Experimental Philosophy

Call for Papers AJOB Neuroscience

Paul Wolpe asked me to pass along the following CFP from AJOB Neuroscience:

Now, I seek submissions from you, your colleagues, and your graduate students.  

First, we are encouraging general submissions to the journal.  Please consider submitting articles yourself or with collaborators, and please forward the attached call to your colleagues and graduate students.  

Second, we are planning a special issue on the controversies around free will and agency in neuroscience.  Please consider contributing to that special issue, and forwarding that special call to colleagues and graduate students.  Letters of intent are due in July and the papers in August.  

Survey on Personal Identity

Jabir Yusoff sent me the following message:

My name is Jabir and I am a student at Carleton College. My research friends and I are currently working on an x-phi project on the topic of personal identity. We are trying to find out if responses to thought experiments on personal identity vary by demographics. To this end, we have created an online survey and we were wondering if you could post a link to it on your x-phi blog. We would appreciate it if you could do so since that will get us more responses. Thank you.

The survey is here.  Please drop by and take it!

More objections to the Deep Self model

Hi everyone. Here is the draft of a new paper I wrote with Hichem Naar. Its main purpose is to present empirical data that spell trouble for Sripada's Deep Self model of intentionality judgments. Briefly, the paper shows that (i) some predictions made by the Deep Self model are wrong and (ii) there are cases of asymmetries in ascriptions of intentionality that the Deep Self model cannot account. We end by proposing a new version of the Deep Self model that can accomodate our new data. We also argue that our data pose a problem for Wright and Bengson's account of the Knobe Effect.

We thank Chandra Sripada for comments on a previous version. Comments are welcome.

Download SripadaReply

Experimental Philosophy and Its Critics

Thomas Grundmann and I would like to announce that the first of two special issues of Philosophical Psychology on experimental philosophy is out now. The issues are entitled "Experimental Philosophy and Its Critics, Parts 1 and 2", with all of the contributions by experimental philosophers in Part 1 (issue 23.3), and only papers by their critics in Part 2 (issue 23.4). However, there are also some non-experimental papers in Part 1, and not all of the critical papers are equally critical or skeptical of experimental work in philosophy. 

You can download a draft of our editorial introduction here (the published version is here), which contains an overview of both issues, as well as a brief summary of all the papers. The general focus is clearly on metaphilosophical issues, with a special focus on explicit attacks on intuition-based armchair methods. But there are also some purely experimental papers in Part 1, e.g. by Nichols & Bruno on intuitions about personal identity. Readers of this blog will also discover the published versions of some papers that have been previously discussed here, e.g. a paper on expertise by Weinberg et al. (discussed here) and a paper on philosophical temperament by Livengood et al. (discussed here). 

Funding for Experimental Pragmatics

EURO-XPRAG third call for proposals (open)

Collaborative research in Experimental Pragmatics

Travel grants for short visits

http://www.euro-xprag.org/activities/call-for-proposals/

Experimental pragmatics investigates and develops explicit theories of language use and of communication using the methodologies of psycholinguistics and, more generally, of experimental psychology. After having seen accelerated growth over the last ten years, experimental pragmatics is now in a better position to resolve theoretical disputes, to investigate semantic and pragmatic phenomena experimentally, to employ theory-making in order to account for data and to make pragmatic theories more accessible to the cognitive science community at large. As part of an effort to provide a more permanent platform, a Research Networking Program known as EURO-XPRAG supported by the ESF is presenting a third call for proposals that will support collaborative research.

Given the goals of Experimental Pragmatics, EURO-XPRAG is seeking proposals that will bring teams of at least two researchers (across separate countries) together to enrich the field through collaborations. These collaborations will ideally test between theoretical predictions through experimentation, experimentally investigate semantic and pragmatic phenomena with the benefit of am theoretical approach, or develop theories that can account for experimental-pragmatic findings.

Accepted projects will be reimbursed for travel expenses up to EUR 4000 distributed over a two year period starting October 15th, 2010. The travel expenses must be distributed over two or three short trips, with the first trip taking place in 2010, as soon as two weeks after notification and before mid-December 2010 (see note b in “Further details” below). Reimbursement of travel expenses will be administered through the ESF as Short Visits following the guidelines specified below. After each visit a one-page report must be submitted to the ESF.

Call for Papers

CFP 1^st Workshop of the Experimental Philosophy Group UK

13:00 – 18:30, 15^th September 2010, University of Bristol

Submission Deadline: 16^th July 2010

Experimental Philosophy Group UK invites the submission of 500-word abstracts on the topic of experimental philosophy for a series of 10-minute presentations (each followed by a 20-minute discussion) at their upcoming workshop.  Keynote presentations will be given by Prof. David Papineau (KCL) on ‘The Significance of Experimental Philosophy’ and Dr. Finn Spicer (Bristol) on ‘The Goals of Experimental Philosophy’.  

