Experimental Philosophy

X-Phi 'Lab Meetings' in NYC

This semester the Metro Experimental Research Group will continue to host our series of (roughly) fortnightly  experimental philosophy 'lab meetings' for students and faculty in the New York area. 

As before, the plan is for people from New York area institutions to have a chance to present ideas for experiments and then hone their experimental designs in a collaborative discussion with other lab members. Our first meeting this semester will be this week, on Friday, February 5th, 2-4:30, in the second floor seminar roon (202) of the NYU philosophy department.  (Meetings will alternate between CUNY and NYU.) This meeting will include presentations by Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) and Zoltan Szabo (Yale).

If you are interested, you can see details about our meetings here. MERG also has a facebook page.

“Your life is completely determined” / “People's lives are completely determined” - benefits of an ambivalent belief in determinism

Hi, I am new here and this blog post will be about my Bachelor’s thesis in experimental philosophy/social psychology, which was titled ‘The prosocial benefits of a multidimensional belief in determinism’. Its main focus is how a belief in determinism can be construed cognitively as a bidimensional concept. Moreover, I examined whether there are certain prosocial benefits to a belief in determinism.

In a way, one impetus to conduct this study was the controversy of the free will/determinism debate itself. One the one hand, mainstream science assumes that hard determinism (the thesis that ‘‘at any instant exactly one future is compatible with the state of the universe at that instant and the laws of nature”) is valid and this does not leave any room for free will. On the other hand, this is hard to believe for most people and I hypothesized that this is because there is such a strong subjective feeling (or illusion) of free will.  If subjective feeling of free will really is the main reason for having free will beliefs, one might argue that it should be easier for people to be convinced that others are determined than to be convinced that they themselves are determined. In order to test this, I conducted an experiment in which three groups of people read different texts and later answered a questionnaire as a dependent measure. The participants in the two experimental groups were the ‘You [are determined]’ condition and the ‘People [are determined]’ condition. In both conditions participants read almost identical essays both explaining and arguing in favour of determinism.

X-Phi Blog Statistics

I thought I would post some random statistics about this blog.  Keep in mind that the blog only dates back to 2004!

Lifetime Page Views: 498, 857

Total Posts: 529

Total Comments: 2736

Avg. Page Views Per Day: 243

Contributors: 104

Given the relative youth of experimental philosophy, I think these numbers are pretty impressive.  So, thanks to all of the contributors and readers who have helped keep this blog up and running.  Without your interesting posts and comments, we never could have generated the kind of interest needed to bring people to this page nearly half a million times!

Spam Revisited

I just wanted to let everyone know that in light of our earlier discussion, I have decided to switch to moderated comments after all.  It turns out that Typepad allows me to set up the moderation function so that authors have to approve comments on their own posts.  This means that I don't personally receive an email every time anyone posts a comment--which was my main reason for resisting the temptation to switch to moderated comments earlier!  Of course, this also means that authors will now have some extra work to do to ensure that comments are approved in a timely fashion.  In the event that you think switching to moderated comments is more trouble than it's worth, feel free to email me privately.  If enough people complain, I will simply switch back to unmoderated comments.  But for now, I thought I would give moderation a shot--at least with respect to comments!  I am determined to outsmart the godforsaken Spambots!

Norms and the Knobe Effect

People might be interested in a short piece on the Knobe effect that I have forthcoming in Analysis. The basic idea uses two premises:

(i) there is an asymmetry between intentionally violating a norm and intentionally conforming to a norm. Intentional violation just requires knowing violation: when one knowingly violates a norm, one is expressly not letting the norm guide one's actions. In contrast, intentionally conforming to a norm requires one to treat the norm as a guide.

(ii) in making ascriptions to agents we are greatly influenced by whether or not they  have intentionally violated or followed a norm. So, for instance, in judging whether someone has intentionally brought about some outcome, we are influenced by whether, in bringing about that outcome, they have intentionally violated or followed a norm.

The proposal then is that the various manifestations of the Knobe effect can be economically explained using these two premises. And the explanation extends not just to the original findings, but to the asymmetries that have been discovered in a host of other ascriptions. There's no new empirical work I'm afraid, but anyone interested in this interpretation of others' findings can read it here.

FSU Free Will Project

Please join me in congratulating Al Mele on receiving a $4.5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation for the project: "Free Will: Human and Divine--Empirical and Philosophical Explorations."  Given how much Al has done both for me and for experimental philosophy more generally, I think it is richly deserved (but not in the deep metaphysical sense)!  Needless to say, I expect a number of readers of this blog to submit proposals for free will-related projects.  So, good luck to everyone with the free-for-all (pun intended)!  For more information on the project please see this website. 

Sytsma and Livengood on Semantic Intuitions

As many readers of this blog will know, there have been some extremely surprising experimental results involving people's intuitions about classic philosophical thought experiments in semantics. Take the Gödel/Schmidt case (included here below the fold). An elegant experimental study shows that when participants are given this case, people in some groups say that the speaker is talking about (a) the person who really discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic, whereas people in other groups say that the speaker is talking about (b) the person who got hold of the manuscript and claimed credit for the work. (See Machery et al. 2004.)

In an impressive new paper (forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy), Justin Sytsma and Jonathan Livengood offer a surprising twist on this line of research. Specifically, they show that different participants in the study actually understand the question they are being asked in different ways. Some think they are being asked to pick out the person whom the speaker is actually talking about, while others think they are being asked to pick out the person whom the speaker thinks he is talking about. 

