Experimental Philosophy: Crosscultural Research

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Epistemic Challenges Faced by Non-native English Speakers in Philosophy: Evidence from an International Survey.Uwe Peters, Yener Cagla Cimendereli, Alex Davies, Charlotte Gauvry, Kiichi Inarimori, Anna Klieber, Sitian Liu, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Federica Russo & Juan Samuel Santos Castro - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-37.details
The widespread use of English in the field of philosophy facilitates international collaboration but may also pose significant challenges in understanding, analyzing, or producing information for both native (NES) and non-native English speakers (NNES). These challenges have not yet been systematically investigated. We conducted an international survey of philosophers (N = 1,615), comparing NES and NNES, while controlling for their academic position (e.g., student, staff, etc.) and other relevant variables. Responses indicated that NNES needed up to twice as long as NES to read English articles and nearly twice as long to prepare English presentations. Additionally, even NNES with the highest English proficiency reported significantly more English manuscript rejections, greater avoidance of attending or asking questions at philosophy events in English, and more frequent feelings of ridicule for their English use. No statistically significant difference was observed in the reported time required to complete an English draft, but NNES tended to report shorter times, possibly reflecting greater reliance on external assistance to detect linguistic errors. Finally, while extensive use of English may help NNES overcome difficulties with English, 88% of NNES respondents reported that it also reduced their ability to discuss philosophy in their native language. This study provides the first systematic, quantitative evidence of English-related epistemic challenges that many NNES may face in philosophy, highlighting significant linguistic inequities.
A puzzle about knowledge ascriptions.Brian Porter, Kelli Barr, Abdellatif Bencherifa, Wesley Buckwalter, Yasuo Deguchi, Emanuele Fabiano, Takaaki Hashimoto, Julia Halamova, Joshua Homan, Kaori Karasawa, Martin Kanovsky, Hackjin Kim, Jordan Kiper, Minha Lee, Xiaofei Liu, Veli Mitova, Rukmini Bhaya, Ljiljana Pantovic, Pablo Quintanilla, Josien Reijer, Pedro Romero, Purmina Singh, Salma Tber, Daniel Wilkenfeld, Stephen Stich, Clark Barrett & Edouard Machery - 2025 - Noûs 59 (2):392-408.details
Philosophers have argued that stakes affect knowledge: a given amount of evidence may suffice for knowledge if the stakes are low, but not if the stakes are high. By contrast, empirical work on the influence of stakes on ordinary knowledge ascriptions has been divided along methodological lines: “evidence‐fixed” prompts rarely find stakes effects, while “evidence‐seeking” prompts consistently find them. We present a cross‐cultural study using both evidence‐fixed and evidence‐seeking prompts with a diverse sample of 17 populations in 11 countries, speaking 14 languages. Our study is the first to use an evidence‐seeking prompt cross‐culturally, and includes several previously untested populations (including indigenous populations). Across cultures, we do not find evidence of a stakes effect with our evidence‐fixed prompt, but do with our evidence‐seeking prompt. We argue that the divergent results reveal a tension within folk epistemology: people's beliefs about when it is appropriate to ascribe knowledge differ significantly from their actual practice in ascribing knowledge.
Methoden in Form bringen. Über die Verbindungen gestalterischer und wissenschaftlicher Rationalität.Popp Judith-Frederike - 2024 - In Lars Christian Grabbe & Tobias Held, Designforschung und Designwissenschaft. Wiesbaden: Springer. pp. 195-211.details
Der vorliegende Aufsatz widmet sich der Charakterisierung von Methoden als Bezugspunkt der Designforschung aus einer rationalitätstheoretischen Perspektive. Im Fokus steht dabei zum einen die Überlegung, wie der Einsatz von kreativen und wissenschaftlichen Methoden den Gestaltungsprozess systematisiert und rationalisiert. Zum anderen geht es darum, wie die spezifischen Qualitäten von Designprozessen etablierte Verständnisse sowohl von Wissenschaft und Forschung als auch von Rationalität als solcher herausfordern. Mit Bezug auf konkrete Beispiele für Forschungsprojekte wird die Möglichkeit erkundet, inwieweit die pragmatisch formende Verhandlung eines methodischen Vorgehens Designforschung mit der Kapazität ausstattet, einen Maßstab für selbstkritische Forschungspraxis zu aktualisieren. Es wird gezeigt, dass dieser Maßstab Implikationen für die philosophische Bestimmung gestalterischer und wissenschaftlicher Rationalität bereithält. Eine zentrale Rolle kommt dabei den externen und internen Grenzgebieten von Vernünftigkeit zu.
