Experimental Philosophy

New Experimental Political Philosophy - But Better!

Hi all,

Bertil just sent me this paper on people's intuitions about meeting needs. I think the methodology should be of interest even to those who are not interested in distributive justice or political philosophy. He says it is posted at Equality Exchange. Here's the title etc.:

Cappelen A. W., Moene K. O., Sørensen E. Ø., Tungodden B., Rich meets poor - an international fairness experiment.

Cheers, -Nicole

Motivated moral reasoning

Hi all-

Eric Uhlmann, David Tannenbaum, Peter Ditto and I have just published an empirical paper in Judgment and Decison Making on the motivated use of moral principles (157 kb pdf download can be found here or this paper and others of ours at peezer.net/publications; html version available here).

 Some of you have seen early drafts of this, but essentially we show that individuals differentially endorse consequentialist or deontological options in moral dilemmas that are structurally similar but that differ only in whether or not the content conflicts with their underlying social/political motivations.

This is perhaps most easily illustrated by one of our studies--in a variation of the infamous footbridge dilemma, when the "large man" is referred to as "Tyrone Payton" (a stereotypical African American name), conservatives are more likely to endorse the consequentialist option of sacrificing one innocent person for the sake of the greater good. Liberals, on the other hand, prefer the consequentialist option if the large man is named "Chip Ellsworth III". Across a number of studies we show that such political/social motivations point toward a flipping of what many (including our own subjects) presume are invariant principles. In the final study  we demonstrate that we can even prime individuals to make judgments akin to the conservative or liberal participants in the previous studies simply by priming them using the ubiquitous sentence-unscrambling procedure and including words that point to multiculturalism or patriotism. Of note, if we can refer to this as "bias", liberals and conservatives both show a bias across our studies. Also, the vast majority of our subjects indicate that they would never allow race or nationality influence their judgments in these dilemmas. Any comments/criticisms welcome!

Best,
David

Where The Wild Things Are...

In the event that some of you missed the following two op-eds by David Brooks in The New York Times, I thought I would pass them along: (a) "The Young and the Neuro," and (b) "Where the Wild Things Are."

The Survey Says...

Stephen Stich has asked me to post the following call for help.*  Hopefully, everyone will take a few minutes to play along:

Dear Colleagues,

In collaboration with Joe Henrich and Taylor Davis at the University of British Columbia, I’m conducting a study on philosophers’ views about normative judgments.  Joe, Taylor and I would be very grateful if you would participate in our study.

Participation should take 30 minutes or less, and it involves responding to a 20-item questionnaire.  In developing the questionnaire, we found that many respondents find consideration of the issues involved interesting and engaging.  The research has been approved by UBC’s Behavioral Research Ethics Board and is open to all faculty and graduate students in philosophy.

Here's a link to the test:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=u_2fmW1lVR2ZyszkTSH2Jnzw_3d_3d 

We encourage you to forward this notice to other philosophers you think might be interested. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me at sstich@ruccs.rutgers.edu or Taylor Davis at taylorth@interchange.ubc.ca. 

Many thanks for whatever assistance you can provide.

With best wishes,

Stephen Stich

Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy & Cognitive Science Rutgers University

Collaborators:

Joe Henrich: Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition & Evolution, Departments of Psychology & Economics, University of British Columbia

Taylor Davis: Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia

*Here is the link to the official letter/invitation.

Are People Actually Moral Objectivists?

Metaethicists disagree about a whole lot of stuff—whether moral properties exist and, if so, what the heck they are and how we have knowledge of them; whether one can derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ ; whether moral judgments are the deliverances of affective or purely cognitive faculties; and a whole lot besides. 

One particular claim, though, seems to have widespread endorsement—the claim that the folk are objectivists about morality—that ordinary folk view moral issues as having a single correct answer.  When ordinary individuals claim, for example, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were wrong or immoral, they mean that it is wrong or immoral *full stop*.  If someone were to disagree with such a claim, then at least one of the persons would have to be wrong.

The claim of folk objectivism is a datum that most metaethical theories try to vindicate or accommodate.  But is it true?  Are ordinary folks objectivists about morality?  John Park (a philosopher at Duke), Joshua Knobe (someone you don’t know) and I have been pursuing this question, and our initial findings suggest that folk objectivism might be rather relative in nature. 

