Experimental Philosophy

The "Deep Self" Model

Hi all,

Like many others,  I've contracted a bad case of "Knobe Effect" fever!  I've written a paper on a model, which I call the Deep Self Model, that attempts to explain a variety of asymmetries in intentionality and responsibility judgments using a unified framework.

Quoting from the abstract, "The model proposes that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, a Deep Self that contains the agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes and a Superficial Self that contains attitudes that are less central and more fleeting".  An intriguing aspect of the model is that the distinction between an agent's Deep Self and Superficial Self is one already made by, or is implicit in the work of, a number of philosophers including Harry Frankfurt, Gary Watson and others.  Thus I hope the Deep Self Model will help anchor the recent asymmetry findings from the experimental literature in an already familiar and well accepted philosophical framework.

I would much welcome any comments and feedback.

-Chandra

Download sripada_the_deep_self_model_and_asymmetries_in_folk_judgments_about_intentionality_and_responsibility.doc

The Folk as Compatibilists and Incompatibilists

Edward Cokely (a graduate student in the psychology department here at Florida State) and I have run a set of experiments about folk intuitions of free will. We build off both Nahmias et al. and Nichols and Knobe's previous work. Our main finding is that there seem to be groups of people who express compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions--hence, the folk are not compatibilists or incompatibilists. Moreover, contrary to Nahmias et al's tentative position, our data suggest the biggest group of folk are incompatibilists. Section 3 reports these new findings (sections 1 and 2 are background).

At the end of the paper we hint at being able to predict these groups with individual differences. We have data about this, and we are currently conducting a study to replicate. Our hope is that by defining groups we can use more fine-grained techniques to understand what accounts for the differences (e.g., with protocol analysis).

We'd greatly appreciate any feedback!

Link to paper: “Most Folks Are Incompatibilists, But Not All”

Churchland on Decisions, Responsibility, and the Brain

I just found this interesting talk by Patricia Churchland (UCSD) on neurophilosophy, free will, and moral responsibility over at A Brood Crumb.  It's certainly well worth the watch!

Variantism

John Doris, Joshua Knobe and Robert Woolfolk’s (hereafter DKW) new paper on responsibility has been posted over at the Garden of Forking Paths. Most of the experimental work will be familiar to regular readers; the point of the paper is to argue for a particular view about responsibility on the basis of this work. DKW argue that philosophical approaches to responsibility are usually committed to two claims: invariantism and conservatism. Invariantism is the view that there is a single set of responsibility attribution criteria; conservatism is the view that the correct theory of moral responsibility will systematize folk attributions of responsibility reasonably well, so that folk attributions constrain, relatively tightly, the correct attribution criteria. DKW argue, on the basis of the experimental evidence, that in fact invariantism and conservatism conflict: folk attributions of responsibility are variantist.

DKW amass a large amount of evidence for the claim that folk morality is variantist. First, they argue, folk morality is neither compatibilist nor incompatibilist, but both at once: the folk have compatibilist intuitions with regard to concrete cases, but incompatibilist responses at a more theoretical level. Second, folk attributions of responsibility are sensitive not only to the psychological relations between agents and acts, but also to the valence of the action and the seriousness of its consequences. Thus, for instance, the folk hold people responsible for producing foreseen side effects when these outcomes are negative, but not when they positive, and they hold agents more responsible for negligent actions that produce seriously bad outcomes than for the same negligent actions when they produce trivially bad outcomes (in all, DKW identify four asymmetries in responsibility attribution).

Now, we can take issue with the details of the experimental paradigms in one or other of these experiments (as a matter of fact, I do). But it is very likely that DKW are right: there really is a lot of variation in folk attributions of responsibility. If that’s right, we can’t have both invariantism and conservatism. DKW argue that we must either become invariantist revisionists, or variantist conservatives (I note that there is a third option available – variantist revisionism – but it seems rather unattractive). They argue that we ought to plump for the latter.