Folk concepts of race, cross-culturally.Leda Berio, Steffen Koch, Daniel James, Benedict Kenyah-Damptey & Alex Wiegmann - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.details
The investigation of folk concepts of race has been central to many theoretical and experimental contributions in recent decades; however, most of these contributions have been centred around the North American cultural context. Despite many philosophers pointing to a possible discrepancy between the European, and especially the German, context and the U.S.-American one, a systematic investigation has yet to be undertaken. This paper provides the first cross-cultural experimental study of U.S.-American and German concepts of race. More specifically, it examines whether German concepts of race are more biological than U.S.- American ones and to what extent Germans and U.S.-Americans lean towards conservationism or eliminativism about concepts of race. Surprisingly, our results suggest that U.S.-Americans’ concepts of racial categories such as Black, White, or Asian are no less biologically loaded than Germans’ but that Germans lean far more towards eliminativism than U.S. Americans. We discuss multiple explanations for this finding and develop avenues for future research. In doing so, this paper contributes to the larger project of cross-cultural comparisons between folk theories of race - a project we deem highly fruitful and timely.
The linguistic diversity of truth and correctness judgments and the effect of moral-political factor.Masaharu Mizumoto - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (2):1-24.details
In this paper, we will report results of two sets of cross-linguistic studies about truth judgments and correctness judgments by speakers of English and Japanese, which will show a significant influence of a moral-political factor in an utterance on Japanese truth/correctness judgments. Following up Mizumoto (2022), which demonstrated such an effect on Japanese truth judgments and correctness judgments about utterances containing a contrastive conjunction (such as “but”), Study 1 shows the same effect on Japanese correctness judgments about utterances containing a pejorative. Study 2 then shows that a moral-political factor in utterances can affect Japanese truth/correctness judgments about them even if they are simple utterances containing neither a contrastive conjunction nor a pejorative. In conclusion, we will briefly discuss whether this effect is linguistic or psychological, and present three hypotheses: the semantic hypothesis, pragmatic hypothesis, and error theory hypothesis, to account for the data, which we leave open for future studies.
Die Psyche und die Krankheit. Ein abhidhammisch-spinozistischer Ansatz.Cristina Chitu - 2023 - Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.details
Psychische Krankheiten werden im Oxford Handbook of Psychiatry (2019) als Erkrankungen der Gehirnfunktion betrachtet. In DSM-5 und ICD-11, den Haupthandbüchern der Psychiatrie, gelten sie als (schädliche) Dysfunktionen. Beide Ansichten sind mit Problemen behaftet, weshalb es bisher keinen Konsens darüber gibt, was es eigentlich bedeutet, psychisch krank zu sein. In der Philosophie der Psychiatrie hat es viele Versuche gegeben, dies zu klären. Im vorliegenden Buch wird das Problem aus spinozistisch-abhidhammischer Perspektive in zwei Schritten angegangen: Zunächst wird festgestellt, dass die Psyche aus dieser Perspektive keine Gehirnfunktion ist, sondern die Beziehung eines Körpers zu seiner Umwelt. Es wird vorgeschlagen, den Gehirnreduktionismus durch die Ansicht zu ersetzen, dass das Gehirn der letzte Baustein ist, in dem sich die Berührungen des Körpers widerspiegeln. Aber noch bevor sie sich im Gehirn widerspiegeln, rufen die Berührungen eine Psyche in die Existenz. Anschließend wird die Krankheit als eine fortschreitende Beeinträchtigung der Kraft des Körpers definiert, seine Essenz zu manifestieren, und zwar bis zu dem Punkt, an dem sein Überleben bedroht ist. Daraus ergibt sich ein alternativer Ansatz, der einige Gemeinsamkeiten mit der Psychiatrie aufweist, teilweise aber auch zu Modifikationen ihrer aktuellen Nosologie und Praxis anregt.
Looking across languages: Anglocentrism, cross-linguistic experimental philosophy, and the future of inquiry about truth.Joseph Ulatowski & Jeremy Wyatt - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1):1-23.details
Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property truth. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that cross-linguistic experimental philosophy has an indispensable yet underappreciated role to play in all of these debates. Recognising the indispensability of cross-linguistic experimental philosophy should compel philosophers to significantly revise the ways in which they inquire about truth. It should also prompt analytic philosophers more generally to consider whether similar revisions might be necessary elsewhere in the field.
