Experimental Philosophy

Philosophical Discussion Arcs

I don't know if this is experimental philosophy or not, but readers of this blog might be interested in my treatment of philosophical discussion arcs over at The Splintered Mind.  I suppose I'm doing, to use Shaun Nichols's phrase, quantitative history of philosophy.

The two posts (here and here) look at patterns in the rise and fall of discussion of philosophers' work, using keyword searches in the Philosopher's Index.

[Comments will be accepted on the original posts.]

Experimental Philosophy and Philosophy of Medicine

The Nordic Network for Philosophy of Medicine and Medical Ethics is organizing a workshop on "Experimental philosophy and experimental medical philosophy" in Copenhagen in June (2-4, University of Copenhagen).

The speakers include Jesse Prinz, Bryony Pierce, and me.

If you are interested, more information about the workshop is available there and there.

The Truth in Cultural Relativism

Many ordinary people appear to be willing to allow that whipping a sailor drunk on duty was acceptable 300 years ago while thinking that it would be morally wrong to do so now. Many also think that abusing military trainees is okay if the Pentagon says so, but wrong if forbidden by the authorities. These findings suggest that people don't think harmful actions are always wrong, but are instead some sort of relativists. But what kind? And what are the implications of this? Lately, Stephen Stich and his colleagues have argued that since the cluster of features identified by psychologists in the Turiel School (harm justification, authority-independence, generality, and seriousness) comes apart, moral judgment doesn't form a psychological natural kind. Over at Ethics Etc, I argue that ordinary people's cultural relativism is of an entirely innocuous sort. My hypothesis is that people are intuitive deontologists, which means that they look at the attitudes expressed by actions rather than at their consequences, in short, their significance rather than harmfulness. Significance varies with cultural context, which accounts for the apparently relativist data. Expressing (what the judge takes to be) roughly speaking disrespectful attitudes in context appears to be sufficient and possibly necessary for general and authority-independent disapproval. If so, this alternative cluster may form a psychological natural kind after all.

The Truth in Cultural Relativism

(I gave a live version of this blog post at the MERG meeting this Friday. Thanks to everyone who showed up! I received many useful comments that I haven't yet incorporated into the paper.)

Are There Any Moral Universals?

As some readers of this blog may know, for the past several years I have been investigating this question empirically with the help of a terrific group of research assistants by examining how the prohibition of homicide is codified in several hundred jurisdictions around the world, including all 204 member-states of the UN, the Rome Statute of the ICC, and other smaller-scale societies and jurisdictions.  The first publication arising out of this research project can be found here.

 

Particularly because this project is still in its early stages, I would welcome suggestions and critical feedback from the X-Phi community.  For some background on how this research relates to ideas of moral grammar and human rights, I recommend this article by Greg Miller in Science and this short (30 min) interview I gave on public radio in 2007.  For two excellent and wide-ranging papers that offer a critical take on the existence of moral universals and a strong challenge to certain ambitious versions of moral nativism (“content nativism”), I suggest the pair of chapters by Chandra Sripada (Nativism and Moral Psychology: Three Models of the Innate Structure that Shapes the Contents of Moral Norms) and Jesse Prinz (Is Morality Innate?) in the first volume of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s collection on moral psychology, along with commentaries by Gil Harman, Sue Dwyer, Valerie Tiberius and myself, and replies by Sripada and Prinz.

Experimental Philosophy Lab Meetings in NYC

On Friday, April 30th, a special MERG Experimental Philosophy Lab Meeting will take place at CUNY. Presenters will include James Andow (University of Nottingham), Michael Brownstein (New Jersey Institute of Technology), Jill Cumby and Craig Roxborough (York University), and Richard Kamber (College of New Jersey). Please join us for this lab meeting from 1:00-5:00 pm, in room C205 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

You can learn more about the meeting here: 

http://yale.edu/cogsci/lab30th.htm

MERG also has a facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=165286086303&ref=ts

This lab meeting is connected with the May 1st MERG Metaethics Workshop:

http://yale.edu/cogsci/metaxphi.htm

Metaethics and Experimental Philosophy Workshop

Join MERG on May 1st for a Workshop on Metaethics and Experimental Philosophy. Invited speakers are Goodwin, Prinz, and Sarkissian; commentators are Darwall, Harman, and Wong. The invited program will be preceded by12 short submitted presentations of cutting edge research in experimental philosophy. Learn more about the conference here.

