Experimental Philosophy

Reversing the Knobe Effect with Alternate Saliencing

Brian Robinson, Paul Stey, and I have been working on a theory of the Knobe effect that draws on my collaboration with Beebe and Robinson.   The basic idea is to use non-moral psychological processes to explain the effect.  We presented some preliminary results at the Experiments in Ethical Dilemmas conference in London last week.  Here's a write-up of that presentation.

(The second link takes you to my [rather] new blog.]

Intentions: Philosophical and Empirical Issues

Call for papers: Topoi conference and special issue 
Intentions: Philosophical and Empirical Issues 
Rome, Italy, 29-30 November 2012

We are proud to announce that the first Topoi Conference will be held in Rome in November 2012. This will be the first in a series of conferences, to be held every 2 years, sponsored by Topoi: An International Journal of Philosophy (http://www.springer.com/philosophy/journal/11245).

In analogy with the journal format, each conference will focus on a specific theme (topos), and contributions presented to the conference will later appear in an issue of the journal dedicated to the same topic.

INVITED SPEAKERS 
Marcel Brass (Ghent) 
Cristiano Castelfranchi (Rome) 
Elisabeth Pacherie (Paris) 
Corrado Sinigaglia (Milan)

SUBMITTED PAPERS 
Submissions of unpublished papers are welcome on any topic relevant to the conference theme (see below). Submitted articles should be in English, not exceed 5.000 words in length (including references), and be prepared for blind reviewing. Only original papers (i.e., not published or submitted for publication elsewhere) will be considered, since the authors of accepted contributions will be invited to submit a revised longer version of their papers for a special issue of Topoi, edited by Markus Schlosser (Leiden) and Fabio Paglieri (Rome).

Submission of papers by e-mail to: Fabio Paglieri (fabio.paglieri@istc.cnr.it) 
Accepted file formats: .doc, .rtf., .odp, .pdf 
Deadline for submission (full papers): 31 August 2012

Society for Philosophy of Agency

The new website for the recently formed Society for Philosophy of Agency is now up here.  The Society is now accepting applications for membership.  Membership is free and open to graduate students, professional philosophers, and researchers working on issues about human agency who work primarily in cognate fields (e.g., law, neuroscience, psychology, theology, etc.). 

All you need to do to apply for membership is send an email to <philosophyofagency[at]gmail.com> with your name, email address, and institutional affiliation (if applicable).  You will be added to the Society's email list.  Your information will not be shared with anyone. 

The Society's first event will be held in a group session meeting on Friday, April 6, 2012, at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA.  It will be a panel discussion on "The Current State and Future of Philosophical Research on Action and Agency" featuring Jeanette Kennett, Alfred Mele, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Eddy Nahmias, and Manuel Vargas.

 

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.

X-Phi makes the Annual Review of Psychology

Each year, Annual Review of Psychology commissions critical reviews documenting the most important scholarly advances on a range of different scientific topics.  So it is really exciting that in a forthcoming volume, they have chosen to include an article specifically on experimental philosophy.

Readers of the blog may be interested in this paper ("Experimental Philosophy") by Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols, Philip Robbins, Hagop Sarkissian, Tamler Sommers and I, summarizing (from a slightly more psychological perspective) some of the incredible new discoveries that experimental philosophers have made regarding questions about morality, metaethics, free will, and consciousness.

Abstract: Experimental philosophy is a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy. The present review focuses on research in experimental philosophy on four central questions. First, why is it that people’s moral judgments appear to influence their intuitions about seemingly nonmoral questions? Second, do people think that moral questions have objective answers, or do they see morality as fundamentally relative? Third, do people believe in free will, and do they see free will as compatible with determinism? Fourth, how do people determine whether an entity is conscious?

 

Moral Psychology REP Entry

Research in moral psychology has often been done either primarily from the armchair (consider Nagel, Smith, Korsgaard, etc.) or primarily in reference to empirical work (consider Kohlberg, Batson, Damasio, etc.). But a hope I share with many others is to continue the trend of blurring these into a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach.

Partly toward that goal, I've completed a draft of a relatively short entry for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entitled "Empirical Work in Moral Psychology" (PDF). It covers both x-phi as well as empirical work not done by philosophers, and it ties them to traditional debates in philosophical moral psychology. The condensed range of topics included are: free will and moral responsibility, egoism and altruism, moral judgment and motivation, weakness and strength of will, and moral judgment and intuitions. The article is meant as a short introduction to this burgeoning field while following closely to the topics that appear in Michael Slote's REP entry "Moral Psychology."