The origin of cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions: Perspective taking in the Gödel case.Jincai Li - 2021 - Journal of Semantics 38 (3).details
In this paper, we aim to trace the origin of the systematic cross-cultural variations in referential intuitions by investigating the effects of perspective taking on people’s responses in the Gödel-style probes through two novel experiments. Here is how we will proceed. In section 2, we first briefly introduce the MMNS (2004) study, and then critically review the two relevant studies conducted by Sytsma and colleagues (i.e., Sytsma and Livengood 2011; Sytsma et al. 2015). In section 3, we introduce the literature on cross-cultural variation in perspective taking in cultural psychology, which together with the conjecture of perspectival ambiguity leads to the hypothesis of our current study. In sections 4 and 5, two new experiments on how perspective taking affects people’s responses in hypothetical stories modelled on the Gödel thought experiment will be reported. Based on the empirical findings, in section 6 we argue that the robust cross-cultural variations thus far observed in people’s responses to the Gödel cases are largely attributable to culturally specific perspective-taking strategies, which provides new support for the proposal previously made by Sytsma and Livengood (2011). The implications of the experimental results for the ongoing work of testing the theories of refence of names and for the current metaphilosophical debate on the robustness of philosopher’s intuitions are also drawn in this section. Finally, the major conclusions and contributions of the current study are highlighted in section 7.
Editorial: Cultural Variation and Cognition.Edouard Machery, Joshua Knobe & Stephen P. Stich - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):339-347.details
Difference and Robustness in the Patterns of Philosophical Intuition Across Demographic Groups.Joshua Knobe - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):435-455.details
In a recent paper, I argued that philosophical intuitions are surprisingly robust both across demographic groups and across development. Machery and Stich reply by reviewing a series of studies that do show significant differences in philosophical intuition between different demographic groups. This is a helpful point, which gets at precisely the issues that are most relevant here. However, even when one looks at those very studies, one finds truly surprising robustness. In other words, despite the presence of statistically significant differences between demographic groups, a core finding coming out of those studies is that philosophical intuitions are surprisingly robust across demographic groups.
Demographic Differences in Philosophical Intuition: a Reply to Joshua Knobe.Stephen P. Stich & Edouard Machery - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):401-434.details
In a recent paper, Joshua Knobe (2019) offers a startling account of the metaphilosophical implications of findings in experimental philosophy. We argue that Knobe’s account is seriously mistaken, and that it is based on a radically misleading portrait of recent work in experimental philosophy and cultural psychology.
Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers.Louisa M. Reins, Alex Wiegmann, Olga P. Marchenko & Irina Schumski - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):735-762.details
The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to _say_ something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample of _N_ = 255 participants from Russia and _N_ = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our findings show a strong degree of similarity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agent _saying_ something they believe to be false.
Experimental Philosophy and Ordinary Language Philosophy.Masaharu Mizumoto - 2023 - In David Bordonaba-Plou, Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 31-56.details
This chapter tries to elucidate the complex relationship between ordinary language philosophyordinary language philosophy (OLP) and experimental philosophy (X-Phi) from the perspective of the contrast between the positive and the negative programs of X-Phi. I will first show the relevance of language to the various fields of contemporary philosophy, through what I call the Argument from Cross-Linguistic Diversity and the Argument from Intra-Linguistic Variance, together with empirical data. This will partly vindicate OLP, which is generally thought to be obsolete today. I will then examine the reasons for the demise of OLP, and show that the contemporary meta-philosophical debates over X-Phi are in fact a revival of the debates in the heyday of OLP. This will then also indicate a parallel between Wittgenstein’s negative programnegative program, called quietism, and the negative program of X-Phi, especially Stich’s. The positive program of X-Phi can no doubt contribute to science, but the question of whether it is philosophy may depend on our conception of philosophy. The negative program of X-Phi is no doubt philosophy, but the question is whether it can make any positive contribution to philosophy, let alone science. I will answer “yes” to it, by sketching a radical negative picture of philosophy in general.
Reflections on Cognitive and Epistemic Diversity: Can a Stich in Time Save Quine?Michael Bishop - 2009 - In Dominic Murphy & Michael Bishop, Stich and His Critics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 113–136.details
This chapter contains sections titled: Stich's Epistemology A Brief Digression: The Role of Intuitions in Epistemology A Critique: The Pragmatic Virtues of Reliabilism Conclusion References.
