Experimental Philosophy

Are We Dumb(founded) or Dubious?

My student, Bradley Thomas, and I have been wondering if there is a problematic confounding factor in the infamous trolley cases. If you are like us (and many of our students), one reason you answer that it’s wrong to push the fat man off the footbridge is not so much that you think it is morally inappropriate but that you think it is stupid. A fat man is not going to stop a train! So, while it’s highly believable that pushing the fat man will kill him, it’s unbelievable that doing so will actually save five people. In contrast, it is believable enough that you could throw a switch to make a train avoid five people so that doing so will in fact save them, though it will also kill one worker. 

Of course, you are told to believe what the scenario says, but that’s hard to do when what it says is so … silly. Some people may overtly reject the purported “facts” of the case. Others may try to accept them but be unable to “internalize” them in such a way that their moral intuitions properly respond to those facts. As Anthony Appiah points out in his recent book, these dilemmas ask us to imagine what should be done in emergency situations and, if we are able to imagine that, we may employ heuristics to make quick moral judgments, heuristics like: “Don’t risk killing an innocent person unless you feel quite confident it will save more innocent persons.”

So, we are trying to test (a) whether this “epistemic” confound may be exaggerating the large differences in responses to Switch and Footbridge cases, differences usually explained in terms of the effects on people’s intuitions of killing by personal contact and/or of killing a person as a means to an end rather than as a side-effect of that end (we are not trying to show that these effects are not significant), and (b) whether this confound has been discounted as an explanation for people’s divergent responses to the two cases, such that people may be less dumbfounded than some have claimed. Instead, they may be dubious.

For instance, if we’re not mistaken, Fiery Cushman and Liane Young (in their wonderful 2007 M&L paper) treated subjects who explained their divergent moral judgments in terms of rejecting stipulations of one of the scenarios as “morally dumbfounded”—that is, they coded such explanations as “Alternative explanation: added assumption,” rather than as “Sufficient” (i.e., explanations that recognize the “personal” nature of Footbridge vs. the “impersonal” nature of Switch). If we are correct, subjects’ explaining that they reject the stipulations of a case should similarly count as an adequate explanation of their judgments, at least if they seem to recognize that they are answering differently in part because the scenarios differ in their believability.

We have some preliminary results showing that the degree to which participants believe the purported outcomes of moral dilemmas is highly correlated with their moral judgments (e.g., the more they believe that smothering their child in the circumstances of the scenario will save their other three children, then more they agree that smothering their child is the right thing to do). The tests below are meant to further test this hypothesis. We think the results are potentially important both for what they reveal about people’s moral intuitions and the relation of such intuitions to their “epistemic” intuitions and also for what they may say about the methodology of experimental philosophy—i.e., how (and when) can we trust judgments about unbelievable philosophical thought experiments?

We hope you will provide feedback about our hypothesis and also about our scenarios, which we have found excruciatingly difficult to develop. We're really hoping you save us from headaches down the road by finding any flaws that we've overlooked!  For all four of our cases, in addition to asking the standard “How morally appropriate is it for [agent] to do X [the act that leads to one being killed]?”, we also ask four questions about believability that take this basic form:

How likely do you think it is that, if [agent] does NOT do X, the five workers will be killed and the one worker will survive?

How likely do you think it is that, if [agent] DOES do X, the one worker will be killed?

How likely do you think it is that, if [agent] DOES do X, the five workers will survive?

How likely do you think it is that the ONLY way for [agent] to save the five workers is to do X?

Here is our version of the impersonal Switch case, which we call "believable" to indicate that it is rather believable that flipping the switch will actually save the five (it has been modified from the traditional Switch cases in order to make it more parallel with the new cases we constructed to test our hypotheses):

Frank is the only passenger in the front car of a subway train on some elevated tracks; the conductor just shouted that the brakes have failed, and then passed out over the controls. Frank knows about subway trains and knows that the automatic braking system at the next station will stop the train, so Frank, the conductor, and the other passengers are not in danger. But he sees that the train is speeding toward five people working ahead on the tracks; they are on a high overpass so they cannot escape in time. Frank also sees that there is a side track leading off to the left and, if he can flip a switch on the train's control panel, it will turn the train onto the side track where there is one person working on the tracks. The only way for Frank to prevent the deaths of the five workers on the main track is to flip the switch in order to turn the train onto the side track. If Frank flips the switch, the one worker on the side track will be run over and killed. If Frank does nothing, the five workers on the main track will run over and killed.