For example, we asked subjects to interpret disagreement on the morality of the following action: “Dylan buys an expensive new knife and tests its sharpness by randomly stabbing a passerby on the street.”  When asked whether disagreeing Americans could both be correct in their judgments about the morality of this action, the folk were predictably objectivist. 

Things began to shift, though, when the disagreeing individuals were depicted as belonging to different cultural groups.  When the disagreement was between an American and a member of an Amazonian warrior culture, or a member of an extraterrestrial species called the Pentars, objectivity levels dropped in turn.  It seems as though subjects think that there could be objectively correct moral judgments within cultures, but not between them.  The greater the disparity of the cultural groups, the more the folk started to embrace a relativistic conception of morality.

So perhaps people aren’t actually objectivists about morality after all. Perhaps they think that moral judgments can only be true or false relative to a particular individual… but then if the individuals turn out to be very similar to each other, they assume that anything that is true relative to one of them will also be true relative to the other.

Here is a link to our (extremely brief) paper. Download Are the Folk Objectivists About Morality.

 

 

 

Experiments in the Humanities

Thanks to Jonathan Kramnick for sending me a link to this interesting upcoming event at Rutgers (New Brunswick) entitled Experiments in the Humanities.  Here is the description of the conference:

Experiments in the Humanities features two world-renowned humanists interested in bringing empirical methods to bear on longstanding questions in their disciplines: Stephen Stich, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers will discuss how research in cognitive science can advance and transform traditional philosophical debates, especially in moral theory. Franco Moretti, Professor of English at Stanford, will discuss how quantitative analysis can illuminate our understanding of the novel, especially questions of plot.

It's free and open to the public, so if you're in the area you should certainly check it out!  It ought to be exciting!

Experiment Boot Camp

Experimental philosophy is no longer simply a band of ragtag rebels attacking the death star of armchair methodology. If even Timothy Williamson is now dabbling in X-Phi, we may have become the Empire! More and more philosophers appreciate the relevance of experimental methods to their own topics of research. Many of these people have ideas for studies they would like to undertake. But the new recruits need training before they can take up arms. To that end, the Metro Experimental Research Group (MERG) is offering an “experiment boot camp” to train would-be-experimentalists in the basics of quantitative engagement. On Saturday the 24^th, Deena Skolnick-Weisberg (Rutgers Cognitive Science), Ray Baser (Sloan-Kettering Biostatistics), and Joshua Knobe (Yale Philosophy and Cognitive Science), will introduce philosophers to the basics of experimental design, statistical analysis, and SPSS in a one-day tutorial at the CUNY Grad Center. This is free to those interested in participating, so please let us know if you would like to join us (at mergphi@gmail.com). More details (including directions) are available here: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~mp622/bootcamp.htm.

 

This is the first of many general events we have planned at MERG. If you’d like more details on our group, send an email to mergphi@gmail.com to join our mailing list.

De Brigard on Consciousness

As many of you will know, there has been a surge of recent work in experimental philosophy on intuitions about consciousness. But most of this work uses various sorts of indirect methods. Researchers proceed, e.g., by asking whether a given entity can 'feel pain' or 'experience joy,' and if subjects say yes, it is assumed that they regard this entity as being capable of phenomenal consciousness. 

In a new paper (forthcoming in Journal of Consciousness Studies), Felipe De Brigard uses a quite different approach. Subjects are presented with a vignette and then asked directly whether the character in this vignette is 'conscious' of a particular event. 

SSPP 2010 in Atlanta: Second Call for Papers

102nd Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology
April 15-17, 2010
Westin Peachtree Plaza
Atlanta, GA

SSPP Webpage
Information on 2010 meeting
Submission of papers having interdisciplinary interest is strongly encouraged. Papers should be no longer than 3000 words and be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 150 words. Submissions for the philosophy side of the program, accompanied by the abstract submission form from the website, should be sent to:

Daniel Weiskopf
Department of Philosophy
Georgia State University
sspp.submission@gmail.com

Submission deadline: November 16, 2009 (postmarked midnight for electronic submissions)

I would also like to draw your attention to the invited side of the program.

Doris & Prinz on Appiah

John Doris and Jesse Prinz have a nice review of Anthony Appiah's book Experiments in Ethics over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 

The review focuses on Appiah's discussion of character and of ethical intuitions and then concludes with a suggestion that 'empirical work demands a reconstruction of morality.'