Experimental Philosophy

The Latest on Experimental Philosophy of Consciousness

These past few years have seen a surge of new experimental papers on intuitions about consciousness -- with lots of new data indicating that people's intuitions about whether an entity is capable of phenomenal consciousness (feelings, experiences) can come apart in interesting ways from their intuitions about whether an entity is capable of non-phenomenal mental states (beliefs, desires). [For a quick summary, see this post.]

In an innovative and thought-provoking paper (forthcoming at Mind & Language), Adam Arico, Brian Fiala and Shaun Nichols argue that this flurry of new data might actually be leading us astray. On the view they defend, there is actually a single underlying process that is responsible for attributions of what they call AGENCY. Then, once we have classified an entity as an AGENT, we immediately go ahead and attribute to it a capacity for all sorts of psychological states: beliefs, desires, feelings, experiences and everything else besides.  

How can this be possible? The key insight of the paper is that even if people's core capacity for attributing mental states follows this simple model, people might have various other capacities that enable them to inhibit or modify their initial intuitions. Take this adorable fellow: 

If you know a little bit about neuroscience, you might conclude that it is not at all capable of experiencing pain... but even so, there could be a little voice within you saying: 'Just look at it! Of course it will feel something if it gets hurt!' The aim of the AGENCY is to understand the nature of this little voice and the core capacity that generates it. 

To get at its workings, Arico and colleagues conduct a reaction time study which, they argue, shows that people's reactions to insects like this one show the trademark signs of an initial attribution of consciousness. (Indeed, there was even some evidence that people are covertly attributing feelings to plants!) Ultimately, then, the suggestion is that people are ascribing consciousness to everything they intuitively regard as an agent, whether they admit it or not. 

Gettier made ESEE

It is assumed by nearly all philosophers that agents in standard Gettier conditions do not have knowledge, and that this intuition generalizes across vignettes with sufficiently similar epistemic features.  Yet, recent work in contemporary epistemology has suggested that besides the traditional epistemic features of a case like JTB, certain non-epistemic features such as practical interests and error can also determine whether a belief counts as knowledge.  Recently, the Epistemic Side-effect Effect (ESEE) demonstrates that moral considerations significantly influence third-person mental state attributions of knowledge, suggesting that perhaps morality might also be counted as one of these non-epistemic features.

Yet given the important evidentiary role Gettier case intuitions have historically played in arguments about the constituents of knowledge, we might wonder whether the standard intuition “s does not know that p” is case-dependent, in that it is also sensitive to the same kinds of non-epistemic features. That is, if ESEE actually does show that knowledge has an important moral comment, could it really be true that Gettier agents are said to have knowledge, just depending on the particular kind of moral outcome p happens to be?

To test this I ran three experiments that Getter-ized the epistemic side-effect effect.  Below is stimuli used in one of these experiments:

The mayor of a small town is trying to decide whether or not to sign a new contract with a local corporation.  The math is all very complex, but all his economic strategists think that there’s a relatively good chance that one outcome is that it will [create/cut] jobs for workers in the community.  The mayor says, “All I really care about is campaign contributions, not people’s jobs, and I am sure to get millions from the corporation if I agree.”  So, he decides to sign their contract. 

James the office secretary overheard everything, and is appalled by what the mayor said.  Nonetheless, the mayor decides to sign the contract. 

The corporation, however, didn't take any chances.  They secretly switched the contract with a totally different one right before the mayor signed it.  By changing all the fine print, in some cases the opposite of what the mayor thought he was signing, the corporation could be sure it got what it wanted.  Sure enough, shortly after the mayor signed the contract, a number of members of the community [got/lost] jobs, and the mayor received a huge donation to his reelection campaign.

Participants were then asked if they agree or disagree with the following statement: The mayor knew that by signing the contract he would create/cut jobs. The result was that between subjects, participants were much more likely to say that the mayor had knowledge when the outcome was bad than when it was good.

Additionally, two separate groups of participants were also asked to agree or disagree with a different statement: James the office secretary knew that members of the community would get/loose jobs.  Even though James has nothing to do with the Mayor's blameworthy action, people still continued to show the same basic effect in ascribing knowledge to James as they did for the Mayor.  These mayor and secretary results can be seen on the right two columns of the graph below, respectively:

Able to completely reverse the standard intuitions in these cases, it seems like such findings begin to suggest that moral judgment can have a strong impact on people’s intuitions in Gettier cases.   Comments about this effect, or about how epistemologists should best interpret these data as in the paper available below, are very welcome.

Experimental Philosophy Lab Meetings in New York: Schaffer and Peterson and Vaesen on the 28th

Join the Metro Experimental Research Group for an experimental philosophy lab meeting on Friday, January 28th, at 4:00 pm at the CUNY Graduate Center, room 5414.  Presentations by Jonathan Schaffer and Martin Peterson and Krist Vaesen will be followed by informal discussion at a local pub. Please note: this and other talks this semester will be held at CUNY. Titles and abstracts follow.

