Experimental Philosophy

Experiment Month Results: Intuitions about Scientific Progress

People typically talk about scientific progress. But what does scientific progress amount to? In the philosophy of science literature, one can find three major accounts (See Darrell Rowbottom and Alexander Bird). The Epistemic (knowledge) view holds that people’s concept of scientific progress involves the accumulation of scientific knowledge. The Semantic (truth) view says that scientific progress involves the accumulation of true scientific beliefs, though not necessarily scientific knowledge. The Functional-Internalist (goal) view states that scientific progress primarily involves achieving either theoretical or technological scientific goals. When arguing for or against these three views, philosophers often rely on intuitions about how much progress people think scientists have made in hypothetical cases relative to the amount of knowledge, truth, or problem-solving outcomes that are generated. Typically, these philosophers assume that ordinary intuitions regarding these factors count as some of the best evidence for their particular approaches. But we might wonder: do actual ordinary intuitions best support the epistemic, semantic, or functional-internalist views?

To find out, Wesley Buckwalter and I ran the following 2x2x2 between-subjects experiment.

Jesse Prinz in New York Times

Today's column by David Brooks on "The Limits of Empathy" features research and commentary by Jesse Prinz.  Anyone who has been lucky enough to hear Jesse speak knows how articulate and insightful he is on this topic.  It's great to see his ideas getting such wide exposure.  Congratulations Jesse!

Reminder: Formal Epistemology Meets Experimental Philosophy in Tilburg (28-29)

If you are near Tilburg, don't miss the workshop on Formal Epistemology Meets Experimental Philosophy. Details here. See you there.

Another French X-Phi Book

For those who are interested in the international diffusion of experimental philosophy, I wanted to signal the recent publication of a second french book dedicated to experimental philosophy : Ruwen Ogien's L'Influence de l'Odeur des Croissants Chauds sur la Bonté Humaine, et autres questions de philosophie morale expérimentale. It's mainly about moral philosophy (trolley problems and all the stuff) and it also includes under the label "moral experimental philosophy" the work of situationist psychologists.

Here's a fun excerpt I translate to share with you:

The idea to run experiments about behaviour to confirm hypotheses about "human nature" is nothing new.

Kant was very fond of this kind of exercise, for which he probably wasn't very gifted. One of his hypotheses was that a woman would sulk longer if she was told she's old (it's objective) than if shewas told she's ugly (it's subjective).

(It is said that he really tested this hypothesis on his sisters, which, nowadays, would have probably costed him to be pursued for mental cruelty : Louis Ernest Borowski, Reinhold Berhnard Jachmann et Ehrgott André Wasianski, Kant Intime, dir., trad. Jean Mistler, Paris, Grasset, 1985.)

X-Phi Methods Bleg (Likert Scales)

Hi everyone, I'm in the process of revising a manuscript for a journal and could really use a little help with something. A reviewer asked for me to clarify the Likert scale in one of my surveys. Given that I am very new to experimental philosophy, I am not sure that what I have said in response to the reviewer's concern is right or adequate. I would be very grateful if anyone here is willing to help.

Here is what I have written (I have included the entire passage, so as to not leave out anything that may be in error):

• The Moral Intuition Survey (MIS) is a 17-question survey which asks respondents to morally judge individual moral propositions 1-5 scale (where ‘1’=morally wrong, ‘3’=morally neutral (neither good nor bad), and ‘5’=morally required).  It is important to clarify that we did not understand this range of responses to be a Likert scale (where this is understood in the standard sense, i.e. as involving summations of responses across different survey items).  Instead, we understood each MIS question to be a (singular) Likert item, where the 1-5 scale is indexed to each individual item.  Let us explain.  Likert scales take a range of responses (e.g. a 1-5 scale) across different survey items to represent a particular psychometric property.  For example, several items on a personality inventory (e.g. the Short-D3) may be summed as a representation of a particular personality trait (e.g. Psychopathy).  The MIS was not intended to measure any such property summed across different items.  Instead, it was intended to measure moral judgments, as indexed to particular moral issues.  Consider, for example, MIS item#10 (“Gay marriage is: “).  In asking respondents to rate this item on a scale from 1-5 (where `1’=morally wrong, ‘3’=morally neutral [neither good nor bad], etc.), we were only interested in measuring how respondents judged that particular issue (e.g. the morality of gay marriage), considered in isolation.  We believe that this decision – to treat the MIS’s 1-5 range in each case as a Likert item (rather than a Likert scale, to be summed across items) – is clearly justified, given our study’s aims.  Finally, we hold that the MIS’s 1-5 scale is perspicuous in what it purports to measure.  A person who gives a response of “1” to MIS item#10 (“Gay marriage is: “) is simply reporting their judgment that gay marriage is morally wrong.  Although there are deep philosophical and linguistic questions about the meaning of moral terms (e.g. “morally wrong”), we do not believe it possible or advisable to attempt to resolve these issues in our study.  Questions about the MIS’s 1-5 scale can also be addressed in terms of the survey’s validity, which we now discuss.

Thanks again to any of you who take the time to help!  I am very grateful.