Can a Bodily Theorist of Pain Speak Mandarin?Chenwei Nie - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (1):261-272.details
According to a bodily view of pain, pains are objects which are located in body parts. This bodily view is supported by the locative locutions for pain in English, such as that “I have a pain in my back.” Recently, Liu and Klein (Analysis, 80(2), 262–272, 2020) carry out a cross-linguistic analysis, and they claim that (1) Mandarin has no locative locutions for pain and (2) the absence of locative locutions for pain puts the bodily view at risk. This paper rejects both claims. Regarding the philosophical claim, I argue that a language without locative locutions for pain only poses a limited challenge to the bodily view. Regarding the empirical claim, I identify the possible factors which might have misled Liu and Klein about the locative locutions for pain in Mandarin, and argue that Mandarin has a wide range of locative locutions for pain by conducting a corpus analysis. I conclude that compared to English, Mandarin lends no less, if not more, support to the bodily view of pain.
Why Variation Matters to Philosophy.Edouard Machery - 2023 - Res Philosophica 100 (1):1-22.details
Experimental philosophers often seem to ignore or downplay the significance of demographic variation in philosophically relevant judgments. This article confirms this impression, discusses why demographic research is overlooked in experimental philosophy, and argues that variation is philosophically significant.
The referential mechanism of proper names: cross-cultural investigations into referential intuitions.Jincai Li - 2023 - New York, NY: Routledge.details
Each of us bears a unique name given to us at birth. When people use your name, they typically refer to you. But what is the linkage that ties a name to a person and hence allows it to refer? Li's book approaches this question of reference empirically through the medium of referential intuitions. Building on the literature on philosophical and linguistic intuitions, she proposes a linguistic-competence-based account of referential intuitions. Subsequently, using a series of novel experiments, she investigates the variation of referential intuitions across different cultures, as well as the developmental trajectory and the underlying causes of the observed cultural differences. What she finds is that the cultural patterns of referential intuitions are already in place around age seven, and the differences are largely attributable to the distinct perspective taking strategies favoured by easterners and westerners, rather than the moral valence of actions involved in the experimental materials. These results are taken to better support referential pluralism (in particular, the ambiguous view) than referential monism. By undertaking this fascinating research, Li's book provides new insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying people's referential usage of names. It will be valuable to students and scholars of linguistics, philosophy of language and experimental philosophy, and in particular, to those who research into semantic intuitions and theories of reference.
Experimental philosophy.Jordan Kiper, Stephen Stich, H. Clark Barrett & Edouard Machery - 2021 - In David Ludwig & Inkeri Koskinen, Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science. New York: Routeldge.details
Group-level differences in visual search asymmetry.Emily S. Cramer, Michelle J. Dusko & Ronald A. Rensink - 2016 - Attention Perception and Psychophysics 78:1585-1602.details
East Asians and Westerners differ in various aspects of perception and cognition. For example, visual memory for East Asians is believed to be more influenced by the contextual aspects of a scene than is the case for Westerners (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). There are also differences in visual search: for Westerners, search for a long line among short is faster than for short among long, whereas this difference does not appear to hold for East Asians (Ueda et al., submitted). However, it is unclear how these group-level differences originate. To investigate the extent to which they depend upon environment, we tested visual search and visual memory in East Asian immigrants who had lived in Canada for different amounts of time. Recent immigrants were found to exhibit no search asymmetry, unlike Westerners who had spent their lives in Canada. However, immigrants who had lived in Canada for more than two years showed performance comparable to that of Westerners. These differences could not be explained by the general analytic/holistic processing distinction believed to differentiate Westerners and East Asians, since all observers showed a strong holistic tendency for visual recognition. Results instead support the suggestion that exposure to a new environment can significantly affect the particular processes used to perceive a given stimulus.
Enterreirando a investigação: sobre um ethos da pesquisa sobre subjetividades.Wanderson Flor do Nascimento - 2020 - Arquivos Brasileiros de Psicologia 72:199-208.details
In the present context of valuing the knowledge of historically subordinated peoples, the risk of epistemic extractivism emerges as a new element that concerns the field of research. Specifically with regard to the investigation of subjectivities in Terreiros de Candomblé, this danger also appears, effectively. By understanding the ways in which the Terreiros are structured as spaces of resistance, how the processes of subjectivation are experienced and what is the importance of knowledge in these processes, this article aims to present elements that support a proposal of thought and research enterreirados as one of the paths possible to circumvent the signaled risk and we discussed some elements of an ethos of research buried in the spaces of the Terreiro communities.
