Experimental Philosophy

Philosopher's Annual Suggestions

I was recently asked to submit recommendations for this year's Philosopher's Annual (which aims to bring together ten of the best philosophy papers published in 2008). 

Do any of you have any suggestions?

Bicchieri on Expectations and Fairness

Cristina Bicchieri just sent me two papers along with the following message:

Here are two new papers you may find interesting.  Some of you know the earlier versions, but they have since been modified quite a bit.  In both papers, we test my theory of social norms.  That is, individuals generally do not "prefer to be fair". Quite to the contrary, they conditionally prefer to obey a fairness norm only if they have the right kind of expectations.  In both papers, manipulating expectations (via small changes in information) leads to major behavioral changes. Moreover, by assessing participants' beliefs about other participants' expectations, we can test for the presence (or absence) of a social norm.

At present, I am exploring the implication of this work for moral theories, especially "applied" ones.

The two papers are:

Download JBDM with Xiao

Download Paper 020909

Mandelbaum and Sytsma Awarded Mellon Fellowships

Congratulations to Eric Mandelbaum and Justin Sytsma who both received the ACLS/Mellon Fellowship! This is a very serious honor.

(Mark Phelan actually received the fellowship last year, which makes for a pretty amazing record for experimentalists. )

Do Spam Filters Think X-Phi is X-Rated?

X-philes,

During the last two weeks I've noticed that a significant portion of my X-Phi corespondence has landed in my Spam/Bulk mail folder--signicantly more than my non-X-Phi professional correspondence. I suspect the reason is that most of these emails have had 'X-Phi' in the subject line and that spam filters think I'm being sent something X-rated. So, beware of using this in subject lines and check your spam folders for lost emails.

The Survey Says...

I got the following email earlier today:

Dear Prof. Nadelhoffer,

I am a graduate student in philosophy at Oxford University, conducting a survey on intuitions with Troy Cross. The survey can be accessed here, and takes at most 5 minutes to complete. We would be tremendously grateful if you might complete the survey (results will remain anonymous). Like all survey participants, you will be eligible for a £100/$150 prize drawing!

Thanks so much for your participation!

Sincerely,
Amia Srinivasan

I asked whether I could post the link here and I was given permission to do so.  So, happy surveying...

In Praise Of....

Thanks to Jussi Suikkanen for bringing this brief Guardian editorial about experimental philosophy to my attention.  It's nice to be in the "In praise of..." section!

On the Overselling of Experimental Philosophy

Responding to the Prospect article that we recently linked to, "Philosophy's great experiment",  Dwight Furrow has some thoughts up under the heading "Overselling Experimental Philosophy" -- and, to be clear, it is the the article that he is accusing of the overselling, not experimental philosophers themselves.  I do think that this is something of a concern; so much of the coverage that experimental philosophy has received really has been rather unfortunately hyped up, in a way that is understandable given the way that part of media's being media is that it hypes things up.  But this has led to some unhappy consequences (I'm sure many readers remember this fooferaw a couple of years back), and maybe goes some way towards explaining some of the strange attitudes that some philosophers have taken up in response to the body of work produced under the x-phi label. 

And I find myself in agreement with a very large part of what Furrow says in his post, and I suspect that most of the x-phi community would agree with much of it as well.  For example:

"X-phi is interesting because it might help philosophers do one part of their job. But it cannot solve philosophical problems."  (I think that latter sentence is supposed to be read as meaning something like "X-phi cannot solve philosophical problems by itself.")

"The real problem with some contemporary philosophy is not the absence of scientific data but the use of odd and fanciful scenarios like the Trolley Problem to unearth how we reason."

"Experimental philosophy may help us determine what people believe and how they respond to various situations. Thus, it can act as a check against unreflectively assuming our intuitions are shared."

Nonetheless, despite these agreements, there are also some parts of his post that I think don't quite hit the mark.  Furrow's post continues after that last quoted sentence as follows: "But brain scans can’t tell us much about why people think as they do, and tracking blood flow or electrical activity is not going to reveal very much about patterns of reasoning."  But brain scans can, in fact, tell us very important things about why people think as they do!  I take it that what's interesting about, e.g., Josh Greene's work in this regard is very much that it is providing some evidence for claims about what psychological factors are or are not in play when people make different sorts of moral judgments.