As I think they will admit, their suggestion is a little too underdeveloped to be properly assessable. Indeed, it faces a dilemma, of which they’re well aware: on the one hand, too much variation, in the absence of a principle explaining and justifying the variation, and the resulting mess will better motivate scepticism than variantist conservatism; on the other hand, too much unification by principles and the result will be an invariantism. The success of their theory depends upon finding a middle way between these horns.

Here I want very briefly to raise a methodological issue. Conservative variantism is a possible view just in case conservatism is a possible view: that is, that folk attributions are stable enough for us to be able to say how the folk would respond to this or that case. But is conservatism possible? I’m worried that it isn’t: that in fact DKW only think it is because the studies they cite have limited their attention to a narrow range of questions.

I’m too lazy to check, but I suspect that these studies used a between-subjects design. Why? Because a within-subjects design would yield different results: subjects would become aware of a prima facie inconsistency between their responses, and would therefore be motivated to make them internally inconsistent. If that’s correct (and it is an empirical hypothesis) then how subjects judge these cases depends upon the nature of the study design. So the methodological question is this: what is the rationale for limiting ourselves to the between-subjects design when we want to uncover how the folk attribute responsibility? A within-subjects design doesn’t obviously contaminate judgments. If I’m right that both kinds of ways of probing folk morality are valid, and that they yield different responses, then conservatism isn’t on the table at all. And if that’s right, then the evidence DKW cite is evidence for revisionism or for scepticism.

Experimental Philosophy--a Modern phenomena?

In a recent Notre Dame Philosophical Review of James A. Harris's Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy, reviewer Sean Greenberg writes:

What is distinctive of eighteenth-century British philosophy, according to Harris, is that it is experimental philosophy, "philosophy which aims to be true to the facts of experience" (p. 2). Eighteenth-century readers saw An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as having introduced the experimental method that Newton had pioneered for the study of matter into the study of the mind, and Harris traces the methodology of British eighteenth-century accounts of freedom to Locke. Although Harris recognizes Newton's significance for eighteenth-century British philosophy -- he draws attention to the way in which Hume, Hartley, Priestley, and Reid all refer to Newton in support of their own approaches to mind and human freedom (pp. 64-65, 156-157, 172-173, 195) -- he particularly emphasizes Locke's methodological significance for eighteenth-century British philosophy, and he begins his narrative by examining Locke's account of freedom. Harris suggests that the substantial revisions which that account of freedom underwent over the course of the various editions of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding reflect "renewed attention to the experience of choice" (pp. 12, 20) on Locke's part. Although Locke's successors retained a commitment to the experimental method in their discussions of freedom, manifest in the importance they attributed to conscious experience (p. 10), which they cite as evidence for their different accounts of freedom, they found Locke's account of freedom itself unsatisfactory: William Molyneux objected that it "seems so wonderfully fine spun . . . that at last the Great Question of Liberty and Necessity seems to vanish" (p. 26).

The full review can be found here:  http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=5901

Trying to Test Smilansky's Free Will Illusionism

As some of you already know, Eddy Nahmias, Jason Turner, Steve Morris, and I ran a number of studies a while ago with the goal of probing folk intuitions concerning free will, determinism, and moral responsibility. The details of these studies--and our analysis of the results--can be found here. Our most surprising finding was that participants were less likely to have incompatibilist intuitions in response to cases involving determinism than philosophers (especially incompatibilists) have traditionally assumed. Leaving aside for now the results fof some interesting follow-up studies that have been run by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (the details of which can be found here)--I wanted to say a few words about a project that I am working on with Adam Feltz (a grad student here at FSU and a contributor to this blog). When we looked more carefully at Saul Smilansky's free will illusionism, we realized that his particular (and peculiar) position within the free will debate is markedly more dependant on empirical claims about folk intuitions than other positions. Indeed, we argue that if the relevant data does not come out his way, then there is no way of motivating illusionism at all. The details of our argument need not concern us now.