To examine our question of whether believability influences people's judgments about this case, we have constructed an unbelievable impersonal dilemma called Statue to match the believable impersonal Switch case above. Like Switch, Statue is impersonal (no contact), killing the one is a side-effect of the means used to save the five, and performing the proposed action is likely to kill the one (just as flipping the switch will kill the one worker on the side track). However, in contrast to Switch, in Statue (like the Footbridge case) we have attempted to make it unbelievable that performing the proposed impersonal action will actually save the five workers. If believability, or epistemic intuitions that contradict the stipulations of the thought experiment, are part of the driving force behind the difference in people's judgments about the Switch vs. Footbridge cases, then we would expect that judgments about this Statue scenario to move in the direction of judgments about Footbridge (and that judgments of appropriateness will correlate with judgments of believability). Below is our version of Statue, or if you are curious to see what these will look like on our online surveys, you can see the Statue case by clicking here

John is on a footbridge over some elevated subway tracks. John can see that a subway train approaching the footbridge is out of control, with its conductor alive but passed out over the controls. John knows about subway trains and knows that the automatic braking system at the next station will stop the train so the conductor and passengers are not in danger. But he sees that the train is speeding toward five people working ahead on the tracks; the tracks are so high that they cannot escape in time. John also sees that the only way to stop the train is to drop a weight onto it heavy enough to break through the cockpit window and depress the emergency brake switch on the control panel beneath the passed-out conductor. The only available, sufficiently heavy weight on the footbridge is a large statue next to John. The only way for John to prevent the deaths of the five workers is to push the statue off the footbridge and through the cockpit window in order to depress the brake switch on the control panel beneath the conductor. If John pushes the statue off the footbridge, the conductor will be crushed and killed. If John does nothing, the five workers on the track will be run over and killed.

Similarly, we have tried to construct a believable personal dilemma called Conductor to compare with the unbelievable personal Footbridge case (this was a hard one to create!). Like Footbridge, Conductor is personal (involves contact), killing the one is a *means* to saving the five, and performing the proposed action is likely to kill the one (as pushing the fat man will kill him). However, in contrast to Footbridge, in Conductor we have tried to make it believable that performing the proposed personal action will actually save the five workers. If believability is part of the driving force behind the difference in people's judgments about the Switch vs. Footbridge cases, then we would expect judgments about this Conductor scenario to move in the direction of judgments about Switch (and that judgments of appropriateness will correlate with judgments of believability). Below is our Conductor scenario, followed by our version of Footbridge (again modified from the original to make it more parallel with our other cases):

Your comments are very much appreciated!

Thanks, Eddy and Bradley

 

Conductor

Steve is the only passenger in the front car of a subway train on some elevated tracks; the conductor is alive but has passed out over the controls. Steve knows about subway trains and knows that the automatic braking system at the next station will stop the train, so Steve, the conductor, and the other passengers are not in danger. But he sees that the train is speeding toward five people working ahead on the tracks; the tracks are so high that they cannot escape in time. Steve also sees that if he can pull down the emergency brake lever located under the control panel, the train will stop before it hits the five workers. The train’s cockpit is so narrow that the only way to get to the brake lever in time is to push the conductor off of the controls and out of the doorway of the speeding train. The only way for Steve to prevent the deaths of the five workers on the main track is to push the conductor out of the train in order to pull down the brake lever. If Steve pushes the conductor out of the train, the conductor will be killed by the impact. If Steve does nothing, the five workers will be run over and killed.

