Experimental Philosophy

Intuitions, Thought Experiments, and Expertise

Over the course of the last year, I have written extensively about intuitions, thought experiments, and expertise.

In "Experimental Philosophy of Language," a chapter co-written with Steve Stich for a Companion on the philosophy of language, I review the reasons for why a growing number of syntactians distrust the appeal to experts' intuitions, and favor the experimental study of linguistic intuitions. We argue that these reasons carry over to the linguistic intuitions philosophers of language have appealed to.

In "Expertise and Intuitions about Reference," forthcoming in Theoria (as part of an exchange with Michael Devitt), I provide some tentative evidence for the claim that expertise does not improve the reliability of experts' intuitions about reference.

In "Thought Experiments and Philosophical Knowledge," forthcoming in Metaphilosophy (together with some papers by Papineau, Williamson, etc.), I argue that a plausible view about intuitions (defended, e.g., by Williamson) leads to some form of skepticism about many, perhaps most, intuitions elicited by thought experiments (the argument differs from the one put forward by Jonathan Weinberg) I also say a few words about expertise. 

There are several positions that emerge from this body of work.

I reject the idea that philosophical expertise improves the reliability of intuitions in general. Whether or not philosophical expertise improves their reliability, and in which area of philosophy it does, is an empirical question, and available evidence casts doubts on an improvement of intuitions in ethics and philosophy of language. 

Furthermore, I hold that if intuitions are to play a role in some philosophical argument, they should be surveyed experimentally.

Finally, I argue that we have reasons to doubt that the intuitions elicited by many thought experiments are reliable, and this leads me to question whether that most of these intuitions can really justify the premises of philosophical arguments. 

Comments on any of these papers would be welcome.

CALL FOR PAPERS: 2nd Workshop of the Experimental Philosophy Group UK

17 - 18th September 2011, University of Sheffield

Submission Deadline: 20th May 2011

Experimental Philosophy Group UK invites submissions on the topic of experimental philosophy, in two categories:

1. 500-word abstracts for 45-minute presentations (including questions) that report the results of experimental research;
2. 500-word proposals for group discussions. The aim of the discussion sessions will be to facilitate the development of an effective experimental design, drawing on the expertise of the group. Proposals should identify a philosophical question where significant progress can be made by applying experimental methods. Discussions will be introduced by the proposer and chaired by a suitable philosopher/psychologist.

There will be three keynote presentations. We have confirmed two of these: Joshua Knobe (Yale) and Paulo Sousa (QUB).

High-quality submissions in all areas of experimental philosophy considered. Submissions encouraged from all levels of academia. 500-word abstracts to be sent as PDF or Word documents to experimentalphilosophyuk@gmail.com by 20th May 2011. Subject line of email should read “SUBMISSION [YOUR NAME]”. Body of email should include the following information: name and affiliation.

Experimental Philosophy Group UK aims to provide a forum for UK-based researchers from all disciplines who are engaged in or interested in the investigation of philosophical topics using empirical methods. The workshop will have a focus upon (i) providing a platform for UK-based experimental philosophers, (ii) providing instruction in experimental methods and (ii) providing a forum for constructive discussion and collaboration to help and encourage new experimental work.

Registration for this event is expected to open in May.  Presenters should be prepared to obtain funding from their home department, or to fund themselves.  You can download a PDF copy of this CFP (Download CFP 2nd Workshop of Experimental Philosophy Group UK) or view it on our website here.  We look forward to your submissions.

Workshop Organisers: Bryony Pierce (Bristol), Robin Scaife (Sheffield) and James Andow (Nottingham).

The Experimental Philosophy Society (XPS)

Greetings, I am writing to update everyone on the latest with the Experimental Philosophy Society (XPS).  As some of you may know, since we started XPS, we have hosted several outstanding group sessions at the APA which have given graduate students, post-docs, and professors of philosophy and psychyology the chance to present and discuss their recent work.  In order to be able to provide some very modest travel stipends to graduate students who were presenting at the APA, we originally decided to collect dues both in order to pay for these stipends and to pay for the space for the homepage.  

