Experimental Philosophy

Experimental Philosophy: Criticisms and Responses

A forthcoming issue of Philosophical Explorations is not only going to feature Antti Kauppinen's "The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy" (which has been posted here before), but it will also include replies by both Joshua Knobe--"Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance"--and Eddy Nahmias and me--"The Past and Future of Experimental Philosophy."  Since someone over at Garden of Forking Paths recently asked why philosophers ought to care about "unreflective opinions," I thought it might be helpful to kick off yet another round of meta-philosophical debate here on the x-phi blog!

Here are drafts of the three papers:
Download The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Experimental_Philosophy.pdf
Download the_past_and_future_of_experimental_philosophy_final.pdf
Download phil-significance.pdf

Stich Wins the Jean-Nicod Prize

Our very own Stephen Stich--one of the great patriarchs of experimental philosophy!--has been awarded the prestigious Jean-Nicod Award.  Please join me in congratulating him for having received this great honor!  It is certainly well-deserved.

OPC: The Sequel

As some of you may already know, last May we held the first On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC)--which included over thirty papers and sixty invited participants and received 40,000 visits from the global philosophical community.  Well, we are now pleased to announce the sequel--OPC2--which will be hosted on this new blog.   This year's tentative line-up is as follows:

Week One--May 14th through 20th (2007):

1. Juan Comesaña (University of Wisconsin--Madison), "Knowledge and Subjunctive Conditionals," w/ commentary by John Greco (St. Louis University) and Tim Black (Cal State--Northridge).

2. John Martin Fischer (University of California--Riverside), "The Direct Argument," w/ commentary by Randolph Clarke (Florida State University) and David Widerker (Bar-Ilan Univesity).

3. Caspar Hare (MIT),"Morphing and Aggregation," w/ commentary by Peter Graham (UMass--Amherst).

4. Shaun Nichols (University of Arizona) “The Rise of Compatibilism: A Case Study in the Quantitative History of Philosophy," w/ commentary by Eric Schwitzgebel (University of California--Riverside), and Kelby Mason (Rutgers University--New Brunswick).

5. **Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University--New Brunswick) "Epistemic Normativity" w/ commentary by Ram Neta (University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill), and Duncan Pritchard (University of Stirling).

6. Meredith Williams (Johns Hopkins University), "Wittgenstein and the Paradox of Thought," w/ commentary by Hans-Johann Glock (University of Zurich), and David Stern (University of Iowa).

Week Two--May 21st through 27th (2007):    

1. Jonathan Dancy (University of Texas--Austin), "Practical Reasoning and Inference," w/ commentary by Joseph Raz (Columbia/Oxford), and Candace Vogler (University of Chicago).

2. Delia Graff Fara (Princeton). Title and commentators TBA.

3. **Jeff McMahan (Rutgers University--New Brunswick), "The Pacifist Challenge."  Commentators TBA.

4. Derk Pereboom (Cornell), "A Compatibilist Account of the Beliefs Required for Deliberation," w/ commentary by Joseph Campbell (Washington State University), and Dana Nelkin (University of California--San Diego).

5. Adina Roskies (Dartmouth). Title and commentators TBA.

6. Gillian Russell (Washington University - St. Louis), "One True Logic?" w/ commentary by JC Beall (University of Connecticut), and Jonathan McKeown-Green (University of Auckland)

**=keynote address

OPC 2 will officially last two weeks this year-although you are obviously welcome to continue commenting in the threads so long as others are willing! Some of the threads last year were very active--hopefully, even more people will take part this year.  After all, that is one of the primary benefits of the on-line format.  It enables the participants to get a lot of constructive feedback on their work in a short amount of time.  Please do your part and play along.

For now, we just want to welcome you once again to this year's OPC.  We hope to "see" you in the comment threads come May!  Keep in mind that the more everyone in the broader philosophical community puts into the conference, the more everyone gets out of it. So, we hope you will watch and listen to a couple of interesting philosophy talks, download and read some engaging papers, peruse the invited commentary, and contribute to the unfolding philosophical dialog that this conference is designed to facilitate.   

It looks like I was wrong

It is now widely agreed that people's moral judgments have some impact on their intuitions about whether a behavior was performed intentionally, but there has been considerable disagreement about precisely what sort of moral judgment is having an impact here.  Is it a judgment about whether the behavior itself was morally bad?  Or about whether the agent was blameworthy?  Or about whether it was wrong for the agent to perform the action? 

In earlier work, I suggested that the relevant moral judgment was a judgment as to whether the action itself was a bad one.  This hypothesis has been put to the test in a number of subsequent experiments, and I am sorry to say that the results overwhelmingly indicate that the hypothesis is false.  Indeed, my beloved hypothesis has been falsified independently in experimental work by Cushman, Machery, Nichols, Phelan & Sarkissian, Pizarro et al., Sinnott-Armstrong et al., and Wright & Bengson.   (Unfortunately, not all of the papers are available on the web.)

But it seems to me that these studies, taken collectively, also show something of deeper importance.  It's not just that one particular hypothesis turned out to be incorrect; it's that it hasn't been possible to identify any conscious moral judgment that can explain the full range of results.  That is, it doesn't seem possible to point to some specific type of conscious moral judgment and say, 'This particular type of moral judgment explains the full range of results we have amassed thus far.' 

I now think that the best way to understand these phenomena is to posit non-conscious moral judgments.  The basic process would then go something like this: As soon we encounter a behavior, we make an automatic and extremely swift moral judgment that remains entirely shielded off from consciousness.  It is this non-conscious moral judgment that influences intuitions about intentional action.  Of course, a person can then reflect and arrive at a conscious moral judgment after further thought, but this conscious moral judgment will not affect intuitions about intentional action; those intuitions will be determined entirely by the immediate, automatic non-conscious judgment.  (For a more detailed discussion, see the later sections of this new paper.)

In any case, whether or not you decide to read the full paper, I would love to hear your thoughts on these matters.  Does the new hypothesis look like a promising one?

Causation Survey at TAR

I just noticed that Brian Weatherson recently ran an on-line survey about causation over at TAR.  I thought perhaps some of the readers of this blog might want to participate in the unfolding discussion.

Neurolaw in The NY Times

I thought some of you might be interested in this article from The NY Times--which is called, "The Brain on the Stand."  Happy reading!

New Additions...

I wanted to welcome yet two more people to the blog.  The first is Marica Bernstein--the scientist responsible for this interesting paper (and subsequent discussion).  The second is Liane Young--who is a grad student in Marc Hauser's Cognitive Evolution Lab at Harvard.  I am delighted to have them both on board!

A scientist looks at x-phi (with, er, mixed results)

The biologist Marica Bernstein recently presented a paper at the Mid-South Philosophy Conference in which she took a random survey of papers in x-phi, and evaluated how well we as a group are doing on which of a large number of basic methodological criteria.  And how did we do?  Well, you can see for yourself, but the short answer is: not so hot, really.

I should emphasize that Marica's paper is intended very much as a friendly critique.  She's not at all saying that philosophers shouldn't do experiments; she's just trying to argue that we should do experiments better.  (Though at least some of us -- Stotz & Griffiths in particular -- are already doing them very well, on her view.)