Russell Hardin, How Do You Know?: The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge (Princeton UP)

Fisher's Exact Test

I recently noticed that in Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich's "Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions," they used Fisher's Exact Test to get their p value.  Having looked at some of the stuff on FET I was curious what people thought about using this test when analyzing data.  Perhaps the best part about it--at least compared to running chi squared tests on MS Excell!--is that there are plenty of readily available and free on-line programs such as this one.  Now, I am aware that FET is best when the sample size is relatively small, but it would be nice if one of our readers could explain when it ceases to be appropriate to analyze the kind of data we collect concerning folk intuitions, etc.  I would also be happy to hear more in general about the benefits and costs associated with using the two-tailed p value of FET to show significance.  I, for one, am surprised it seems to be used so infrequently by experimental philosophers.  Since I am tempted to start using FET rather than CHI SQ when my sample size is less than 100, I would like to hear from others who know far more about data analysis than I do.  Thanks in advance for your input! 

Buffalo All X-Phi Weekend--Oct. 2nd & 3rd, 2009

The University at Buffalo Experimental Epistemology Research Group is pleased to announce the Buffalo All X-Phi Weekend, which will take place Oct. 2nd & 3rd, 2009.

Fri., Oct. 2nd, will be a Graduate X-Phi Conference, featuring Stephen Stich (Rutgers) as the keynote speaker. A Call for Papers can be found here. Submissions from graduate students are currently being accepted until Aug. 15, 2009.

Sat., Oct. 3rd, will be an Experimental Epistemology Workshop, featuring James Beebe, Michael Bishop, Ram Neta, Shaun Nichols and Jonathan Weinberg as speakers.

Further details about the Buffalo All X-Phi Weekend will be available at http://eerg.buffalo.edu/.