Philosophical Intuitions Are Surprisingly Stable Across both Demographic Groups and Situations.Joshua Knobe - 2021 - Filozofia Nauki 29 (2):11-76.details
Intuitions About the Reference of Proper Names: a Meta-Analysis.Noah van Dongen, Matteo Colombo, Felipe Romero & Jan Sprenger - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (4):745-774.details
The finding that intuitions about the reference of proper names vary cross-culturally was one of the early milestones in experimental philosophy. Many follow-up studies investigated the scope and magnitude of such cross-cultural effects, but our paper provides the first systematic meta-analysis of studies replicating. In the light of our results, we assess the existence and significance of cross-cultural effects for intuitions about the reference of proper names.
Counterfactuals, indicative conditionals, and negation under uncertainty: Are there cross-cultural differences?Niki Pfeifer & H. Yama - 2017 - In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink & E. Davelaar, Proceedings of the 39th Cognitive Science Society Meeting. pp. 2882-2887.details
In this paper we study selected argument forms involving counterfactuals and indicative conditionals under uncertainty. We selected argument forms to explore whether people with an Eastern cultural background reason differently about conditionals compared to Westerners, because of the differences in the location of negations. In a 2x2 between-participants design, 63 Japanese university students were allocated to four groups, crossing indicative conditionals and counterfactuals, and each presented in two random task orders. The data show close agreement between the responses of Easterners and Westerners. The modal responses provide strong support for the hypothesis that conditional probability is the best predictor for counterfactuals and indicative conditionals. Finally, the grand majority of the responses are probabilistically coherent, which endorses the psychological plausibility of choosing coherence-based probability logic as a rationality framework for psychological reasoning research.
Individual Pride and Collective Pride: Differences Between Chinese and American Corpora.Conghui Liu, Jing Li, Chuansheng Chen, Hanlin Wu, Li Yuan & Guoliang Yu - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12.details
This study investigated cross-cultural differences in individual pride and collective pride between Chinese and Americans using data from text corpora. We found higher absolute frequencies of pride items in the American corpus than in the Chinese corpus. Cross-cultural differences were found for relative frequencies of different types of pride, and some of them depended on the genre of the text corpora. For both blogs and news genres, Americans showed higher frequencies of individual pride items and lower frequencies of relational pride items than did their Chinese counterparts. Cross-cultural differences in national pride, however, depended on the genre: Chinese news genre included more national pride items than its American counterpart, but the opposite was true for the blog genre. We discuss the implications of these results in relation to the existing literature on cultural differences in individual pride and collective pride.
Cross-Cultural Convergence of Knowledge Attribution in East Asia and the US.Yuan Yuan & Minsun Kim - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (1):267-294.details
We provide new findings that add to the growing body of empirical evidence that important epistemic intuitions converge across cultures. Specifically, we selected three recent studies conducted in the US that reported surprising effects of knowledge attribution among English speakers. We translated the vignettes used in those studies into Mandarin Chinese and Korean and then ran the studies with participants in Mainland China, Taiwan, and South Korea. We found that, strikingly, all three of the effects first obtained in the US also emerged in the East Asian cultures we studied. Our findings not only cohere with but also provide—at least moderate—support for the existence of extensive convergences of important epistemic intuitions across cultures.
What is in a name?: The development of cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions.Jincai Li, Liu Longgen, Elizabeth Chalmers & Jesse Snedeker - 2018 - Cognition 171 (C): 108-111.details
Past work has shown systematic differences between Easterners' and Westerners' intuitions about the reference of proper names. Understanding when these differences emerge in development will help us understand their origins. In the present study, we investigate the referential intuitions of English- and Chinese-speaking children and adults in the U.S. and China. Using a truth-value judgment task modeled on Kripke's classic Gödel case, we find that the cross-cultural differences are already in place at age seven. Thus, these differences cannot be attributed to later education or enculturation. Instead, they must stem from differences that are present in early childhood. We consider alternate theories of reference that are compatible with these findings and discuss the possibility that the cross-cultural differences reflect differences in perspective-taking strategies.