 

X-Phi in the Stanford Magazine

Stanford Magazine has a nice piece on experimental philosophy.  One of the more interesting bits from the article is a quote from Allen Wood, who will apparently not be standing in line to purchase tickets for our bandwagon tour:

"That more people believe one thing over another, I don't think there is anything very deep to be learned that way," he says. "I'm afraid I don't think that experimental philosophy enables you to learn anything you didn't already know about philosophy, because it's very hard to devise experimental tests to verify claims that are philosophically interesting. Experimental philosophers tend to underestimate the difficulty of designing experiments and research programs. It's much easier to 'know' something than to verify it in a scientific manner. You're more likely to just confirm your own philosophical prejudices and presuppositions. I think a lot of it is false, misleading, pointless at best and maybe even harmful."

If nothing else, it is a bit comical that a non-experimental philosopher would charge us with not appreciating the difficulty of  designing experiments and research programs!  As a free will skeptic who both expected and wanted the data on folk intuitions about free to come out incompatibilist and yet whose name is on a series of papers arguing for natural compatibilism, I can at least say with confidence that not all experimental philosophers are simply fishing for evidence that confirm their own philosophical prejudices and presuppositions.  But at least I can sleep easy knowing that "at best," our work may be pointless.  That alone should dispell the myth that experimental philosophy isn't properly philosophical! 

Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy

Here is an exciting announcement about a new series by Oxford University Press:

• Call for Papers: Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy

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We are pleased to announce the new Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy series, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Joshua Knobe, Tania Lombrozo, and Shaun Nichols. The series joins other successful volumes in the Oxford Studies in… series, which bring together original articles on all aspects of their respective topics. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy will publish a volume every two years, featuring outstanding papers at the cutting edge of experimental philosophy as well as papers that engage in critical discussion of the field. Philosophers and scientists alike are invited to contribute.

We are currently soliciting abstracts for proposed contributions to the first volume. Abstracts should be no more than 1,000 words, and should be submitted to oxford.xphi@gmail.com by December 15, 2011. Abstracts should include a full author list, institutional affiliations, contact information and a summary of the proposed paper. Proposals for experimental papers should include a brief summary of the methods and results of the experiments reported.

Authors will be notified whether they are invited to submit a complete manuscript by February 15, 2012, with full papers due on August 15, 2012. Submissions will undergo a review process prior to final publication.

For further information about experimental philosophy and the Oxford Studies series, see the Experimental Philosophy Page or the Oxford Philosophy Series list.

 

Experimental Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, and Citation Analysis

For obvious reasons, experimental philosophy is often characterized as the study of those intuitions elicited by philosophical thought-experiments. However, we are all aware that this is a simplification, and that there is (fortunately, imo) much more to experimental philosophy than that: Some of the most interesting recent studies (Eric Schwitzgebel's work, Adam Arico and colleagues' article on the folk theory of consciousness in M&L, etc.) are moving beyond the intuition-pumping paradigm. 

In a forthcoming article ("An evidence-based study of the evolutionary behavioral sciences" in BJPS), Kara Cohen and I have been using a new tool, which could be of interest to some of you: quantitative citation analysis. Using this tool, we show that the usual, very negative characterization of evolutionary psychology by philosophers of biology is largely mistaken, and that philosophers of biology have been fighting a strawman.

Quantitative citation analysis could be particularly useful for philosophers of science who want to add quantitative ools to their toolbox.

Moral Grammar on Philosophy Bites

Many thanks to Thomas Nadelhoffer for mentioning awhile back the publication of my new book, Elements of Moral Cognition.  A few months ago I discussed some of the book’s main themes in a philosophy bites interview with David Edmonds (co-author of the entertaining book, Wittgenstein’s Poker).  The podcast of our conversation can be found here.

Two New Papers That May Be of Interest

There are two new papers on SSRN that readers of the X-Phi Blog might find interesting:

1) Stephen Stich, "Do Different Groups Have Different Epistemic Intuitions?  A Reply to Jennifer Nagel"  [http://ssrn.com/abstract=1919107]

Abstract:     
Intuitions play an important role in contemporary epistemology. Over the last decade, however, experimental philosophers have published a number of studies suggesting that epistemic intuitions may vary in ways that challenge the widespread reliance on intuitions in epistemology. In a recent paper, Jennifer Nagel offers a pair of arguments aimed at showing that epistemic intuitions do not, in fact, vary in problematic ways. One of these arguments relies on a number of claims about the psychological literature on intuitive judgment and on mental state attribution (also known as “theory of mind”, “mindreading” and “folk psychology”). I call this the "theoretical argument". The other argument relies on recent experimental work carried out by Nagel and her collaborators. It is my contention that in setting out her theoretical argument, Nagel offers an account of the relevant scientific literature that is, in crucial respects, both flawed and misleading. My main goal in this paper is to rectify these errors and to make it clear that, once this is done, Nagel’s theoretical argument collapses. Thus her paper provides no support at all for her bold claim that “neither ethnicity nor gender has a significant impact on knowledge ascription in general, nor on epistemologically interesting cases in particular.” In the final section, I offer some critical observations about Nagel’s strategy for dealing with empirical data that does not support her view – both other people’s and her own.

 

2) Kevin Tobia, Wesley Buckwalter & Stephen Stich, "Moral Intuitions: Are Philosophers Experts?" [http://ssrn.com/abstract=1923260]

Abstract:     
Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people’s moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers’ moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philosophers and non-philosophers do indeed sometimes have different moral intuitions, but challenging the notion that philosophers have better or more reliable intuitions.