Delinquent Blogger

Sorry the postings have been so few and far between lately.  There are several explanations, some personal (e.g., holidays, job hunting, dissertation writing, etc.) and others not so personal (e.g., experimental philosophy is a pretty small--not to mention fairly nascent--sub-field of philosophy,  I have been unable to get enough people to contribute, too few psychologists and legal scholars post and/or comment, etc.).  In any event, I will be posting a few things over the next few days.  Hopefully, others will follow suit.  Happy New Year to everyone.  Thanks for coming by.

Comments

[Al Mele]

I'm a delinquent blogger too. Here's a question about table turning. Consider the following from Daniel Wegner's 2002 book: "a group of people sit gathered around a table, all with their hands on its surface. If they are convinced that the table might move as the result of spirit intervention . . . and sit patiently waiting for such movement, it is often found that the table does start to move . . . . Carpenter observed that 'all this is done, not merely without the least consciousness on the part of the performers that they are exercising any force of their own, but for the most part under the full conviction that they are not' " (p. 7).

Naturally, the people gathered at the table are moving it. But, apparently, at least some of them are contributing to its motion without having any idea that this is so. Imagine that one of them, Tab, begins to feel some clockwise motion of the table. His hands move in the direction of the motion, as he notices, and he thinks he is merely allowing them to be dragged along by the table. In fact, however, he is pushing the table in that direction ever so slightly. Is Tab *intentionally* pushing the table along?