High-quality submissions in all areas of experimental philosophy considered.  Priority will be given to presentations which do one of the following: (i) present planned experimental research to test a philosophical theory, or (ii) report the results of independent experimental research providing evidence for or against a philosophical theory.  Submissions encouraged from all levels of academia: faculty, graduate students and undergraduates.  500-word abstracts to be sent as PDF or Word documents to experimentalphilosophyuk@gmail.com by 16th July 2010.  Subject line of email should read “SUBMISSION [YOUR NAME]”.  Body of email should include the following information: name, affiliation, and a contact phone number (optional).

Deep Trouble for the Deep Self

Hi Everyone,

My name is David Rose and I am new to this blog and happy to be contributing. Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma, Edouard Machery and I have written a paper discussing Chandra Sripada's Deep Self Model of intentional action.  Recently, Sripada  used structural equation modeling to show that his Deep Self Model was supported over several other models (e.g. Knobe's and Alicke's).  We reanalyzed Sripada's data and found that his data do not support his Deep Self Model.  For those interested, the paper is attached here: Download Deep Trouble for the Deep Self circulated 

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

--David

New experiments (perhaps) support the thesis that knowledge is sensitive to stakes

Hi Everyone. I am linking here a new paper with a bunch of new studies about knowledge and practical interests. The main claims are that (1) folk attributions of knowledge are sensitive to stakes, (2) the data presented supports Interest Relative Invariantism (IRI), but (3) it is not so good for contextualism about knowledge. This paper might be of special interest since some recent work by Buckwalter, Feltz & Zarpentine, and May, Sinnott-Armstrong, Hull and Zimmerman have been interpreted by many to give evidence against (1). I discuss these other studies but, unfortunately, not in a lot of detail (the paper is not really about criticizing those studies). I also have not yet incorporated Keith DeRose's recent criticism of those papers but it looks like there is some overlap (also, see Jonathan Weinberg's blog post from two days ago).

One main idea behind the study is the introduction of "evidence seeking" experiments. This type of probe gets around some possible problems with previous experiments (there are no knowledge attributions inside the vignettes). Basically these new tests work like this: I set up a pair of vignettes where a student wants to proofread his class paper for typos. In one case there is a lot at stake if he has a single typo, and in another case there is little at stake. I then ask subjects to fill in the blank (with a number) in the following prompt: 

"How many times do you think the student has to proofread his paper before he knows that there are no typos?  ____ times." 

It turns out that the subjects given the high stakes vignettes write higher numbers than those who are given the lower stakes vignette. (differences are very much stat. sig.). This sort of result supports the idea that folk attributions of knowledge are sensitive to stakes (practical interests). This is just (1)

Knobe and Baumeister on Self-Control and Agency

On Pollism

I've had a chance to read Keith DeRose's very interesting & rich engagement with some of the experimental epistemology literature, and there's a lot in it that's clearly going to be useful to x-phi practitioners to learn from & absorb.  (See some nice discussion of it already ongoing here.)  But I also think that there are some ways, in a couple of places, in which Keith is subtly underestimating some of the ways in which one can conduct a different kind of investigation with survey methods than one can from the armchair.  And I think it may be a mistake that is not just pretty common outside of x-phi, but also made sometimes by practitioners of x-phi themselves, so let me see if I can take a rough bloggy stab at articulating it.

I think people often take the fundamental difference between armchair and experimental methods in philosophy -- call them a-methods and x-methods (following Dave Chalmers' useful abbreviations here) -- is that both primarily use intuitions about specific cases as their data, but in the former the philosophers deploys their own intuitions, and in the latter, the philosophers deploy what they determine to be the intuitions of a sufficiently strong majority of the folk.   If you're testing some epistemological theory E, and E predicts that some hypothetical case H is an instance of knowledge, then on this picture x-phi and a-phi both agree that the thing to do is to determine whether H is intuitively a case of knowledge, and the disagree only about how best to go about doing so.  Let's call this the pollist picture of x-phi, in honor of Williamson's gloriously high-handed reference to experimental philosophy as "the method of conducting opinion polls among non-philosophers".

But for many epistemological debates, pollism is a mistaken way to think about a possible x-phi contribution.  In particular, debates about whether some factor is or isn't partially determinative of our attributions of knowledge (or justification, etc.) do not need to be addressed in a pollist way.  The standard way to argue for such a theory, either with a-phi or x-phi construed pollistly, is something like:
(i) find a case A that is indicated to be (via either a-methods or x-methods) knowledge;
(ii) find a case B that is indicated to be (via either a-methods or x-methods) not knowledge
(iii) contend that the only difference between A and B that could explain their different knowledge valence is a difference along factor F.