Footbridge

Bill is on a footbridge over some elevated subway tracks. Bill can see that a subway train approaching the footbridge is out of control, with its conductor alive but passed out in the cockpit. Bill knows about subway trains and knows that the automatic braking system at the next station will stop the train so the conductor and passengers are not in danger. But he sees that the train is speeding toward five people working ahead on the tracks; the tracks are so high that they cannot escape in time. Bill also sees that the only way to stop the train is to drop a weight onto it heavy enough to break through the cockpit window and depress the emergency brake switch on the control panel. The only available, sufficiently heavy weight on the footbridge is a very large subway worker who has fainted next to Bill. The only way for Bill to prevent the deaths of the five workers on the track is to push the large worker off the footbridge and through the cockpit window in order to depress the brake switch. If Bill pushes the large worker off the footbridge, the worker will be killed by the impact. If Bill does nothing, the five workers on the track will be run over and killed.

Workshop on Epistemic Assessment

Readers of this blog ought to find interest in this upcoming workshop at the University of Toronto entitled "What We Think about Knowing:  Cross-cultural Uniformity and Diversity in Epistemic Assessments."  Speakers so far include Stephen Stich, Rebecca Saxe, and Anna Papafragou.  It should be really interesting.  Thanks to Jennifer Nagel for the heads up!

 

Collective Agency: From Intuitions to Mechanisms

Dear X-philies,

My colleague Benoit Dubreuil and I recently finished a paper that you might be interested in. We discuss the question of  collective agency and show how, in the first sections how some  x-phi  experiments (e.g. Knobe and Prinz) plays an important role in this debate. Comments welcome !

Hardy-Vallée,B & Dubreuil, B.  Collective Agency: From Intuitions to Mechanisms(pdf)

Abstract:

The debate on the nature of collective agency has been at the center of the philosophy of the social sciences for the last century. In recent years, philosophy of language has been the dominant approach to a debate that has often been reduced to the question of the legitimacy of interpreting collective agency on the basis of folk-psychological categories like belief and desire. In this article, we argue that the debate between individualists and collectivists is currently stagnating, but can be revived by a more empirically sensitive approach to agency. Understanding agents, collective or individual, requires an understanding of the mechanisms that bring about and maintain agency. Collective agents, we suggest, are legitimate constructs in social ontology, but their agency is special. Although they implement control mechanisms similar to that of individual agents, they do not have a conscious first-person point of view. Therefore, like individualists, we recognize the ontological salience of individual agency, and like collectivists, we recognize the soundness of collective agents. However, we reject the folk-psychological account of agency (shared by individualists and collectivists) and favor a mechanistic one.

Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic

Since people are ptiching their essays, I hope you all won't mind my announcing my new book!

Philosophers introspect in the armchair and make sweeping claims about consciousness.  What happens if, instead, you give a subject a beeper and ask her to report on randomly sampled moments of her everyday experience?  Will her reports agree with those of philosophers?

Russ Hurlburt and I gave a single subject ("Melanie") a beeper for six days and interviewed her in depth about 17 randomly sampled moments of inner experience.  Hurlburt did so from the perspective of a proponent of this method as the best way to uncover the real facts about consciousness, I from the perspective of someone skeptical about introspective reports.

The core of the book is edited transcripts of the interviews, where Melanie does her best to describe her experience, Russ tries to bring out the truth in her reports, and I press and challenge them both.  Russ and I continue our disagreements and connect to current and historical philosophical and psychological literature in over 80 side boxes.  We also write separate, substantial introductions and conclusions each from our own perspective, discussing both the state of consciousness studies in general and beeper methodologies in particular.

This book is not so much a debate between opposing partisans as a collaboration between opposing partisans, in which each tries to understand and find the truth in the other's view.

Here's MIT Press's official website for the book.  Here's the book on Amazon ($26.66 + free shipping).  Here's the penultimate draft on my website.

bad epistemology & the justice system?