What's in People's Stream of Experience During Philosophy Talks?

As you may know, Russ Hurlburt and I recently published a book centering on a woman's reports about her experience as she went about her normal day wearing a random beeper. When the beep sounded, her job was to try to recall her "last undisturbed moment of inner experience" just before the beep. Russ and I then interviewed her about these experiences, trying to get both at the truth about them and at methodological issues about the value of this sort of approach in studying consciousness.

Russ and I have presented our joint work in a number of venues now (including at an author-meets-critics session at the APA last week), and normally when we do so, we "beep" the audience. That is, we set up a random beeper to sound when Russ or I or a critic is presenting material. When the beep sounds, each audience member is to think about what was going on in her last undisturbed moment of inner experience before the beep. We then use a random number generator to select an audience member to report on her experience. We interview her right there, discussing her experience and the method with the audience and each other. We'll do this maybe three times in a three-hour session.

As a result, we now have a couple dozen samples of reported inner experience during our academic talks, and the most striking thing we've found is that people rarely report thinking about the talk. The most recent six samples are representative (three from a presentation by me at Claremont Wednesday, three from the APA).

(1.) Thinking that he should put his cell phone away (probably not formulated either in words or imagery); visual experience of cell phone and whiteboard.

(2.) Scratching an itch, noticing how it feels; having a visual experience of a book.

(3.) Feeling like he's about to fade into a sweet daydream but no sense of its content yet; "fading" visual experience of the speaker.

(4.) Feeling confused; listening to speaker and reading along on handout, taking in the meaning. [I'm counting this as an instance of thinking about the talk.]

(5.) Visual imagery of the "macaroni orange" of a recently seen flyer; skanky taste of coffee; fantasizing about biting an apple instead of tasting coffee; feeling need to go to bathroom; hearing the speaker's sentence. The macaroni orange was the most prominent part of her experience.

(6.) Reading abstract for next talk; hearing an "echo" of the speaker's last sentence; fighting a feeling of tiredness; maybe feeling tingling on tooth from permanent retainer.

Congrats!

I just wanted to congratulate our own Justin Sytsma on his new tenure track job at East Tennessee State University!  Justin's well-deserved success in this brutal job market  bodes well for experimental philosophers who are still in graduate school.  

Ichikawa, Maitra, and Weatherson Defend a Dogma

Jonathan Ichikawa, Ishani Maitra, and Brian Weatherson have written a short, but dense reply to the work on intuitions about reference. Their paper, In Defence of a Kripkean Dogma, is forthcoming in PPR.

Brian's post and a link to their paper can be found there. 

Workshop on Moral Biology

Conference: April 15 & 16 (2010):

Along with the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, the Gruter Institute, and the MacArthur project on law and neuroscience, the Project on Law and Mind Sciences is hosting two-day conference entitled "Moral Biology?: What Can Biology and the Mind Sciences Teach Us about Law and Morality?"

The conference will examine what relevance developments in the mind sciences and evolutionary biology may have for moral and legal reasoning about responsibility, punishment, racism, cooperation, and addiction.  The event features a public panel open to all (taking place on Thursday April 15 at 5:30 PM at Harvard Law School) as well as several closed-door sessions.  I've attached the nearly final agenda.

There are a small number of spaces available for the closed portions of the conference.  If you would like to attend the conference or any of those sessions, please let me know.  I will do everything I can to make certain that you are added to the attendance list.  However, to do that, I unfortunately need to hear from you before this Wednesday  (04/07) at noon.