For present purposes, I only want to discuss the results of some studies we ran in an effort to test two empirical assumptions about folk intuitions that play a critical role in Smilansky's attempt to motivate his view. The first assumption is that the majority of people have illusory beliefs concerning the existence of libertarian free will. The second assumption is that if people were disillusioned about this--i.e., if they came to realize that libertarian free will is both incoherent and non-existent--this would have negative effects at both the societal and personal levels. On the one hand, people would be markedly less likely to behave morally. On the other hand, people would no longer find meaning and value in their lives. To test these assumptions, we ran some new studies--studies that mentioned determinism explicitly rather than simply implicitly building it in to the vignettes as we had done in our earlier studies. Participants were 105 undergraduates--none of whom had studied the free will debate before. They were broken into three groups--two groups of 40 and a group of 25 (FW1, FW, and FW3--respectively).

Of Mice and Men? Toxoplasma and Mind Control...

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a bizarre article in The London Times concerning some new studies on toxoplasma gondii. Here is an excerpt:

"THEY may look like lovable pets but Britain’s estimated 9m domestic cats are being blamed by scientists for infecting up to half the population with a parasite that can alter people’s personalities. The startling figures emerge from studies into toxoplasma gondii, a parasite carried by almost all the country’s feline population. They show that half of Britain’s human population carry the parasite in their brains, and that infected people may undergo slow but crucial changes in their behaviour."

If you find this to be as intriguing as I do, then perhaps you would also be interested in an article a few years ago in Scientific American entitled, "Bugs in the Brain." Does anyone else find this particularly threatening to our free will and autonomy? Minimally, we should be humbledby the fact that microorganisms seemingly know more about neural circuitry than we do.

UPDATE: My friends at the Philosophy of Biology blog (also run by FSU students!) have a post that provides links to a number of the scientific studies on toxoplasma (not to mention a picture of very cute kitten).

Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?

During the past year and a half, I have been working on a research project with Eddy Nahmias, Steve Morris, and Jason Turner. The project--which was an attempt to probe folk intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility in an empirically informed manner--has produced three papers. The third paper--entitled "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?"--has just been accepted for publication by Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Since we talk a lot about the relevance of folk intuitions to the free will debate--I thought some of you may be interested in checking it out. Here's the abstract:

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach.

"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.

Fashioning the Plain Person's View out of One's Own?

The recent issue of The Journal of Consciousness Studies is centered on an interesting paper about free will by David Hodgson (a justice of the Australian Supreme Court of NSW) entitled, "A Plain Person's Free Will." The list of commentators--which includes, e.g., J.C.C. Smart and Robert Kane--is impressive. However, it is disappointing that no one in the entire issue mentions any of the work that has been done on folk intuitions concerning free will by Eddy Nahmias, Steve Morris, Jason Turner, and myself or by Shaun Nichols (and more recently, by Nichols and Joshua Knobe). In Hodgson's defense, much of the research has yet to come out. But given that our piece on the phenomology of free will--which appeared in JCS less than six months ago--is very relevant, it would have been nice if any of the authors in this issue had at least acknowledged that perhaps we should pay more attention to what "plain people" actually believe before we place views, beliefs, and intuitions, in their mouths. In any event, the issue is full of a number of interesting discussions concerning free will and moral responsibility--so, people interested in these issues should certainly check it out. Once I have had time to wade through the whole thing, I will try to post something more about it. The abstract for Hodgson's paper is as follows:

Abstract: In my experience, plain persons (here meaning persons who are neither philosophers or cognitive scientists) tend to accept something like a libertarian position on free will, namely that free will exists and is inconsistent with determinism. That position is widely debunked by philosophers and cognitive scientists. My view at present is that something like this plain person’s position is not only defensible but likely to be closer to the truth than opposing views. To put this to the test, I have written a simple and straightforward outline of what I hope is a philosophically and scientifically respectable version of the plain person’s position on free will, and have offered it for demolition by those who say such a view is untenable. My account of free will is a robust one, explicitly inconsistent with determinism and intended to support equally robust views of personal responsibility for conduct.