Copied from language log (which for some reason has no permalinks):

Arizona knows

What does it mean to KNOW something anyway? The US Supreme Court is currently trying to deal with this as it considers the appeal of Clark v. Arizona, No. 05-5966. The Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction of a 17 year-old named Eric M. Clark, who shot and killed a Flagstaff policeman in 2000 (see here). He was found incompetent to stand trial and after three years of treatment in a mental hospital, he could no longer have an insanity defense because of the odd statutes in the state of Arizona that bar the defense from using evidence of diminished capacity. This state only allows a defendant to plead "guilty except insane," apparently ignoring the fact that Clark was so mentally disturbed that he thought he was shooting a space alien. At trial he was found guilty of INTENTIONALLY killing a law officer and now that he has recovered his sanity, he has to pay for the crime that he didn't KNOW that he committed.

The M'Naghten rules, followed by most states, say that insane persons do not KNOW the nature and quality of the criminal act and that they don't KNOW that they are doing anything wrong. But these rules appear to be unimportant in Arizona. Now that Clark has been deemed sane, he still has to account for what he did six years ago, when he wasn't. The state's lawyer tried to explain this saying, "the state has discretion to define insanity as it sees fit." He went on to say that based on the evidence in the bench trial, Clark KNEW he was killing a police officer and that he PLANNED the crime in advance. When Chief Justice Roberts asked him about what was so different about barring mental illness as evidence of intent but not barring other evidence, such as failure to be able to understand English, the state's lawyer replied that this question is too complex to ask a judge to decide. It's hard to decide where to begin with this kind of reasoning.

So how do we KNOW that somebody KNOWS something? One might say, "Since I just washed my car, I KNOW it is going to rain," or "I suspect that it will rain," or "I figure it's going to rain." You can't really KNOW it though. When a person really KNOWS something, three steps seem to obtain:

1. One believes it to be true.

2. One has good reason to believe it to be true.

3. There is a substantial probability that it is true.

Everyone agreed that Clark was so deluded that he believed the officer was a space alien (1). A sane person would have good reason to believe it was a policeman (2) and that his uniform or something else would provide probability of this (3). But it's hard to understand how a mentally ill person who believed the victim was a space alien would even get to steps 2 and 3. When the police stopped his car because his loud radio was creating a nuissance, Clark claimed he was trying to drown out the voices in his head. Despite this, the court claimed that Clark INTENTIONALLY PLANNED the murder. Now we somehow add intentionality to knowing.

The court's admission that Clark was "guilty except insane" is tantamount to admitting that he was, indeed, insane. The intentions and plans of insane people are even more difficult to infer than the plans and intentions of sane people. Except in Arizona, where the courts seem to have managed to figure out how to KNOW what people KNOW, PLAN, and INTEND -- even insane people. Amazing. 48 other states do not treat insanity in this way. I wouldn't want Arizona to write my dictionary.

It looks like Arizona could use a large dose of sociolinguistic audience context. Clark clearly intended to shoot a space alien but he had no reason to believe he would have done this if he didn't have a twisted sense of reality. In his mind, he shot a space invader, not a policeman. Arizona could also do with a dose of term clarification. Maybe the state can define insanity how ever it wants, but that sounds a lot like Humpty Dumpty's way to define words: "words mean what I want them to mean, nothing else, nothing more." By judging Clark "guilty except insane" (itself a mind-boggling expression), Arizona falls into the same category of the four states that have totally abolished the insanity defense: Kansas, Utah, Idaho, and (regretfully) Montana. It would probably be better for Arizona to abolish the insanity defense than to pretend that it can KNOW what people are thinking, especially when they are insane.

A Request from Ram

I recently got an email from Ram Neta looking for some advice on some experiments he'd like to run, and I suggested to him that I put his questions to the X-Phi community at large, and he agreed that that would be a good idea.  So, this is from Ram:

Lots of philosophers would accept each of the claims
listed below, on the grounds that those claims are
each intuitively plausible.  Putting aside for now the
question of whether this can ever be a good defense of
any epistemological claim, I'm interested in whether
it's even true that these claims are intuitively
plausible.  Here's a sample list of the claims I have
in mind:

(1) When it visually appears to me as if there's a cup
in front of me, and I have no reason for believing
that there's no cup in front of me, then I'm justified
in believing that there's a cup in front of me. 

