Experimental Philosophy: The problem of ESEE knowledge

No, not that problem. (Sorry, Stew.)

Instead, it's a draft of a new paper on the epistemic side-effect effect (ESEE), which I thought might interest some people around these parts.

Comments welcome!

Short abstract: I report five experiments and three basic findings on ESEE. First, I confirm earlier findings on the effect. Second, I show that the effect is virtually unlimited. Third, I introduce a new technique for detecting the effect, which enhances its theoretical significance.

(Longer abstract below the fold.)

Abstract: Cognitive science has always concerned itself with how we acquire, retain and apply knowledge. Cognitive scientists have recently become interested in how we ascribe knowledge too. Traditionally, it has been thought that the moral valence of a proposition is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to whether someone knows that the proposition is true, and thus irrelevant to the truth-value of a knowledge ascription. On this view, other things being equal, it’s no easier to know, for example, that a bad thing will happen than that a good thing will happen. But a series of very surprising recent experiments suggest that this is actually not how we view knowledge. On the contrary, people are much more willing to ascribe knowledge of a bad outcome. This is known as the epistemic side-effect effect (ESEE), and is a specific instance of a widely documented phenomenon, the side-effect effect (a.k.a. “the Knobe effect”), which is the most famous finding in experimental philosophy. In this paper, I report a new series of five experiments on ESEE, and in the process accomplish three things. First, I confirm earlier findings on the effect. Second, I show that the effect is virtually unlimited. Third, I introduce a new technique for detecting the effect, which potentially enhances its theoretical significance. In particular, my findings make it more likely that the effect genuinely reflects the way we think about and ascribe knowledge, rather than being the result of a performance error.