Experimental Philosophy

Doris on Automaticity at On the Human

There is an interesting discussion by John Doris on automaticity at On The Human (with a follow up post here).  Check it out!

Newly Revamped Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

The official journal of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Division 24 of the American Psychological Association), Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Psychology, has just been added to the APA roster of journals. As many of you know, Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Psychology has published several X-Phi articles in the recent past. Joining the APA's journal roster should give it a nice image boost. The journal can be accessed online here: http://www.apa.org/journals/teo/.

Did Martí Refute the Cross-Cultural Variation in Semantic Intuitions?

In an insightful paper published in the first issue of Analysis (2009), Genoveva Martí notices that in our paper on intuitions about reference (2004), we (Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich) elicited people's metalinguistic intuitions - people's judgments about the reference of cited proper names (e.g., "Gödel"). We did not put our subjects in a position to use the relevant proper names (e.g., we did not ask people whether it was ok for Gödel to claim credit for the incompleteness theorem). She concludes that we have failed to show that the relevant kind of intuitions vary:

"The question, I deem, is inadequate, for it does not test the right kind of intuitions. It does not test the intuitions that could allow us to tell whether or not the participants in the experiment use names descriptively; rather the question tests their opinions as regards which theory of reference determination they think is correct"

Of course, Martí's criticism assumes that people's metalinguistic intuitions about the reference of, say, proper names tend to be incongruent with the way they use these names. Otherwise, there would be no reason to claim that only people's use of these names provides evidence about the reference of proper names. 

But are metalinguistic intuitions really incongruent with people's use of proper names? In a forthcoming reply in Analysis, Chris Olivola (Princeton, psychology), Molly de Blanc (Pittsburgh), and I show that this is not the case.

We gave subjects two Gödel cases: the first case elicits a metalinguistic intuition, while the second one asks subjects to evaluate the truth-value of a sentence. 

Use case

Ivy is a high school student in Hong Kong. In her astronomy class, she was taught that Tsu Ch’ung Chih was the man who first determined the precise time of the summer and winter solstices. But, like all her classmates, this is the only thing she has heard about Tsu Ch’ung Chih. Now suppose that Tsu Ch’ung Chih did not really make this discovery. He stole it from an astronomer who died soon after making the discovery. But the theft remained entirely undetected and Tsu Ch’ung Chih became famous for the discovery of the precise times of the solstices. Everybody is like Ivy in this respect; the claim that Tsu Ch’ung Chih determined the solstice times is the only thing people have heard about him. Having read the above story and accepting that it is true, when Ivy says, “Tsu Ch’ung Chih was a great astronomer,” do you think that her claim is: (A) true or (B) false? 

The metalinguistic case was identical except for the question, which was: 

Having read the above story and accepting that it is true, when Ivy uses the name “Tsu Ch’ung Chih,” who do you think she is actually talking about: (A) the person who (unbeknownst to Ivy) really determined the solstice times? or (B) the person who is widely believed to have discovered the solstice times, but actually stole this discovery and claimed credit for it?

Examining subjects in India, Mongolia, and France, we found no significant difference between people's answers to these two cases: People's metalinguistic intuitions seem to be in sync with how they use proper names. 

Upshot: Because people's metalinguistic intuitions are congruent with how they use words, they provide us with reliable evidence about the reference of proper names, a finding that undercuts Martí's objection.

The next x-phi video (freedom)

Ram Neta stars in the next x-phi video about the Aristotelean conception of freedom, ship captains, and drowning wives.

Read the full paper here.

PhilosophicalPersonality.com

Adam Feltz, Jonathan Livengood, Edouard Machery, and I (Justin Sytsma) have developed a new Website (take a look at http://www.philosophicalpersonality.com).  The basic idea is to provide subjects with a free personality test in exchange for participating in a philosophical study.  Data on both are collected along with biographical and demographic information.  Subjects are generated through paid advertising promoting the free personality test.

We have just started our third round of probes and things have been quite successful!  In fact, we have been so successful at generating traffic, that we have included a third party for this batch, with Thomas Nadelhoffer contributing a study.  This is something we hope to continue in upcoming rounds, providing a service to the experimental philosophy community while helping to offset our advertising costs.  Our plan is to make one or two slots open with each batch of probes, changing probes on a monthly to bi-monthly schedule.

If you are interested in including a probe in a future round on PhilosophicalPersonality.com, please contact one of the principals for further details (I can be reached at jmsytsma@gmail.com)!

Weinberg vs. Williamson on X-Phi

I have a paper now available (based on, but not identical to, a paper that Steve Stich and I presented last year at Arche) at Phil Studies in a book symposium on Williamson's The Philosophy of Philosophy, and Williamson's reply is also available.  I must say, there are a number of things in it that I don't understand:

• Where Williamson's claims about my claims about what is or isn't "urgent" come from, since as near as I can tell, the question of urgency doesn't arise much in my paper; if anything, I suggest a certain kind of non-urgency, in that I say that it should be legitimate to continue to rely on philosophical intuitions while investigations are ongoing.  
• How on earth Williamson's men/women analogy (which was funnier in the original Hofstadter, btw) is supposed to apply to my arguments, since I say very explicitly that such challenges may well apply to the sciences!  I claim that the question becomes the difficult one of looking at particulars about what challenges really arise and what different moves might be available to different practices to respond to such challenges; what has to happen next, I claim, would involve a close attention to what really goes on in those different practices.  His analogy seems to me baldly inconsistent with what I actually say in, and really I find his misreading very mystifying.
• Why the "if we look at this at the level of 'informal qualitative epistemological judgments', then science and philosophy come out the same" isn't just a straightforward fallacy.  (Note that one could say of any bit of belief-formation performed by anyone at any time, that it is an instance of 'human cognition' -- so, by parity of reasoning, how could we fail to credit one piece of human cognition while giving credence to another?)
• How his arguments he offers here are meant to square with his own discussions in the Afterword of his book; as I note, they seem to be offered in very much the same spirit that my own discussion is offered.