(2) When it visually appears to me as if there's a cup
in front of me, and I have no reason for believing
that it doesn't visually appear to me this way, then
I'm justified in believing that it visually appears to
me as if there's a cup in front of me.

(3) When I'm justified in believing that p, and I'm
justified in believing that q, and I have no reason to
think that p and q aren't both true, and I know that r
is entailed by the conjunction of p and q, then I'm
justified in believing that r.

Now I happen to think that the conjunction of (1) -
(3) leads to some false consequences, but that's not
really relevant to the substance of my project.
Really, what I want to know is this:  is it even true
that each of (1), (2), and (3) is intuitively
plausible?

So now I want to test this, and I'm trying to write up
story problems to use in querying subjects.  My first
question for you is this:  how do I test subject's
intuitions about whether or not a belief is
"justified"?  That's a term of art and I don't know
any vernacular equivalent for it.  Do I just have to
stick with "really knows" and "only believes", and
just pack additional information about the truth of
the belief into the story?   

And a second question.  In assessing the intuitive
plausibility of a general claim like (3), is it best
to assess the plausibility of specific instances of
it?  Or is it better somehow to explain the claim in
its full generality (assuming this is somehow possible
-- I haven't figured out a way to do that yet in the
course of a story problem), and then query subjects
about the truth of that general claim?

Do you know of any experimental work that has had to
deal with these two issues?

I'm inclined to think that one way to work around the problem of "justified" (which Ram is surely right is something of a term of art) would be ask a number of different questions in a more ordinary sort of vernacular.  "Did X have a good reason to think...?"  "Was it ok for X to think...?"  "Was this a good way for X to come to believe...?" "All things considered, was it right for X to think...?" and so on.  No one of these will exactly capture what philosophers mean by "justified", and for any given one of them, and any given subject,  they might form some idiosyncratic interpretation.  But you could still generate a sort of 'epistemic goodness' quotient for each subject, and argue (plausibly) that this should track what philosophers have in mind by "justified".

Other advice for Ram, fellow X-Philes?

"As If" Theories...

In a number of areas of philosophy one might be tempted to put forward what I am going to call an "as if" theory in an effort to respond to skeptical arguments. An “as if” theory has the following form:

Even if we have good evidence and/or arguments to the effect that humans lack some property or capacity x, it is nevertheless in our interest to continue believing and/or acting as if x is a property or capacity that we do not lack.

Take, for example, the suggestion that even if humans happen not to be "metaphysically" free--we may be better off living under the general illusion that we are. Both David Velleman's "epistemic freedom"(2001) and Saul Smilansky's "illusionism" (2000) come to mind. It is easy enough to imagine similar stories being told in other areas as well. In the wake of John Doris' attack on robust character traits via what he calls situationalism (2002), for instance, it would be easy enough for a virtue theorist with consequentialist tendencies to argue that we should continue acting as if our character traits were more robust than the empirical data suggest they actually are. Consider another possible “as if” theory--even if it turns out that harsh penalties do not deter violent crime (indeed, even if it turns out that harsher penalties make matters worse!), we are nevertheless better off as a society pretending that harsher penalties do in fact reduce the amount of violent crime.

“As if” theorists have an easy was of shielding themselves from the impact of skeptical arguments. Indeed, they can essentially grant the skeptical premises while at the same time arguing that we can avoid the potentially negative social implications of accepting these skeptical premises by simply pretending that these skeptical premises are false. Hence, even if humans are descriptively unfree or even if events are entirely determined (or entirely random for that matter) or even if many (if not most) of the springs of action are beyond (or below or above) the folds of consciousness or even if our belief in moral objectivity is false or even if there is no God (or gods), it is still to our advantage to maintain certain illusions about the contrary being the case. In this respect, “as if” theories allow us to respond to the “real” threat of skeptical concerns along roughly Humean lines—i.e., we accept the premises and conclusions of skeptical arguments at face value while in our studies. Having done so, we nevertheless eventually find ourselves once again playing backgammon with our friends and engaging in other “mundane” affairs—living as if all of those skeptical arguments were a distant bad dream. On this view, we may naturally have a preference for certain socially adaptive fictions and fantasies. Hence, another benefit of “as if” theories is that they can be coupled with evolutionary explanations for why humans prefer the illusions that we do. And they also receive some empirical support from the research into the positive societal upshots of self-aggrandizement and other forms of cognitive biases. It turns out that people are generally better off--socially speaking--if they are somewhat out of touch with the truth about their own physical and mental limitations. If so, this gives us all the more reason to consider the possibility that even if we lack some property or capacity x, perhaps we really would better off pretending that we nevertheless have x after all.

