Experimental Philosophy

Making raw data freely available online

I would like to make raw data from some recent experiments available for free download.

I could just do this through my own website. But for many reasons it would be better to use a dedicated data repository, one that perhaps other x-philes also use.

All the repositories I have found, however, are either onerously bureaucratic or only accept data from specific groups of people.

So, can anyone recommend one?

Methodology workship at Rutgers, Friday March 12

Brian Weatherson is organizing it, and the invited speakers are Joshua Knobe, Elizabeth Harman, Michael Strevens and Jennifer Nado.  More information here.  I sure wish I could go!

Review of Philosophy and Psychology: Special Issue on Experimental Philosophy

Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe, and I are pleased to announce that the articles for the first issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology dedicated to "Psychology and Experimental Philosophy" are now on-line. You can currently download them for free here, but this will not last. 

Here is the table of Content:

T. Lombrozo, J. Knobe, and E. Machery: Editorial

S. Cullen: Survey-driven romanticism

J. Alexander, R. Mallon, and J. Weinberg: Accentuating the negative. 

J. May, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, J. Hull, and A. Zimmerman: Practical alternatives, relevant interests, and knowledge attributions: An empirical study

S. Pellizzoni, V. Girotto, and L. Surian:  Beliefs and moral valence affect intentionality attributions: the case of side effects

A. Monroe and B. Malle: From uncaused will to conscious choice: The need to study, not speculate about people’s folk concept of free will

G. Goodwin and J. Darley: The perceived objectivity of ethical beliefs: Psychological findings and implications for public policy

E. Schwitzgebel and J. Rust: Do ethicists and political philosophers vote more often than other professors?

B. Huebner, M. Bruno, and H. Sarkissian: What does the nation of China think about phenomenal states?

M. Weber and D. Osherson: Similarity and induction

This is really a wonderful issue with important articles that all of you should read!

Edouard

Experimental Epistemology Makes the Boston Globe Online

Here.

Consciousness

Brian Talbot discusses the article "Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience" (forthcoming, Phil Studies) in his paper "The irrelevance of folk intuitions for the hard problem of consciousness" for the new Consciousness on-line conference. 

Justin and I, as well as Bryce Huebner, reply to Brian's thought-provoking article. 

Brian's, Justin's and Bryce's presentations can be seen and listened here.

Have a look at the exchange and also at this great on-line conference organized by Richard Brown!

Edouard

Special volume of Studia Philosophica Estonica on intuitions in philosophy

...is out now.  Here's the table of contents:

The Role of Intuitions in Philosophy
Daniel Cohnitz, Sören Häggqvist     1-14

Intuitions in Epistemology: Towards a Naturalistic Alternative
Kristoffer Ahlstrom     15-34

If Intuitions Must Be Evidential then Philosophy is in Big Trouble
Joshua Earlenbaugh, Bernard Molyneux     35-53

Philosophical Intuitions
Mark Fedyk     54-80

Intuitions, Externalism, and Conceptual Analysis
Jussi Haukioja     81-93

Explaining Away Intuitions
Jonathan Ichikawa     94-116

Ideal Language Philosophy and Experiments on Intuitions
Sebastian Lutz     117-139

Ignorance Radicalized
Gergo Somodi     140-156

Psychology and the Use of Intuitions in Philosophy
Brian Talbot     157-176

Loose Constitutivity and Armchair Philosophy
Jonathan M Weinberg, Stephen J Crowley     177-195

Let me offer both congratulations and thanks to Daniel and Sören, for such a great looking volume (and for, well, including my paper with Crowley in it!) 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM

Submissions of abstracts for Short "Cutting Edge" Experimental Philosophy Presentations are invited by the Metro Experimental Research Group (MERG). Abstracts should discuss exciting new experimental research, suitable for brief presentation on any topic of philosophical interest. Submitted abstracts should be no more than 1,500 words in length. A limited number of projects will be selected for presentation at a colloquium to be held in New York City on May 1^st in conjunction with a workshop of invited presentations on meta-ethics:

Meta-ethics: Empirical Approaches and critiques

Invited Speakers Include: Stephen Darwall, Gilbert Harman, Geoffrey Goodwin, Jesse Prinz, Hagop Sarkissian, and David Wong.

Submit abstracts by March 20^th to mergphi@gmail.com with the subject line “submission”.

Decisions will be announced by April 1.

MERG is an informal group of researchers interested in applying empirical and quantitative methods in researching philosophical topics. We are based in the New York metro area. To learn more about our group, check out our webpage.

x-phi: it's all about not being a sucker.

I often gloss the value to philosophy of our making a more sustained & deliberate use of scientific methods where we can, in terms of the human mind's being so very good at playing tricks on itself, and these methods are just some of our most useful tools to keep us from playing ourselves for fools.  These tricks just are not something we get out of merely by thinking harder -- that often just allows the mind to just re-play the trick all the more -- rather, they are ones we have to learn what active steps we can take to steer clear of.

I was reminded of this when I recently encountered this quote from the legendary Ricky Jay on the totally excellent experimental economics blog Farnam Street:
"as someone who does slight-of-hand for a living to me the ideal audience would be scientists or Nobel Prize winners who are incredibly smart in their one discipline and often have an ego with them which says 'I am really smart' so I can't be fooled. No one is easier to fool."

Norms and mental state ascriptions

I thought readers of the blog might be interested in a paper Tania Lombrozo and I have recently written. In it we present new evidence for an alternative explanation of the Knobe effect arguing that moral evaluations inform theory of mind judgments, but that this relationship arises because behavior that conforms to norms (moral or otherwise) is less informative about underlying mental states than is behavior that violates norms. Our view preserves the traditional functions of theory of mind (namely predicting and explaining behavior), but also suggests the importance of normative considerations in social cognition.

In our paper we present data from three experiments demonstrating that different norms (moral or conventional) lead to different ascriptions of intentional action for the very same action and outcome, that the effect can be  eliminated when norms are reversed, and that norm-violating behavior supports stronger predictions of future behavior than does norm-conforming behavior. The paper is currently under review but comments are very welcome. 

The paper can be found here.

X-Phi Goes International

I thought that some readers of the blog might be interested in the number of x-phi things currently going on around the world.

• The conference How and Why Economists and Philosophers Do Experiments is set for March 27th & 28th at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan.
• As posted below, there's a workshop in experimental philosophy in Wrocław, Poland May 21st - 23rd at the Institute of Philosophy. 
• In Varna, Bulgaria, there's an experimental philosophy conference June 4th - 6th at the Varna International Philosophical School. 
• A conference on moral judgments and intentional action has been planned for July 5th & 6th at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
• There's a new experimental philosophy site in Portuguese, and there have been rumors of a Portuguese translation of Experimental Philosophy eds. Knobe & Nichols. 
• There's also an experimental philosophy page up at the University of Bristol in England.
• And there have been a number of x-phi projects coming out of the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris.