Experimental Philosophy

Society for Philosophy of Agency

The new website for the recently formed Society for Philosophy of Agency is now up here.  The Society is now accepting applications for membership.  Membership is free and open to graduate students, professional philosophers, and researchers working on issues about human agency who work primarily in cognate fields (e.g., law, neuroscience, psychology, theology, etc.). 

All you need to do to apply for membership is send an email to <philosophyofagency[at]gmail.com> with your name, email address, and institutional affiliation (if applicable).  You will be added to the Society's email list.  Your information will not be shared with anyone. 

The Society's first event will be held in a group session meeting on Friday, April 6, 2012, at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA.  It will be a panel discussion on "The Current State and Future of Philosophical Research on Action and Agency" featuring Jeanette Kennett, Alfred Mele, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Eddy Nahmias, and Manuel Vargas.

 

Doctoral or PostDoc position of interest

Dr. Niki Pfeifer (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich) offers under the usual equal opportunity conditions one doctoral researcher position OR one early postdoctorial researcher position (i.e., if the PhD is obtained after January 1, 2011) to work in the intersection of psychology, philosophy and cognitive science (65%, TV-L 13, up to 3 years). In both cases, the (post)doctoral researcher will focus on empirical work (developing the research hypotheses, designing psychological experiments and running the data analysis) in the field of reasoning under uncertainty, focussing on conditionals.

One student assistant will support the (post-)doctoral researcher by helping with theconstruction of the experimental material, collection of the data and preparation of the data for analysis. Opportunities for the doctoral researcher to prepare a PhD thesis that is thematically located within the project will be provided. Working language is English or German.

The positions is vacant until filled. For an application send an email including the following items to niki.pfeifer@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

1. a letter of motivation
2. a curriculum vitae
3. a scan of the most recent academic degrees
4. evidence of English and mathematical skills (e.g., school/university grades)

 Selection criteria include
-) Proven experience in psychological experimentation and statistical data analysis (e.g., by empirical Master's or PhD thesis)
-) Academic excellence (publications are a plus)
-) Research ability and potential
-) Motivation
-) Knowledge of psychological experimentation and statistical data analysis are required
-) Knowledge of logic, probability, and/or programming are a plus
-) Two confidential letters of reference addressing the applicant's qualifications for doctoral research are required. These must be sent by the referees directly to me. 

Project details: http://www.pfeifer-research.de/spp.html

 

CFP: Computational Models of Mindreading

Hi everyone, I wanted to distribute another CFP on behalf of some friends for a special issue that looks to be of interest to lots of folks in this group! Enjoy,

Fiery

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Journal of COGNITIVE SYSTEMS RESEARCH

Call for Papers Special Issue Computational Models of Mindreading

special issue editors: Paul Bello (paul.bello@navy.mil) & Marcello Guarini (mguarini@uwindsor.ca)

Mindreading, or the ability to represent and reason about the mental states of other agents and oneself, is a pervasive part of cognition that has yet to be deeply explored from a computational perspective. As a fundamental enabler for language understanding, plan recognition, cooperation, competition and moral cognition, it follows that detailed models of mental state attributions are a prerequisite for the development of a more complete theory of the human mind. Current cognitive theories of mindreading are predominantly philosophical in nature, with empirical work seemingly unable to provide definitive answers as to which framework might be the most defensible. Now that researchers have started to build cognitive models of mental-state reasoning, it is hoped that computational considerations may weigh in on the matter of how best to understand mindreading. This special issue seeks to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between computational cognitive modelers, philosophers, and psychologists studying the nature and operation of the human capacity to mindread. The emphasis of the issue will be placed on computational models and how they both inform and are informed by work in other disciplines.

Papers on mindreading are invited from AI, cognitive, social and developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of psychology and other related disciplines.
A non-exclusive set of possible topics (among other possibilities) are:
• Computational representations of mental states
• Cognitive models of the attribution process, including attribution errors.
• Developmental models of mindreading, including both spontaneous elicitation and verbally presented mindreading tasks.
• Imagination as it relates to mindreading
• Introspection and its relationship to 3rd-person mental-state attribution
• Propositional attitude reports
• Philosophical foundations, including the theory/simulation debate and the debate over the domain-specificity of the human mindreading capacity.
• Computational/formal treatments of theory-driven, simulation-oriented, modular, hybrid, or other accounts of mindreading.
• Mental state reasoning in abduction and plan-recognition.
• Mindreading and moral, legal or other forms of normative cognition

Please submit papers electronically, in a PostScript or PDF form, by June 1st 2012, to the editors listed above. See http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/~rsun/journal.html for submission details. For sample issues of JCSR and recent tables of content, see http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/cogsys

CFA: Intuitions, Experiments and Philosophy

3rd Workshop of the Experimental Philosophy Group UK,

8-9th September 2012, University of Nottingham

Deadline for Submission: 7^th July 2012

Experimental Philosophy Group UK invites the submission of 500-word abstracts for 45-minute presentations or poster presentations on the subject of ‘Intuitions, Experiments and Philosophy’ for their upcoming workshop.  Keynote presentations will be given by Shaun Nichols (University of Arizona) and Simone Schnall (University of Cambridge).

