Experimental Philosophy

Reviving the "Interpretive Diversity" Hypothesis

Adam Bear's last post encouraged me in presenting my own pet hypothesis about the Knobe Effect. It can be found in this paper, written with Emmanuel Dupoux and Pierre Jacob , and forthcoming in Mind & Language. Following Nichols and Ulatowski's proposal, we consider that the Knobe Effect and the Skill Effect can be accounted for only if we accept that "intentionally" has three different meanings that are differently elicited by contextual cues.

Asymmetry of Intentionality Judgments in Causal-Deviance Scenarios

When Joshua Knobe documented an asymmetry between people’s judgments of intentionality toward negative and positive side effects in his CEO scenario, many, including Knobe himself, hypothesized that this difference was due to subjects’ differing moral attitudes toward the CEO in the two cases. In particular, subjects seemed to be blaming the CEO for harming the environment in the former case but not praising or blaming him in the latter and, in one way or another, these attitudes toward the CEO were thought to influence subjects’ intentionality ratings (e.g., Knobe, 2006; Adams & Steadman, 2004; Alicke, 2008).

Mere Exposure to Bad Art: Experiment Results

Are there really such things as artistic masterworks? That is, do works belong to the artistic canon because critics and museum curators have correctly discerned their merits? An experiment carried out by Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, and myself in connection with the experiment month initiative was designed to engage with a previous study that suggested we should be sceptical.

X-Phi in Scientific American

There are two new x-phi related pieces in Scientific American.  The first is by Josh Knobe and is entitled, "Thought Experiments: Philosophers."  The second is by Shaun Nichols and is entitled, "Is Free Will and Illusion."   Needless to say, the field of experimental philosophy has come a long way!  

Judgments about Free Will and Determinism in patients with emotional deficits

Nichols and Knobe have famously advanced the hypothesis according to which compatibilist intuitions are the product of emotional reactions. To test for this hypothesis, Maxime Bertoux, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde, Bruno Dubois and I ran a study on patients suffering from a behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia. These patients have emotional deficits, so, we argue, Nichols and Knobe's hypothesis shoud predict that they would be less likely to give compatibilist responses than control participants. The results of our experiment can be found in the draft of our paper.

Comments are welcome!

Group Sessions at the Pacific APA

Readers of this blog might be interested in attending the following two group sessions at the upcoming Pacific APA.  

Thursday Evening, April 5

7:00-10:00pm

Experimental Philosophy Society:

Session Chair: Galen Baril (University of Scranton)

Presentations:

Al Mele (Florida State University) “Free Will, Science, and Substance Dualism” w/ commentary by Kevin Timpe (Northwest Nazarene University)

Tamler Sommers (University of Houston) "Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: A Match Made in Purgatory," w/ commentary by Chris Franklin (Biola University)

Jonathan Phillips (Yale) “Manipulating Morality: Connecting Causation, Intention and Moral Responsibility,” w/ commentary by Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University)

Chris Weigel (Utah Valley University) "Further Implications of Variance in Free Will Intuitions," w/ commentary by Thomas Nadelhoffer (Dickinson College)

Friday Evening, April 6^th

7:00-10:00pm

Society for the Philosophy of Agency

Panel Topic: The Current State and Future of Philosophical Research on Action and Agency

Session Chair: Joseph Keim Campbell (Washington State University)

Panelists: Jeanette Kennett (Macquarie University); Alfred Mele (Florida State University); Thomas Nadelhoffer (Dickinson College); Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University); Manuel Vargas (University of San Francisco)

 

Call for Book Proposals: Experimental History and Philosophy of Science

Paolo Palmieri and I are starting a new book series on Experimental History and Philosophy of Science with the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Please, contact us if you have book suggestions or if you would like to run ideas by us!

One-Day Conference on Mind Perception

Adam Waytz and I would like to announce a conference on Mind Perception to be held on January 26, 2012 as a pre-conference at SPSP 2012, San Diego. 

Mind perception encompasses a variety of topics including empathy, perspective-taking, theory of mind, religious belief, mentalizing, agency detection, anthropomorphism, dehumanization and morality.  We have an exceptional line-up of speakers who explore mind perception from a variety of perspectives, including experimental philosophy, social cognition, development, and neuroscience.

http://www.mindperceptionconference.com/

Speakers include Alison Gopnik, Joshua Knobe, Jason Mitchell, Ara Norenzayan, Rebecca Saxe, Thalia Wheatley and Liane Young.  Also speaking will be Jonah Lehrer, best selling author and writer for Wired magazine.

Registration will include lunch, after which will be a poster session.  If you have a suitable poster, submissions are due by Nov 1st - all those with accepted posters will have the registration fee waived.

We are grateful to the Kellogg School of Management for their support.

Does the S&M Robot Feel Guilty?

Philosophers of mind typically distinguish experiential states or subjective experiences (like seeing red, feeling pain, or guilt) from intentional states (like believing or wanting) on the basis of their purportedly obvious phenomenal character.  But if subjective experiences really are distinctive because they possess an obvious and unmistakable phenomenal character—in other words, because there is “something it is like to occupy them”—then presumably philosophers and non-philosophers will categorize the same mental states as subjective experiences. Specifically, if philosophers have identified a certain type of mental state as a paradigmatic subjective experience, then we should expect ordinary people to identify the same type of mental state as a subjective experience as well.  But do they?

One method experimental philosophers and cognitive scientists have been using to get at this question of how people categorize mental states draws from philosophical thought experiments, which have long asked us to consider what mental states we would be willing to attribute to other entities. The method assumes that if ordinary people categorize a mental state as an experience insofar as it possesses an unavoidable phenomenal character, then we should expect this to be reflected in their attributions of phenomenal states to other entities. As Sytsma and Machery (2010) write, “we should expect the folk to deny that an entity, be it a simple organism, a simple robot, or a zombie, that lacks phenomenal consciousness can see red just as readily as they deny that it can be in pain” (302).

X-Phi and Human Rights

What do experimental philosophy and cognitive science in general have to do with human rights?  Many visitors and contributors to this blog might be inclined to answer: not much.  Perhaps X-Phi and Cog Sci can play a useful negative role in undermining certain dubious assumptions about cultural universals, in the tradition of Weinberg, Nichols & Stich (2001).  But the idea that these fields could play a constructive role in defending the existence or perhaps even expanding the reach of universal human rights seems, well, false and even a bit outlandish.  My own view is different, and in a new paper I have begun to pull together some ideas and arguments about the positive relationship between cognitive science and human rights.  There is some overlap with the brief discussion of human rights in my book, Elements of Moral Cognition, but also much that is new.  Here is the abstract:

"Moral Grammar and Human Rights: Some Reflections on Cognitive Science and Enlightenment Rationalism,"  in UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL ACTION, PROMOTING HUMAN RIGHTS, Ryan Goodman, Derek Jinks, & Andrew K. Woods, eds., Oxford University Press (forthcoming)