But once it became clear that graduate students represented the bulk of our membership, we decided that it made more sense to simply make XPS a dues free society!  So, once we send stipends to the junior folks presenting at the upcoming two APA sessions, we will no longer be sending stipends in the future (boo!) but we will also no longer be collecting dues (hooray!).  

We also decided to relocate the homepage for XPS--which will now be a free standing XPS blog.  We will use the blog to post information about upcoming events and APA sessions.  If you have anything you would like cross posted at either of the two blogs, please let me know.  Finally, if you'd like to help organize a session on experimental philosophy for either the APA or another conference, please volunteer your services.  XPS is now a free and open society and we welcome your support and suggestions!

Genre and Folk Evaluations of Art

How do our moral evaluations of artworks relate to our aesthetic evaluations? Put it another way: do moral defects cause or constitute aesthetic defects, cause or constitute aesthetic virtues, or are they aesthetically irrelevant? This is the question that we (Shen-yi Liao and Jonathan Phillips) attempted to answer in recent studies. Our findings suggest that there is no univocal answer to the question. Instead, the influence that moral evaluations have on aesthetic evaluations of artworks partly depends on genre.

Let's run through one study (N = 50; between-participants). In one condition, participants listened to a 30-second clip of a Taiwanese folk ballad song.

(Please enable flash to listen to the clip.)

Then they were shown two sets of "translated lyrics", and asked which set of lyrics would make the song more appealing.

"Show You the Facts" (Moral)
Men say stupid things like
“Women are not worth anything
I use them and then I toss them”
They don’t treat women like they should
Let me show you the facts, get it right:
Women are equals in every respect

"Game Over" (Immoral)
Another woman dropped down
I wanted it, I got it, and I’m gone
There’s another one around the corner
I’ll do the same thing with her
You know they want more from me
But the game’s over when I score

In the other condition, participants listened to a 30-second clip of a Taiwanese hip hop song.

Then they were shown the same two sets of "translated lyrics" as before, and asked which set of lyrics would make the song more appealing.

Deep Trouble for the Deep Self (Redux)

Chandra Sripada's (forthcoming) Deep Self Concordance Account aims to explain various asymmetries in people's judgments of intentional action. On this account, people distinguish between an agent's active and deep self; attitude attributions to the agent's deep self are then presumed to play a role in people‟s intentionality ascriptions. Two judgments are supposed to play a role in these attributions—a judgment that specifies the attitude at issue and one that indicates that the attitude is robust (Sripada and Konrath, forthcoming). In an article forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology, Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma, Edouard Machery and I show that the Deep Self Concordance Account, as it is currently articulated, is unacceptable.  For those interested, the paper can be found here Download Deep Trouble for the Deep Self-final.  And, for those interested in an earlier, lively discussion of the various issues raised in our paper and Sripada and Konrath's paper, that discussion can be found here.

The Instability of Philosophers' Judgments about Hypothetical Moral Scenarios

Non-philosophers' judgments about hypothetical philosophical scenarios are often labile and variable. They are subject, for example, to substantial order effects, and they vary by culture and gender. Question: Are professional philosophers' judgments about such hypothetical scenarios particularly better grounded? Jonathan Weinberg and Stephen Stich say no. Timothy Williamson says maybe yes. At stake, perhaps, is the reliability of "armchair philosophy" as a research method.

Fiery Cushman and I have started to examine the question experimentally. We begin by examining order effects on moral judgment: We presented hypothetical moral scenarios, in varying order, to three sets of respondents: professional philosophers, academic non-philosophers, and non-academics. (The professional philosophers had graduate degrees in philosophy and were mostly drawn from Leiter-ranked PhD-granting departments.) Non-philosophers, we suspected, would respond differently to the scenarios depending upon the order of presentation, a sign of instability and unreliability in judgment. Our question was: Would professional philosophers show smaller order effects and thus more stable judgments?

They did not. In fact, the overall trend across our data (marginally statistically significant) was for philosophers to show less stability their responses. This was true even for the subgroup of 91 respondents reporting a PhD in philosophy and a competence or specialization in ethics.