A Comparative Study of Cultural Identities and Universal Nomad.Algis Mickunas - 2020 - Dialogue and Universalism 30 (3):9-26.details
The essay provides arguments and the disclosure of principles which are at the base of the modern Western understanding of the world and the human role in it. The principles are ontological, i.e., the conception of nature as a sum of material, atomic parts, and metaphysical, i.e., mathematics as a basis of scientific theories and methods. The conjunction of these principles constitutes what is known as “instrumental reason,” resulting in the universal technological globalization and nomadic civilization. The latter is composed of detached, technical experts, capable of residing anywhere without any cultural or ethnic commitments. The results of their activities are a global network of technical means both for global nomadic tourism and anonymous associations without personal involvement.
The weirdness of belief in free will.Renatas Berniūnas, Audrius Beinorius, Vilius Dranseika, Vytis Silius & Paulius Rimkevičius - 2021 - Consciousness and Cognition 87:103054.details
It has been argued that belief in free will is socially consequential and psychologically universal. In this paper we look at the folk concept of free will and its critical assessment in the context of recent psychological research. Is there a widespread consensus about the conceptual content of free will? We compared English “free will” with its lexical equivalents in Lithuanian, Hindi, Chinese and Mongolian languages and found that unlike Lithuanian, Chinese, Hindi and Mongolian lexical expressions of “free will” do not refer to the same concept free will. What kind people have been studied so far? A review of papers indicate that, overall, 91% of participants in studies on belief in free will were WEIRD. Thus, given that free will has no cross-culturally universal conceptual content and that most of the reviewed studies were based on WEIRD samples, belief in free will is not a psychological universal.
Reporting Conditionals with Modals.Magdalena Sztencel & Sarah E. Duffy - 2019 - In Alessandro Capone, Una Stojnic, Ernie Lepore, Denis Delfitto, Anne Reboul, Gaetano Fiorin, Kenneth A. Taylor, Jonathan Berg, Herbert L. Colston, Sanford C. Goldberg, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Cliff Goddard, Anna Wierzbicka, Magdalena Sztencel, Sarah E. Duffy, Alessandra Falzone, Paola Pennisi, Péter Furkó, András Kertész, Ágnes Abuczki, Alessandra Giorgi, Sona Haroutyunian, Marina Folescu, Hiroko Itakura, John C. Wakefield, Hung Yuk Lee, Sumiyo Nishiguchi, Brian E. Butler, Douglas Robinson, Kobie van Krieken, José Sanders, Grazia Basile, Antonino Bucca, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri & Kobie van Krieken, Indirect Reports and Pragmatics in the World Languages. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 201-226.details
Conditionals and modals work in tandem in some instances of practical reasoning, or decision making. Consider the following example :a.I want to become a mayor.b. I will become a mayor only if I go to the pub.c.Therefore, I should go to the pub.Given what the cogniser wants and the relevant circumstances, the conclusion that the cogniser goes to the pub comes out as necessary. Hence, the presence of the necessity modal should in. Indeed, given the context of, the necessity modal in is simply a reflection of the necessity of p for q, which is overtly represented by the use of the ‘only if p, q’ construction. This chapter looks into whether indirect reports of conditionals – in particular, indirect reports which involve the use of a modal verb – are sensitive to the necessity of p for q in cases where necessity is not overtly represented in a conditional, as in ‘if p, q’ formulations.We report on two online experiments into the relation between perceived necessity or sufficiency of the truth of a conditional antecedent for the truth of the consequent, and the formulation of an indirect report of a conditional with necessity or possibility modals. In Experiment 1, the ‘necessity/sufficiency of p for q’ variable was manipulated by contextually altering the number of alternative antecedents. It was found that modals used in indirect reports of ‘if p, q’ conditionals co-vary with the number of alternative antecedents in predictable ways. This suggests that modals used in indirect reports of ‘if p, q’ conditionals may be a diagnostic for biconditional versus material interpretations of conditionals. The aim of Experiment 2 was to find out whether the results of Experiment 1 could be replicated in contexts which lower/eliminate the believability of the conditionals. It was found that manipulating the believability variable has no reliable effect on the results.