I also think that his discussion of the Shanteau represents a substantial misreading of both that paper, and the brief argument of my footnote in which that paper is referenced, but I'll hope to do a fuller post on that later.

Experimental Philosophy Society (XPS)

After having kicked around the idea of starting a society for experimentally minded philosophers and philosophically minded scientists for quite some time, we are pleased to announce the official formation of the Experimental Philosophy Society (XPS).  Thanks to all those who have played an instrumental role in getting this thing up and running.  A list of the members of the executive committee can be found on our new homepage (which was designed by our own Justin Sytsma). 

Please help spread the word to any potentially interested undergraduates, graduate students, and fellow researchers.  Our main goal is to have annual meetings at the APA--which will provide a unique opportunity for undegrads and graduate students to present their work and personally interact with the vibrant x-phi community.  Tentatively, we would like to hold our first meeting  at the Eastern APA this fall in New York (although we have yet to work out the details!).  I will try to put together a call for papers soon.  In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions or problems with respect to joining.  

Post-Doc Position of Interest

The following post-doc might be of interest, and Paul Egre asked me to mention it to the community of experimental philosophers:

** Post-doc proposal : Program « Cognitive Origins of Vagueness », Institut Jean-Nicod **

Job description : Institut Jean-Nicod (EHESS/ENS/CNRS, Paris) is seeking to recruit a post-doctoral researcher for 12 months as part of the ANR research project « Cognitive Origins of Vagueness », conducted by Paul Égré. The position is to start September 2009 or possibly later. The applicant’s PhD should have been defended and filed by the starting date. The net salary will be of 2040 euros/month. French social security and retirement benefits will apply.

The post-doc's primary responsibility will be to conduct research on vagueness, and the candidate should be motivated to pursue new directions of investigation in this domain, whether theoretical or
empirical. Questions of interest for the project concern the incidence of vagueness in language, in perception and in decision (representative issues include, among other topics and
non-limitatively, the link between vagueness and language learning, the articulation between perceptual categories and linguistic categories, the role of decision in the assignment of boundaries for
concepts, the importance of contextual factors in vagueness resolution).

The candidate should have a PhD in one of these areas: philosophy, psychology, formal semantics, cognitive science, preferably on issues connected to vagueness or categorization. The selected candidate will participate in regular seminars on the topic of vagueness and will also take part in the organization of workshops and scientific events. The candidate will have the possibility to do experimental work and will be given adequate supervision to that effect if appropriate (in partnership with the LSCP and Department of Cognitive Studies at Ecole Normale Supérieure).

Candidates are invited to submit an application (in English) including a curriculum vitae, a letter of motivation with a brief statement of interests, a writing sample, and two letters of recommendation, by May 13, 2009. The application, as well as individual queries, should be sent directly to Paul Egré : paulegre@gmail.com. 

Institut Jean-Nicod (http://www.institutnicod.org) is a member of the Department of Cognitive Studies at École Normale Supérieure (DEC-ENS), which also includes dynamic groups in psychology and cognitive science (such as the LSCP, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, and the LPP, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, with both of which collaborations are taking place).

Side-effect Effect Without Side Effect

Hello everyone,

My name is Hichem, and I am new to this amazing blog. I mean, I have been reading it for a while, but never had a good reason to be added to the contributors list. Now I have one. Florian Cova and I have been performing an experimental study on the so-called 'Knobe Effect' and have found an interesting result: the Knobe effect is not restricted to intentionality judgments of ends, but is also found in intentionality judgments of means. We have indeed found that the same kind of asymmetry that was first discovered by Knobe in the case of ends is also to be found in cases of means. In other words: people are more inclined to judge a means to an end as performed intentionally if they consider it as morally wrong than if they consider it as morally right; a highly counter-intuitive result.

In our paper, we argue that this poses an important problem for the study of people's concept of intentional action: when we think we are studying people's concept of intentional action, are we really studying the folk-psychological concept of intentional action that philosophers have been concerned with, or are we instead dealing with something totally different? Put differently, when we engage in the experimental study of people's concept(s) of intention, are we really (and directly) probing the relevant concept(s), i.e. the concept(s) that is (are) part of the experimental philosopher's theoretical suitcase, or are we just engaging in the construction of phenomena that are far from the real-world realm (if any) of folk-concepts?

Here is the draft of the paper: Téléchargement KnobeEffectMeans

Comments are very welcome!

Steve Stich elected to National Academy of Arts and Sciences

Probably most of you members of the blog-reading public already saw this over on the Leiterblog, but just in case you haven't: Stephen P. Stich, one of the godfathers of x-phi, has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.  It's a much-deserved honor -- congratulations!