Experimental Philosophy

Mele's Interview with 3:AM

Yet another interesting and illuminating interview by 3:AM's Richard Marshall.  This time, Al Mele talks about free will, self-deception, neuroscience, experimental philosophy and a number of other themes.  Check it out!

Online Consciousness Conference 2012

Readers of the blog may be interested in a number of papers from this year's Online Consciousness Conference. 

In addition to this year's keynote on the The Biological Cost of Consciousness by Bernard Baars, also check Peter Carruthers, Logan Fletcher, and J. Brendan Ritch's work in Evolving Self-Consciousness, arguing that evolutionary origins of  self-consciousness depend on the prior evolution of a mindreading system.

And also, in Does the S&M Robot Feel Guilty? Mark Phelan, Justin Sytsma and I, continue our earlier discussion (from this blog) on valence, function, and the folk dichotomy of phenomenal states.  Justin has provided some new experimental data on this topic since then that people interested in this question will want to check out.

Comments are open Feb 17-March 2, so be sure to head on over to OC4 and join in!

Frege Lectures by Stich

Daniel Cohnitz asked me to pass along the following:

Videos of the 2010 "Gottlob Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy", delivered by Stephen Stich (Rutgers) on "Experimental Philosophy and the Bankruptcy of 'The Great Tradition'" are now online. You'll find them on the Frege Lectures website

http://daniel.cohnitz.de/index.php?Gottlob-Frege-Lectures-in-Theoretical-Philosophy-20101

or via this direct link:

http://www.cohnitz.net/Frege/Stich2010/

A draft of the paper presented in lecture 3 is online here:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1683066

X-Phi Online and in the Media

Here are three things readers of this blog may find of interest (if you haven't already seen them):

1. Jesse Prinz was recently interviewed as part of the University of Chicago's Elucidations series of podcasts.  
2. Joshua Knobe recently wrote a piece about experimental philosophy for the NYT's Opinionator/The Stone series.
3. Finally, Philosophy TV has an discussion between Tamar Gendler and Eric Schwitzgebel about the distinction between aliefs and beliefs--with a nice foray into the troubling literature on IAT.

Happy viewing and reading!

Mele on Big Think

There is an interesting and illuminating talk posted on Big Think by our own Al Mele.  In addition to talking about free will and weakness of will, he also talks about experimental philosophy.  So, you should drop by to check it out! 

X-Phi Goes International

I thought that some readers of the blog might be interested in the number of x-phi things currently going on around the world.

• The conference How and Why Economists and Philosophers Do Experiments is set for March 27th & 28th at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan.
• As posted below, there's a workshop in experimental philosophy in Wrocław, Poland May 21st - 23rd at the Institute of Philosophy. 
• In Varna, Bulgaria, there's an experimental philosophy conference June 4th - 6th at the Varna International Philosophical School. 
• A conference on moral judgments and intentional action has been planned for July 5th & 6th at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
• There's a new experimental philosophy site in Portuguese, and there have been rumors of a Portuguese translation of Experimental Philosophy eds. Knobe & Nichols. 
• There's also an experimental philosophy page up at the University of Bristol in England.
• And there have been a number of x-phi projects coming out of the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris.

Levin on X-Phi

I just found this critical notice by Janet Levin, which came out in the October issue of Analysis:

http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/extract/69/4/761

She discusses nearly every chapter in the collection by Knobe and Nichols, Experimental Philosophy, and ultimately argues that:

the results of the most methodologically sound and philosophically relevant studies discussed in this volume could have been obtained from the armchair, and thus that experimental philosophy may not present a serious challenge to the traditional methods of analytic philosophy. (p. 761)

However, I think this statement of her conclusion is a bit misleading. Sometimes she does, as this quote indicates, simply want to reject the revisionist claim that x-phi should replace the armchair entirely (or pretty much entirely).  But at other times she seems to be targeting the more modest claim that x-phi is a more promising methodology for some projects in philosophy. For example, she says "it seems that traditional analytic methods may well suffice for identifying the judgements that provide the right sorts of data for philosophical theories" (p. 767). Here she's not just saying x-phi doesn't undermine the armchair entirely; she's suggesting the armchair is as good as x-phi at gathering the relevant information about our concepts and so on.

Anywho, I thought readers of this blog might like to take a look at her piece if they haven't already.

Doris & Prinz on Appiah

John Doris and Jesse Prinz have a nice review of Anthony Appiah's book Experiments in Ethics over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 

The review focuses on Appiah's discussion of character and of ethical intuitions and then concludes with a suggestion that 'empirical work demands a reconstruction of morality.'  

Jackson on X-Phi

Thanks to all the folks who sent me a link to Frank Jackson's recent NDPR review of the recent Experimental Philosophy anthology that was edited by Knobe and Nichols (a link to this volume can be found in the sidebar to the left).  A quick google search also turned up this video of a recent talk by Jackson at Swarthmore entitled "Conceptual Analysis and Experimental Philosophy."  I suspect this is a version of the talk he gave at the ANU conference on X-phi back in 2007.