The following is a list of suggested types of content and possible topics:

• Presentations of new experimental work
• Non-experimental papers
• The role/relevance of empirical findings in philosophy
• The role/relevance of intuition in philosophy
• The empirical investigation of intuitions
• Proposals for new experimental work
• Expert intuitions
• The nature of philosophical intuition
• Philosophical implications of gender, cultural or other demographic difference in intuition
• Methodological issues raised by experimental philosophy

All high-quality submissions considered. Submissions encouraged from all levels of academia. 500-word abstracts to be sent as PDF or Word documents to experimentalphilosophyuk@gmail.com by 7th July 2012. Subject line of email should read “SUBMISSION [YOUR NAME]”. In the body of the email please state your name, affiliation and in which category (presentation or poster) you wish your submission to be considered.  Submissions for presentations that are unsuccessful will be automatically considered for poster presentation. Presenters should be prepared to obtain funding from their home department, or to fund themselves.

Experimental Philosophy Group UK aims to provide a forum for UK-based researchers from all disciplines who are engaged in or interested in the investigation of philosophical topics using empirical methods.  This workshop will have a focus upon (i) providing a platform for UK-based experimental philosophers, (ii) providing a forum for constructive discussion and collaboration to help and encourage new experimental work, (iii) encouraging constructive debate about the relevance of empirical findings (particularly those concerning intuitions) to issues in philosophical methodology.

Workshop Organisers: Bryony Pierce (Bristol), Robin Scaife (Sheffield) and James Andow (Nottingham)

https://sites.google.com/site/experimentalphilosophygroupuk/

 

Response to Devitt and to Ichikawa, Maitra, and Weatherson

Our response is on line on PPR's website.

NEH Institute in Experimental Philosophy, Summer 2012

Shaun Nichols and I are happy to be reprising the NEH Summer Institute in Experimental Philosophy this July in Tucson.  Details are here: 

http://epi.arizona.edu/ 

Applications are due March 1st.  

Institutes are designed for teachers of American undergraduate students.  Because of recent changes to the program, now up to three spaces may be awarded to graduate students in the humanities.

We hope you'll consider applying!

Carruthers is not Impressed by Experimental Philosophy

Carruthers is interviewed in 3am:

"It requires a long apprenticeship to design and implement experiments effectively. While there has been some good work done by people in the experimental philosophy movement, whenever I talk to psychologists about this stuff I find myself embarrassed for my discipline by their reactions."

Perhaps Peter should talk to a broader range of psychologists.

CFP: 2012 Meeting of SPP, Boulder CO

Hi everyone, just wanted to send out a quick reminder about the upcoming submission deadline for the annual meeting of the Society for Philosphy and Psychology, June 21-23 in Boulder, CO.   Download a PDF copy here.

 

Hope to see you there!

 

Fiery

 

CFP: Consciousness and Moral Cognition

Adam Waytz and I are guest editing a special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology on consciousness attribution in moral cognition. As a recent post on this blog notes, "two favorite topics of X-Phi are morality and how we perceive the minds of others," so I hope readers of this blog (and experimental philosophers in general) will consider submitting. Guest authors include: Kurt Gray (Maryland), Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) and Justin Sytsma (East Tennessee State), and  Anthony I. Jack (Case Western Reserve) and Philip Robbins (Missouri). 

Submissions are due March 31, 2011.

The full CFP, including relevant dates and submission details, is available here. 

Here is an abbreviated CFP:  When people regard other entities as objects of ethical concern whose interests must be taken into account in moral deliberations, does the attribution of consciousness to these entities play an essential role in the process? In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have begun to sketch limited answers to this general question. However, much progress remains to be made. We invite contributions to a special issue of The Review of Philosophy and Psychology on the role of consciousness attribution in moral cognition from researchers working in fields including developmental, evolutionary, perceptual, and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy.