To test this hypothesis, Sytsma and Livengood conducted four experimental studies, but you can get a pretty good sense for the basic approach just by considering Study 4. In this study, all participants were given the usual question about which person the speaker was talking about... but then, after providing an answer, they were asked to say which of the following two questions they had just answered: 

(1)  When John uses the name 'Gödel,' does John think he is talking about (a) or (b)?

(2)  When John uses the name 'Gödel,' is he actually talking about (a) or (b)?

Strikingly, participants who gave different answers indicated that they had been asked different questions. In fact, of the participants who gave answer (a), a full 75% said that they had been asked question (1)! 

Free Will, Dualism, and Intentionality

I’m an experimental psychologist (Ph.D. from UCLA, 1986), but my focus these days is philosophy. My basic thesis is that questions of free will and dualism arise from confusion as to the nature of knowledge. I argue that there are two true models of the world, inter-translatable, but not appropriately collapsed into a single model. They differ by the inclusion or exclusion of a single construct – intentionality.

I explore all of this in three articles, “Dualism”, “Agency” and “Knowledge”, on my new website, called

http://howitallcomestogether.com .

I’m interested in comments, and in establishing a dialogue with people with common interests.

Chuck Turner

Spam

Greetings!  I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss the topic of Spam with the readers of the blog.  In a recent comment, Justin Sytsma made the following suggestion:

I wonder if it isn't time for the blog to shift to moderating comments? The downside is that it would be extra work for Thomas; but as there are a lot of contributors, maybe the comment notifications can go to a handful of volunteers, any of which could put the legit comments through and spreading out the work. I would be happy to volunteer for this. 

Needless to say, I am as frustrated by the Spam as anyone since I have to delete it all.  Initially, when I added the filter to weed out automated comments, it cut down on the Spam.  But as time went by, the sneaky bastards who design these programs have obviously figured out how to bypass the filters.  So, what to do?  Unfortunately, there is no way for me implement Justin's otherwise helpful suggestion since I cannot set up the moderating function in a way that would allow multiple people to approve comments.  So, if we switch to moderated comments, it will simply mean that I have even more emails in my inbox.  Another possibility involves giving a few folks my account information so that when Spam gets posted, they, too, would have the ability to log in and delete it.  Unfortunately, that won't work either since my Typepad account is linked to several other blogs as well.  Of course, the most straightforward solution requires me to check out the site a few times each day to see whether any Spam has made its way past the filter.  But since I don't always check the blog on a daily basis, it may sometimes take a bit longer for me to delete the Spam.  As a reminder, perhaps readers could send me an email if Spam has been up for more than a day or so, so I know to delete it.  For my part, I will try to check the blog more often. 

In the event that the volume of Spam increases any further, I will have no choice but to switch to moderated comments.  In the meantime, you should consider (a) buying more viagra, (b) using a paper writing factory for all your term paper needs, and (c) taking out as many payday loans as possible--I've heard the interest rates are outstanding!

Is the Armchair Sexist?

Since Plato, intuitions have played considerable evidentiary roles in shaping philosophical discourse.  Yet, given the gender imbalance in professional academic philosophy today, intuitions imported from the armchair mostly belong to a bunch of men.  But do the epistemic intuitions of male philosophy professors represent consensus?  A growing body of empirical evidence suggests they don’t.

In a new paper [Gender and Epistemic Intuition], I present a series of experimental studies showing that men and women intuit about important epistemological thought experiments in surprisingly different ways:

Epistemological Purism.  As many may recall, the Epistemic Side-Effect Effect (Beebe and Buckwalter forthcoming) is an extension of the original side-effect effect for folk knowledge attribution.  We found that participants were significantly less likely to say an agent knows an action will bring about a certain side effect when the outcome is good, and more likely to attribute knowledge when that outcome happens to be bad.  This effect was highly variable to the factor of gender, whereby women were significantly less likely than men to ascribe knowledge to a subject just because the outcome was good.

Gettier Cases.  While there has been some experimental evidence that the Gettier intuition varies among and between cultures (Weinberg et al. 2001), another groundbreaking study has shown that men and women also reason very differently about these kinds of cases.  Starmans & Friedman (2009) report that, pace professional philosophical intuition, women are far more likely than men to deny the so-called Gettier intuition, and attribute knowledge to a putative knower in the particular Gettier vignettes tested. 

In the paper, I develop and test a hypothesis that explains these differences under a single mechanism.  I argue for what I call the normative evaluation hypothesis, or the idea that the gender differences in epistemic intuition arise as a result of the way men and women consult normative factors in formulating their intuitive judgments across domain.  My aim is to show that such demographic variation in intuition seriously undermines an extensive group of epistemological projects that rely on intuitional evidence.  For on what grounds is an intuition characteristic of one group (men) more privileged than another group (women) in that it counts as better evidence to support certain analyses of knowledge?

Additionally, these data may also help explain one factor that contributes to the discrimination against women in philosophy (see Haslanger 2008), as well as the alienation that women sometimes feel in the classroom.  For instance, imagine being a young female philosophy student, presented with the scenario of a famous thought experiment like Gettier, and then asked a question designed to reveal a particular philosophical intuition.  Now imagine that your intuition does not agree with not only the males in the class, but also with the male philosophical majority.  When you try to express that intuition, your professor insists that you are wrong.  It is not hard to understand why any person in this situation would feel alienated.  But why think that the professor’s intuitions about knowledge are better?  In other words, what possible reason could there be to suppose that the content of men’s epistemic intuitions are any more likely to be true than women’s?

Since intuitions from thought experiments are relied on so heavily in professional analytic epistemology, could the lack of tolerance for different intuitions than the ones men tend to have—even if perhaps ever so slight in some cases—be a factor that continually discourages women from entering professional philosophy today?