He continues: "Furthermore, questionnaires and observations of behavior are notoriously unreliable in explaining the motives behind our actions, and are hardly revolutionary."  Well... is any part of philosophy really concerned with "explaining the motives behind our actions"?  Have any experimental philosophers taken on such a question? And I don't see how armchair reflection is going to do a better job of offering such explanations.  This may be a pitch for doing more and better x-phi -- or just plain more and better psychology -- but I don't see how it is much of a critique of the movement as such.  (I'm also not sure what the point is about whether or not using surveys are "revolutionary".  Seems to me it's clearly not at all revolutionary in psychology, which is a large part of why we're willing to use it ourselves; but it clearly does represent a nontrivial methodological shift in contemporary philosophy.  What else is supposed to be at stake here?)

But, anyhow, that's just quibbling.  I think the deeper disagreement is here, and I think it also points to a deeper promise on the part of x-phi for the philosophical project on the whole:

"Most importantly, X-phi could not begin to tell us how we ought to think about reality. It is rooted in what is, not what should be. It can be critical of philosopher’s pretensions but not of the beliefs it purports to describe. It will not be making philosophical discoveries."

Surely Furrow would be right if all he meant is that we will make few direct discoveries by doing x-phi -- for no one thinks that we're going to just learn whether compatibilism is true, or what normative moral theory is correct, or whether knowledge really is stakes-sensitive, just by looking at people's survey responses and brain scans.  But that middle sentence of this last quote seems to aim for something stronger, and something that seems to me to indicate where things have gone off the rails here.  Barring some particularly pure form of rationalism, most all of our thinking about "what should be" is itself thoroughly and ineliminably rooted in our thinking about "what is".  Change your picture of what's going on descriptively in our minds and in our lives, and you will often change your picture of how our minds and lives should be directed.  Just consider, for example, how many issues in the philosophy of mind have been transformed by shifts in the relevant  sciences -- including, very much, our inquiries into the nature of rationality itself.  Or, to pull an example from another literature I'm interested in, consider how enriched recent discussions in aesthetics has been by its engagement with descriptive psychology of the emotions (e.g., in Jenefer Robinson's Deeper than Reason).  For exactly these reasons, I think we can expect that, pace Furrow, x-phi will indeed play a significant role in future philosophical discoveries.

Reminder: Special Issue on Intuitions in Philosophy

Just a quick reminder about the following call for papers:

Studia Philosophica Estonica

Special Issue on The Role of Intuitions in Philosophical Methodology

In recent years the role that intuitions play in contemporary analytic philosophy has been a topic of heated debate. While some believe that our intuitions give us a priori knowledge about matters of linguistic meaning, or even about matters of metaphysics, others believe that our intuitions should not be regarded as more trustworthy in philosophy than they are in other areas, like the sciences, where we do not actually place too much trust in them (for good reasons) and look for other sources of knowledge instead. This special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica welcomes contributions on any of the following questions:

• What exactly are "intuitions"? Are they different from beliefs? Can they change, if we decide to "give them up"? Is it possible to "train" them? Are there "persistent" philosophical intuitions immune to such reform?
• What is the evidential status of these intuitions? Can intuitions be true or false, reliable or unreliable? If they are evidence at all, what are they evidence for?
• What is the significance of conflicts between opposing intuitions? How is such conflict to be adjudicated?
• What is the relevance of recent results in "Experimental Philosophy" for this methodology? Is it of any relevance for the role of intuitions in philosophy that non-philosophers might have different intuitions than philosophers?
• How did the role that intuitions play in contemporary analytic philosophy develop throughout the history of the profession? How did the justification of this methodology develop?

This special issue is edited by Sören Häggqvist (Stockholm University) and Daniel Cohnitz (University of Tartu).
Time Plan: Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2009; Publication: October 1, 2009
Papers should be received through our online submission system (http://www.spe.ut.ee) no later than April 1st, 2009.
Submissions must be in English and conform to the submission standards of the journal and the methodological standards of analytic philosophy.

Experimental Political Philosophy

Jonathan Phillips is presenting his experimental studies of people's intuitions about freedom over at the Political Philosophy Podcast Symposium.

In an interesting twist, the symposium includes a video that lets you listen to him explain the studies while following along with a powerpoint presentation (kind of like Justin Sytsma's amazing presentation on intuitions about consciousness). Readers then have a chance to write in with questions, objections, etc.

Definitely something worth checking out.

Post-docs of interest

Two post-docs of interest for the readers of this blog:

1. 2-year posdoctoral fellowship in the philosophy of cognitive science at Oxford (starting Oct 2009, deadline: March 6).

Information here.

2. 2-year postdoctoal fellowship at the Institut Jean-Nicod (starting Oct 2009, deadline: Aoril 10).

The applicant's research area should be either knowledge and the modes of justification or metacognition. For more information, please e-mail Joëlle Proust (jproust@ehess.fr).

Edouard