Neuroscience Boot Camp

Penn's Center for Neuroscience & Society--one of the world's leading neuroethics institutes--is once again hosting its annual Neuroscience Boot Camp.  Here is some salient information:

Why?

Neuroscience is increasingly relevant to a number of professions and academic disciplines beyond its traditional medical applications. Lawyers, educators, economists and businesspeople, as well as scholars of sociology, philosophy, applied ethics and policy, are incorporating the concepts and methods of neuroscience into their work. Indeed, for any field in which it is important to understand, predict or influence human behavior, neuroscience will play an increasing role. The Penn Neuroscience Boot Camp is designed to give participants a basic foundation in cognitive and affective neuroscience and to equip them to be informed consumers of neuroscience research.

What?

Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function.

Each lecture will be followed by extensive Q&A. Break-out groups will allow participants to delve more deeply into topics of relevance to their fields. Laboratory visits will include trips to an MRI scanner, an EEG/ERP lab, and a transcranial magnetic stimulation lab. Participants will also have access to an extensive online library of copyrighted materials, including classic and review articles and textbook chapters in cognitive and affective neuroscience.

Who?

College and university faculty, professionals in journalism, law, government and advanced graduate students are encouraged to apply. The only prerequisites are a grasp of basic statistics and at least a dim recollection of high school biology and physics. (A short set of readings will be made available prior to the Boot Camp to remind you about the essentials.)

 

Epistemic Intuitions in Fake-Barn Thought Experiments

David Colaço, Wes Buckwalter and I have recently posted a paper on SSRN reporting a surprising age effect in “fake-barn” style thought experiments.  Here’s the Abstract:

In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether non-philosophers share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-barn cases do count as knowledge is negatively correlated with age; older participants are less likely than younger participants to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases. We also found that increasing the number of defeaters (fakes) does not decrease the inclination to attribute knowledge.

The paper can be downloaded at  http://ssrn.com/abstract=1973351 . 

Wes and I have also posted a substantially revised version of our “Gender and Philosophical Intuition” paper.  It can be downloaded here:  http://ssrn.com/abstract=1966324  

The Essence of Morality is Mind Perception

Two favorite topics of X-Phi are morality and how we perceive the minds of others.  In a recent paper, Liane Young, Adam Waytz and I argue that the very essence of moral judgment is mind perception.   Briefly, we outline the idea that people have a psychological prototype of morality consisting of a moral dyad of two perceived minds - an agent and a patient (i.e., interpersonal harm).   Grounding morality in harm is a bit contentious given recent research, but you can be the judge of whether we've made a good argument for it.

We've solicited a number of official commentaries in Psychological Inquiry, but we'd love to get some more informal feedback.  Here's the paper.  And here - just as a teaser - is the first figure.

Joshua Knobe Interview at 3:AM Magazine

A funky little piece by Richard Marshall, if y'all haven't already noticed.

Gender Differences and Ordinary "Truth"

Suppose one asserts that there is a cat on the mat, when--in fact--there is a cat on the mat.  Is the accuracy of this assertion sufficient for truth?  

In a recent study inspired by Arne Naess’ 1938 ("Truth" as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers) project, Bob Barnard and I asked respondents about their conception of truth.  Naess' work suggested that there may be significant differences in how men and women think about truth.  We found that men and women differ with respect to the degree to which accurate description or representation is judged sufficient for truth.  In at least some cases, men see accurate representation as a more important component of truth than do women.  In light of these findings we further suggest that men, more than women, would be apt to accept a version of the truth principle often known as "Aristotle’s dictum":

To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1011b25)

That these results suggest a gender difference in how a core philosophical concept is characterized by respondents is especially intriguing in light of recent work by Buckwalter and Stich (here), which contends that men and women systematically differ in the intuitions they report in response to canonical philosophical thought experiments.   We would like to present our empirical findings that seem to show that although the conception of truth outlined by Aristotle’s dictum may seem intuitive to the philosopher (Cf. philpapers study here), the data suggest that something else may be at work in the folk conception of truth.   (This study follows up on a related historical project about the relationship between Naess and Tarski (see discussion below), a draft of which is available by emailing one of us, either Joe at oohlah at mac dot com or Bob at rwbjr at olemiss dot edu.) 

Chandra Sripada and Jason Stanley on Intuitions about Knowledge

Philosophers have often claimed that people are less inclined to attribute knowledge in cases where the stakes are high than in cases where the stakes are low, and there is a complex and sophisticated debate in the epistemology literature about the philosophical implications of this pattern in people's intuitions.