The problems with self-deception writ large notwithstanding, does anyone think that the “as if” argumentative strategy is an effective one? I haven't really thought it through myself--I am really just curious to see what others think--either about some of the examples I have discussed or others that I have overlooked.

An Experiment by Weatherson

Thanks to Tamar Gendler for pointing out another recent post on Weatherson's page. Perhaps some of you will be interested in looking at his experiment--I am sure he would appreciate comments.

What's in a concept? (a reply to Brian Weatherson)

Following Thomas's cue, I want to say a few words in response to Brian Weatherson's recent musings on the question of whether intuition-based methodologies in analytic philosophy can be saved from the cognitive diversity attacks by taking a 'multiple concepts' approach. That is, one explains away the divergent intuitions of different groups by attributing different concepts to the different groups. As Ernie Sosa has written, if "the proposition affirmed by [one set of subjects] as intuitively true is not the very same as the proposition denied by [the other group] as intuitively false", then there's no real conflict of intuitions.

Brian links to our suggestions about how this move offers little hope to the practitioner of conceptual analysis, and I won't re-rehearse them here. He wants to offer a "more direct response" than that one. I don't have any problem with that in principle, but I want to observe that one reason we don't want to make the kind of more direct response he offers is dialectical: if we made heavy-duty use of some particular take on concept possession, then a proponent of conceptual analysis could simply say, 'well, that's not my take on concept possession'. If the relevant take on concept possession was sufficiently well-established, then perhaps that move would be too costly for the proponent of CA; but I take it that the questions here are very far from settled.

One worry about Brian's picture is that many proponents of CA simply will be unable to accept it, because that picture views the target philosophical concepts as extremely attenuated, to the point of having almost no substantive content. Consider the example of 'the' concept of the moral good shared by you, me, Kant, and Osama bin Laden. On Brian's account, we all have the same concept, because that concept serves the same fundamental role in our cognitive economy: at a minimum, providing a bridge from judgements of a certain sort to reasons of a certain sort. But what is to become of the traditional project of normative ethics, on this picture? There is nothing in the concept of the good to help choose between the wildly different accounts of the good that you, me, Kant, and Osama bin Laden might hold. (I can't speak for you, but I'm certain that the other members of that group completely disagree with each other.) Appealing to the concept helps address a particular metaethical question, but the ethical questions are left pretty much completely up in the air. Considerations of the concept of the good just don't help us rule one way or another on the various questions that have traditionally motivated debates about, say, the law of double effect. So if normative ethics is to continue, it would have to take on a different ratifying metaphilosophy than CA. My sense of Brian's post was that he wanted to save CA by redirecting it to a different emphasis -- conceptual role instead of hypothetical cases -- but at least some practitioners will, I fear, consider their village more burned than saved in the process.

It seems clear that this is the same for knowledge. If the concept of knowledge is exhausted by "can be used as premises in practical reasoning", then we won't be able to appeal to CA to help us determine what we should, in fact, use as our premises in practical reasoning, i.e., to help us figure out what the conditions on knowledge ought to be. (I'm not 100% sure I agree with his take on the fundamental conceptual role for knowledge, either. How do we decide that it isn't "the goal of inquiry" or "the norm of assertion" or …?)