So, for example, the classic trolley problem comes in two versions. In the switch version, a bystander diverts a runaway trolley onto a sidetrack, killing one person on that sidetrack to save five people on the main track. In the push version, a bystander pushes a heavy person into the path of a runaway trolley, preventing the trolley from killing five people further down the track, but killing the heavy person. Now, whether they think such actions are good or bad, the majority of respondents rank the two actions the same when they are presented side-by-side. But order of presentation influences this result: Respondents are substantially more likely to rank the two actions the same when the push version is presented first than when the switch version is presented first. (Why? Intuitions about switch are unstable, and tend to descend to match push, if push is presented first. Intuitions about push are more stable, shifting around less, and thus often will not rise to match switch when switch is presented first.) Non-academics rated switch and push equivalently 53% of the time when switch was presented first and 68% of the time when push was presented first. For academic non-philosophers, the differential was 55% vs. 71%. For professional philosophers, it was 54% vs. 73%, including 50% vs. 75% for the ethics PhD subgroup -- effect sizes well within statistical chance of each other.

Moral luck scenarios (e.g., drunk driver hitting a tree vs. hitting a girl) and action-omission scenarios (e.g., snatching away a drowning person's life vest vs. failing to offer him a life vest) produced similar results. In each case, the order effects were about the same size for philosophers and non-philosophers. In our aggregate measure, philosophers (including ethics PhDs) trended toward showing slightly larger order effects overall than did the two comparison groups.

For further details, see our manuscript here, forthcoming in Mind & Language.

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]

CFP: Special Issue of The Monist on Experimental Philosophy

CFP: Special Issue of The Monist devoted to Experimental Philosophy

http://monist.buffalo.edu/callsforpapers.html#Experimental

Deadline for Submissions: April 30, 2011

Advisory Editor: James Beebe, University at Buffalo (jbeebe2@buffalo.edu)

In recent years an increasing number of philosophers have been utilizing the experimental methods of the cognitive and social sciences to test key empirical claims advanced in various areas of philosophical dispute. Much of the time these experiments have taken the form of philosophical thought experiments presented to ordinary subjects which test whether the responses elicited match philosophers' claims. A number of surprising findings have been made by experimental philosophers that seem to bear directly on debates in action theory, epistemology, ethics, folk psychology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. But the philosophical significance of these findings continues to be the subject of debate. Contributions are invited that present results of applying experimental methods to philosophical hypotheses or address the significance of these results and the methodological challenges posed by experimental philosophy.

Send submissions via email to the advisory editor, James Beebe (jbeebe2@buffalo.edu), in a format suitable for blind review.

Latest issue of Science features review of experimental philosophy

Shaun Nichols reports!

The Self-Reported Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors

New essay in draft here, co-authored with Joshua Rust.

Abstract:

We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with self-report. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show significantly better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: Ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation.

Warning: This essay is monstrously long -- 70 pages! In earlier (uncirculated) drafts we had tried to keep it to normal journal-article length, but eventually we decided to give up on that. It's a very complicated study, so it just takes some space to lay it all out properly.

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]

Experimental Philosophy Conference & Workshop on the Experimental Philosophy of Consciousness

Not only do people experience consciousness, they also attribute it. But how is consciousness attributed and what sorts of entities are ordinarily thought to possess it? Experimental research provides new insights into these and related questions. Join the Metro Experimental Research Group for a free workshop on this topic, as well as a conference of cutting-edge work in other areas of experimental philosophy.

Because we received so many excellent, submitted presentations, we've decided to extend the program of the conference for two days. Presentations will begin at 3:30 on Friday, March 25th, and conclude after the invited workshop on the experimental philosophy of consciousness at 5 pm on Saturday, March 26th. Invited presenters include Alvin Goldman, Kurt Gray, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, David Rosenthal, and Susanna Siegel.  To reflect the interdepartmental nature of MERG, the first day of the conference (the 25th) will take place at CUNY, the second (the 26th) at NYU.

You can learn more about the conference here. I hope to see you there!