Unfortunately, when experimental philosophers went out and tested the exact cases that had appeared in the philosophical literature, what they found again and again was that there simply wasn't any effect (see here, here, here, here and here; for an opposing perspective, see here).  People were not substantially less inclined to ascribe knowledge in cases with high stakes than they were in cases with low stakes.  This discovery threatened to undermine the whole philosophical debate.  

In an exciting new development, Sripada and Stanley have now posted a new paper over at Certain Doubts in which they present a series of experimental studies showing that stakes actually do impact knowledge ascriptions.  I'd love to hear what people here think about their findings!

[Comments closed here to allow for discussion at Certain Doubts.]

How People Think About Meeting Needs

I've just posted a draft paper on how people think about meeting needs co-written with Nathan Lubchenco on my website here: How People Think About Meeting Need. Comments would be lovely.

The abstract is below:

This paper tries to determine how people think about meeting needs in a way that can inform both theory and practice. It uses data gathered from Kiva, an online, non-profit, organization that allows individuals to help other individuals in need to isolate intuitions that people find broadly compelling. The central result of the paper is that people accept a sufficiency principle for distributing limited resources to people in need. A sufficiency principle of distribution holds that it is better to help those below some (e.g. welfare,) threshold than those above this threshold. This paper’s results may be useful for engaging with and evaluating philosophical theories about how people think about meeting needs. Additionally, this paper’s methodology may have advantages over the survey techniques of traditional experimental philosophy, or at least encourage methodological reflection over the range of options available.

You can download the paper here and here.

Nahmias, Neuroscience, and Free Will in the NYT

Congrats to our own Eddy Nahmias, who has an op-ed on neuroscience and free will in today's NYT Opinionator/The Stone entitled, "Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?"   

Call for Paper: Midwest Empirical and Theoretical Association for Philosophical Researc

Jonathan Livengood (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) has the following cfp which should be of interest:

META is a bi-monthly meeting held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where researchers present high quality empirical and  theoretical work in philosophy, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. 

Call for Papers 

We are pleased to announce that we are now accepting submissions for our bi-monthly META meetings for the Spring of 2012. We welcome papers in experimental and metaphilosophy, philosophy of science, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Papers should not exceed 3,500 words in length, excluding footnotes and bibliography, and should be suitable for a 30 minute presentation. The paper should be accompanied by an abstract and prepared for blind-review. 

The due date to present a paper at META is December 15th, 2011. 

Submissions should be sent to illinoismphil@gmail.com 

 

Response to Sripada et al.

We are grateful for Sripada and colleagues' very useful and interesting response, which identifies some mistakes in our analyses.

On the other hand, their response mistakenly asserts that the statistical issues they examine are “the basis” of our arguments. In fact, many of our key claims do not depend on these issues and are left untouched. 

Our full response is here.

While I will leave the comments open, it is unclear whether we will have the time to address responses, criticisms, etc. 

A Reply to Rose, Livengood, Sytsma, and Machery

Sara Konrath and I recently published a paper investigating the Knobe effect using an analysis method called structural equation modeling. The paper came out in Mind and Language and is available here. A really nice summary of the methods and findings from our study is available here.

David Rose, Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma, and Edouard Machery wrote a critique that they posted on this blog earlier, and reposted today. It is available here. Their critique is quite strongly worded, and they claim repeatedly in their paper that ‘Sripada and Konrath’s own data undermines their model’.

Rose et al’s claim is very surprising because 1) the methods Sara and I use are completely standard in psychology – the methods we used are the basis of literally thousands of studies published in major journals such as Psychological Science, JPSP, etc…; and 2) we executed these standard analysis methods without errors, as Rose et al themselves have noted. How can it be that standard analysis methods strongly support our model, yet Rose et al conclude that the data in fact undermines our model?

To address this puzzle, I teamed up with a group of Michigan faculty that includes a social psychologist, two statisticians, one person who is a mathematical psychologist and statistician, and a computer specialist. We sought to examine Rose et al’s statistical tests in greater detail.

In short, our conclusion is that the statistical tests used by Rose et al are clearly invalid, and yield demonstrably false conclusions. There were three main statistical tests used by Rose et al in their critique, and that form the backbone of the three main sections of their paper. These tests were put forward by Rose et al, but are not accepted in the structural equation modeling field. These tests superficially look like accepted tests and this probably explains why Rose et al thought the tests were legitimate to use. But the tests are in fact statistically invalid. We demonstrate this by means of detailed theoretical analyses and Monte Carlo simulations.

Our report is available here. The paper is written in a non-technical style, and I hope that people will take the time to read this.