Setting aside the parochial concerns of the CA practitioner, what is the status of Brian's picture of concept sameness? Although I feel some of the tug of Brian's examples, I can't help but feel at the same time that these sorts of funny cases are exactly the sort for which the phrase "in one sense" was created. I want to say of his A and C, for example, that in one sense they share the same concept of cause, whereas in another sense they don't. It's just not obvious to me that the relevant ordinary notion of sameness of concept is up to the task of making the distinctions as nicely as Brian wants it to.

Also, I (and some of the commentators over at Brian's site) wonder whether the congruence-of-cases heuristic for sameness of concept isn't doing more work in Brian's cases than he realizes. I believe that even bin Laden, as completely screwed up as he is, probably agrees with most of us on a vast number of particular ethical judgments. Especially if they are framed in terms of how one ought to behave towards those to whom one has ethical obligations -- we disagree most vividly, I imagine, on the question of who is or is not included in that group. If someone's concept played the same abstract role in their mental lives as a particular concept did in ours, but they disagreed with us on all of the cases … well, I don't know what to say about such a person, but I doubt that we'd comfortably ascribe to them the same concept as our own. So I suspect that, at the level of our ordinary practices here, things are much messier than Brian makes them out to be.

(By the way, isn't there a tu quoque lying around here somewhere? I.e., Brian says that "The main point I want to defend is that intuitions about particular cases are not of that much evidential value in doing conceptual analysis. Intuitions about borderline particular cases are of even less value." But isn't the most load-bearing part of his argument … the consideration of some intuitions about very borderline cases of sameness of concept? I suppose he could say that it's really being driven by considerations of the conceptual role of the concept of concept, but then it begins to look at bit question-begging, I think. Anyhow, there's lots more to be said about borderline cases, but I'm working on that for another post.)

Let me note that it won't do to appeal to cognitive science to overrule our ordinary practices here -- in general, concept and category researchers traffic in entities that are profoundly unshared across individuals, with the result (to Fodor's undying dismay) that we all have different concepts. Not a result that I imagine Brian, or any proponent of CA, being too friendly to.

Finally, let me briefly respond to the issue of the strong contrastive focus in our probe, i.e., forcing subjects to choose between "really knows" and "only believes". The reason we did this was to try to cue the usage of "knows" that is of interest to epistemologists, as opposed to its other usage as a rough synonym for "feels certain". I think we'd be willing to accept any possible worries along the lines that this setting generally skewed our subjects' responses down -- indeed, they were overall pretty unwilling to attribute much knowledge in our surveys. But our arguments didn't much turn on the absolute results, just the comparative ones, and I just don't see how the use of the contrast even begins to account for the differences between the demographic groups we tested. Brian writes, of the claim that this contrastive difference could explain our results: "This is not to say that this is what is going on in the WNS experiments, it’s just a hypothesis. If we had independent evidence of cross-linguistic differences in responses to contrasting options it might even look like a plausible hypothesis. But there are some avenues to explore here that aren’t adequately addressed." (For starters, it's hard to see how "evidence of cross-linguistic differences" would be relevant here, since our subjects were native English speakers.) I might be misreading the force of that last sentence, but it looks to me like a suggestion that we have an uneliminated confound here. But that's not how the game is played: if there were already evidence of relevant differences between our groups of the sort that Brian suggests, then we would be remiss for not considering it. But in the complete absence of such evidence, it's not an uneliminated confound so much as a rival theory without (yet) any evidence on its behalf. (This same sort of reply applies to several of the concerns raised in the Sosa paper linked to earlier, e.g., that we did not offer a 'not enough information' option -- it's not enough to say that the way we framed the probes might have affected the subjects' responses, but rather a challenge needs to suggest how that framing might be responsible for the differences between our experimental groups.)

For all that, though, I would very much welcome anyone's using different materials to check out what versions can aggravate or reduce the intergroup differences in intuition. Someone could set a couple of grad students to attempt to do the same studies, e.g., but using as a probe "Does X know that p? Yes No". I'm pretty sure that the other bloggers here would agree that these debates are more interesting if both sides are trying to generate data….

Weatherson on Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich

Brian Weatherson has posted something on his blog about the Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich paper on folk intuitions/concepts and epistemology. I figured some of you may be interested.