Any feedback would be great, either in the comments thread or via email (joshdmay at gmail). Of course, if I've made a shameful error, feel free to let me know privately! I throw this initial draft out there only because I hope input will make it the best resource it can be. There are many constraints on this particular piece, so I certainly cannot accomodate all feedback. But I'll do what I can.

Thanks!

The Paradox of Moral Focus

Liane Young and I have recently become interested in what I think is an intriguing feature of morality's influence on social and causal cognition. This research began by borrowing from some studies which suggested that people's moral judgments can influence their judgments of force and freedom (if you don't know it, here's a funny 3 minute and 29 second overview). Liane and I took these cases and changed them just a little bit, to see if  people's moral jugments could actually lead them to giving directly contradictory judgments. 

I think the basic finding can be explained pretty simply. In one study, participants read a vignette about a hospital where a chief of surgery orders a subordinate doctor (against his will) to prescribe a drug called Accuphine. And, in some cases, the patient dies as a result of having taken the drug. Then, after reading the vignette, particpiants were asked one of two related questions:

• Did the chief of surgery force the doctor to prescribe Accuphine?
• Was the doctor forced to prescribe Accuphine?

While most participants agreed with the first claim, they actually disagreed with the second :   But this pattern of responses seems obviously inconsistent: participants both agreed that the chief forced the doctor, and disagreed that the doctor was forced. So what might explain this paradoxical pattern of responses? (more after the break.)

Free Will and the Bounds of the Self

From a certain sort of theoretical perspective, the problem of free will can seem extremely simple and straightforward. Yes, it may be true that your actions are determined by our beliefs, desires and intentions... but then again, your beliefs, desires and intentions are simply you. So the alleged 'problem' here is just that your actions are determined by your own self. Where then is the difficulty?

Yet, strikingly enough, people generally are not persuaded by this simple argument. They often hold on to a sense that determinism would be a real threat to their freedom. It seems to them somehow that if all of their actions were determined by causal interactions among their mental states, they themselves would be unfree, like mere  marionettes controlled by this complex computational process. 

In a new paper, Shaun Nichols and I suggest that it might be possible to make sense of people's intuitions in such cases if we can just get a little bit more clear on the folk conception of the self. In particular, we argue that people do not simply see the self as a collection of mental states (so that anything produced by one's beliefs, desires and intentions is thereby produced by the self). Rather, people can easily adopt a conception according to which the self is something that stands outside all mental states and can freely decide, in light of those states, whether or not to perform an action. On such a conception, it is almost as though the agent's mental states serve as lobbyists or advisors and the self is a kind of executive that can listen to the various opinions and then make a choice.

In the actual paper, Shaun and I provide a series of experimental studies to support this claim about the folk conception of the self, but regardless of whether you end up taking a look at those studies, we would love to hear any thoughts you might have about this basic theoretical approach.

Porto X-Phi Lab

Dear All,

The Porto X-Phi Lab, its website and seminar are officially launched. The Lab is a laboratory of experimental philosophy funded by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Porto and founded through the collaboration of a multidisciplinary team of researchers. Our general aim is to contribute to the development of the field of experimental philosophy. Our particular aim is to pursue a research program on agency and moral psychology.

http://portoxphilab.org

Carlos Mauro (Lab Coordinator) and Paulo Sousa (Lab Associate Coordinator)

Perspective in intentional action attribution

Does perspective play a role in intentional action attribution? Maegan Harris, Ashley Perez, and I argue that it does. Using a method borrowed from behavioral economics, we set up environments where people could actually perform an action or observe others performing an action (rather than just reading some scenario). This new approach in experimental philosophy indicates that in some circumstances people make strikingly different judgments about intentions and intentionality partially as a function of whether the person performs the action or watches somebody else perform the action.

In particular, people who performed an action with a bad consequence were more likely to think that consequence was not intended or intentional compared to an action with a good consequence. This pattern of results is opposite of what we find in the traditional Knobe-style cases where harmful consequences of actions are judged more intentional than helpful consequences. This may suggest that traditional Knobe-style effects are only found in some well-specified circumstances (e.g., hypothetical cases about others).

A draft of the paper is available here. We would be appreciative of any comments or suggestions!