Experimental Philosophy

SPP Deadline: This Monday

The deadline for submissions to the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology is coming up this Monday. In the past, the SPP has accepted lots and lots of papers in experimental philosophy, and I would strongly encourage readers of this blog to submit their work!

Temperament and Philosophy: Two New Papers

Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely have recently co-authored an interesting paper about the relationship between personality type and folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility.  More specifically, they claim that extraversion is correlated with compatibilist-friendly intuitions.  I have co-authored a commentary on their paper with Trevor Kvaran and Eddy Nahmias.  Since this is the first time that we discuss some of the results from our on-line survey from last summer (see here), readers might find this pair of papers interesting.

Download Extraversion and Compatibilism

Download Temperament and Philosophy

The Experimental Philosophy Wiki

The newly created Experimental Philosophy Wiki is now up and running! 

The main goal of the wiki is to have a central place where people involved with Experimental Philosophy can have access to X-Phi papers and keep track of a field which is growing very rapidly. The hope is to eventually include every paper in experimental philosophy (like a  more complete version of Joshua Knobe's current  experimental philosophy page).  The wiki will also allow for papers to be categorized and discussed.

So please join in! The only way will be able to make full use of the potential of this tool is if everyone is willing to add their own experimental philosophy papers (there is no other way for us to have access to all of them).  You should also feel free to add papers which have not yet been published.

If you have any questions or want to get even more invloved in the Experimental Philosophy Wiki, you can contact me here: philli@email.unc.edu

Susan Hurley Memorial Conference

A pretty star-studded line-up has accepted my invitation to speak in Susan's honour.  Speakers include:

• Andy Clark 
• Ruth Millikan
• Dan Dennett
• Alvin Goldman
• Jesse Prinz
• Kim Sterelny
• John Campbell
• Jose Bermudez

The Conference is called 'Minds Brains and Beyond - an International Conference in honour of Professor Susan Hurley', held at University of Bristol, UK, 20-22 March 2009.
Registration is now open. For registration and more information, go to the conference website here.

Doris and Nichols on Moral Psychology

John Doris just sent me a copy of a new paper he has co-authored with Shaun Nichols that will surely be of interest to the readers of this blog.  Here is how he explained the line of argument they develop:

We have just drafted a paper on the role of sociality in moral cognition.  This paper was inspired by the observation that, while experimental philosophers and cognitive scientists have made significant contributions to the understanding of human morality, there has been surprisingly little direct study of the relation between group process and moral cognition.  This oversight, we think, seriously impedes the understanding of how moral reasoning proceeds "in the wild." Our paper "Broadminded: Sociality and the Cognitive Science of Morality" attempts to increase attention to the social in moral psychology, and provoke more experimental work on group process in morality.  

The paper can be found here:

Download Doris&NicholsBroadXphi

Consciousness and Agency

In an earlier post, I mentioned that a lot of recent work in experimental philosophy seems to be moving toward a new view about the way people ordinarily attribute conscious states.  This view says that people have certain special criteria for determining that an entity is capable of phenomenal consciousness (as distinguished from other kinds of mental states) and that these criteria have something to do with whether or not the entity has a body.

As Adam points out in the comments there, Arico, Fiala, Goldberg & Nichols now have a new paper challenging this emerging view.  They suggest that people do not in fact have special criteria for phenomenal consciousness in particular.  Instead, people simply have general criteria for attributing AGENCY.  Then, once people have determined that an entity counts as an AGENT, they immediately attribute to it all of the various sorts of mental states they might attribute to a human being.

The paper itself includes not only a lot of complex theoretical argument but also an exciting new reaction time study that examines the speed at which subjects can decide whether a given entity is capable of having a given type of state.  In my view, this new methodology provides an extremely powerful way of getting at subjects' immediate intuitions about consciousness (even in cases where those immediate intuitions are then overruled by subsequent reflection). 

$15,000 Fellowships and Scholarships to M.A. program at Georgia State

...including one for experimental philosophy! (this student would be on our "neurophilosophy track" and work with me on some studies and papers; s/he would have a background in statistics or get one in the first year here).

Please let any relevant students know about these opportunities and/or post this flier:
Download Georgia State University - Fellowships and Scholarships

The Master's program of the Philosophy Department at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia is accepting applications from qualified students for two Neurophilosophy Fellowships, an Experimental Philosophy Scholarship, a Legal/Political Philosophy Scholarship, and a German Philosophy Scholarship.  Fellowships and Scholarships cover tuition, provide $15,000/year for living expenses for two years and up to $500/year for travel to conferences. Fellowships have no teaching duties.  Scholarships have no teaching duties in the first year but require teaching thereafter.

Application deadline: March 15, 2009.

Further information is available at our department's website: www.gsu.edu/philosophy.

Thanks, Eddy