Our entire line up for this semester is available at: http://www.yale.edu/cogsci/mergcalendar.htm

Jonathan Schaffer
ANU/Rutgers University, Philosophy

Title: Knowledge, Stakes, and Mistakes

Abstract: To what extent are knowledge ascriptions sensitive to what is at stake, or to the salience of error? Epistemological debates over contextualism often involve claims about 'our intuitions'. Yet these claims have proven difficult to empirically substantiate. I will discuss some recent empirical work (including some new studies) which aim to discern how knowledge ascriptions work.

Martin Peterson & Krist Vaesen,
Eindhoven University of Technology, Philosophy

Title: Knowledge According to 654 Philosophers

Based on an empirical study on 654 trained philosophers, we propose a pragmatic theory of knowledge. On our account, the concept of knowledge marks high-quality sources of information. In particular, to deserve the title of knowledge, a source of information S must have information exhibiting four informational qualities: (i) S’s information must be (likely) true; (ii) S’s information must be relevant and precise; (iii) S’s information must be represented in the right representational format (e.g. in English, not binary code); and (iv) S’s information must be easy to retrieve (in seconds, not days). We defend our theory against possible objections, and detail its significance for contemporary epistemology.

Is Folk Aesthetics Realist?

Here is a new paper I co-authored with Nicolas Pain. In this paper, we examine an argument in favor of Aesthetic Realism (=the thesis according to which aesthetic values are mind-independent properties of objects) that appeal to folk aesthetics. This argument goes like this: (i) lay people consider that aesthetic judgments can be right or wrong, which means that (ii) folk aesthetics is realist, which is (iii) a great advantage for Aesthetic Realism since other theories have the burden to explain away folk aesthetics (by developing error theories). In a series of experiments, we show that people are not generally realists, since most of them consider aesthetic judgments to be neither right nor wrong.

The idea that people consider their aesthetic judgments to have universal value is also an important starting point of philosophical Aesthetics: many philosophers working in this area think that there's something special about aesthetic judgments (i.e. they are based on feelings but considered universally valid) and that one of their task is to explain it. We discuss how our results suggest that there might not be something special about aesthetic judgments.

Comments are most welcome !

(And maybe this is the occasion to open a new category on Experimental Philosophy: Aesthetics. Yay!)

Ethicists' Responsiveness to Student Emails (new essay in draft)

by Joshua Rust and Eric Schwitzgebel

Available here.

Abstract:

Do professional ethicists behave any morally better than do other professors? Do they show any greater consistency between their norms and their behavior? In response to a survey question, a large majority of professors (83% of ethicists, 83% of non-ethicist philosophers, and 85% of non-philosophers) expressed the view that “not consistently responding to student emails” is morally bad. A similarly large majority of professors (>80% of all groups) claimed to respond to at least 95% of student emails. We sent these professors, and others, three emails designed to look like queries from students: one concerning office hours, one about declaring a major, and a third about a future course of the professor’s drawn from posted schedules of classes. All three emails were tested against spam filters, and we had direct confirmation that almost all target email addresses were actively used. Professors responded to about 60% of the emails. Ethicists’ email response rates were within statistical chance of the other two groups’. Expressed normative view correlated with self-estimated rate of email responsiveness, especially among the ethicists. However, for all groups of professors, measured email responsiveness was virtually unrelated to either expressed normative view or self-estimated email responsiveness.

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.] [Comments closed. Please see the Splintered Mind thread for comments.]

for the record, I wanted to call it "XPS, Cowpoke Division"

The University of Arizona will be hosting an inaugural meeting of the Western Experimental Philosophy Workshop on January 15 in Tucson.  The speakers will be Ron Mallon, Chris Weigel, Trevor Kvaran, Ángel Pinillos, and myself.  I very much hope this will turn out to be an annual event!

Call for Experimental Philosophy Abstracts

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

The Metro Experimental Research Group (MERG) invites submissions of abstracts for Short "Cutting Edge" Research Presentations. Abstracts should discuss exciting new empirical research or works in progress suitable for brief presentation and engaging topics of philosophical interest. Submitted abstracts should be no more than 1,000 words in length. A limited number of projects will be selected for presentation at a colloquium to be held in New York City on Saturday, March 26^th, in conjunction with a workshop of invited presentations on attributions of consciousness and other mental states:

ATTRIBUTIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES

Invited Speakers Include: Alvin Goldman, Kurt Gray, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, David Rosenthal, and Susanna Siegel.

Submit abstracts by February 10th to mergphi@gmail.com with the subject line “submission”.

Decisions will be announced by February 20th.

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.

NOTE: This is the sequel to a conference held last year on metaethics. Presenters selected for inclusion on this year’s program will receive more time to present their work than was available during last year’s conference.

(Learn more about the conference here: http://www.yale.edu/cogsci/conscxphi.htm)