Analiza empirycznych argumentów na rzecz tezy o zróżnicowaniu kulturowym intuicji epistemicznych.Krzysztof Sękowski - 2019 - Studia Philosophica Wratislaviensia 14 (2):75-102.details
The founding text for the new current in modern philosophy—experi-mental philosophy—can be seen in Jonathan Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Ste-phen Stich’s “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions” (2001). The authors describe in this article a study to prove cross-cultural differences in epistemic intuitions. On the basis of their results, they argue that since epistemic intuitions seem to serve a crucial role in the use of thought experiments, contemporary philosophical methodology is highly unjustified. That study has brought about at least three replication attempts (Seyedsayam-dost 2015; Kim, Yuan 2015; Nagel, San Juan, Mar 2013). None of them confirmed the original results. The aim of this article is to critically analyze in detail Weinberg, Nichols and Stich’s methodology and the three replications mentioned. Regarding the results of my analysis, I will try to examine what conclusions can be drawn with regard to the outcomes of analized studies. In particular I will refer to far-reaching con-clusions about the universality of epistemic intuitions or universality of folk epis-temology, which are sometimes—hastily, as I will argue—extrapolated from the results of such kind of studies (e.g., Kim, Yuan 2015; Kim Yuan 2016).
Przynależność kulturowa i język. O metodologicznych problemach filozofii eksperymentalnej.Krzysztof Sękowski - 2018 - Filozofia Nauki 26 (1):49-66.details
The aim of this paper is to analyze methodological problems of cross-cultural research in experimental philosophy. By studying five research projects, representing two distinct approaches to the examination of cross-cultural differences in philosophical intuitions, I point out the difficulties related to the content validity that appear in the choice of some cultural affiliation indicators. I criticize various indicators of cultural affiliation that are used in experimental philosophy (selfidentification, language) and suggest which indicators, and how, should be chosen in that kind of research. I also argue that some problems related to bilingualism, translation, and the possible influence of language on the owned or reported philosophical intuitions may be impossible to transcend in cross-cultural research in experimental philosophy. It may be impossible to assess the differences between cultural philosophical intuitions.
Experimental Philosophy: Impossible Metaphors.Hanna Kim - 2018 - Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 38:3-11.details
In his 2005 paper, DeClercq observes that aesthetic terms such as ‘beautiful’, ‘elegant’, ‘harmonious’, etc. resist metaphorical interpretation and argues that it is the fact that such terms cannot be involved in category-mistakes that explains their metaphorical uninterpretability. While I largely agree with DeClercq’s observation of the metaphorical uninterpretability of aesthetic terms, I offer both non-empirical and empirical considerations against his category-based explanation of the phenomenon. I offer the former in a longer version of this paper. In this shorter version, I offer preliminary, empirical evidence against DeClercq’s thesis that the possibility of category mistakes is what is required for metaphor judgments. I do this, in part, by relying on the work of cultural psychologist, Nisbett, who found that, in general, Easterners rely less on categories and more on relational and contextual information than Westerners in making judgments and reasoning inferentially. I report the results of my cross-cultural study on metaphor, which cast some doubt on DeClercq’s thesis that it is the possibility of category-mistakes that explain the metaphorical interpretability of expressions in general.
A cross-cultural assessment of the semantic dimensions of intellectual humility.Markus Christen, Mark Alfano & Brian Robinson - 2019 - AI and Society 34 (4):785-801.details
Intellectual humility can be broadly construed as being conscious of the limits of one’s existing knowledge and capable of acquiring more knowledge, which makes it a key virtue of the information age. However, the claim “I am humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. Therefore, measuring intellectual humility via self-report may be methodologically unsound. As a consequence, we suggest analyzing intellectual humility semantically, using a psycholexical approach that focuses on both synonyms and antonyms of ‘intellectual humility’. We present a thesaurus-based methodology to map the semantic space of intellectual humility and the vices it opposes as a heuristic to support analysis and diagnosis of this disposition. We performed the mapping both in English and German in order to test for possible cultural differences in the understanding of intellectual humility. In both languages, we find basically the same three semantic dimensions of intellectual humility as well as three dimensions of its related vices. The resulting semantic clusters were validated in an empirical study with English and German participants. We find medium-to-high correlations between thesaurus similarity and perceived similarity, and we can validate the three dimensions identified in the study. But we also find limitations of the thesaurus methodology in terms of cluster plausibility. We conclude by discussing the importance of these findings for constructing psychometric measures of intellectual humility via self-report vs. computer models.
Moral reasoning of Chinese accounting students and practitioners.George Lan, He Zhang, Jianan Cao & Meng Bai - 2019 - Asian Journal of Business Ethics 8 (2):155-171.details
This exploratory study employs the Defining Issues Test to investigate the moral reasoning levels of a sample of 228 accounting students at Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, and 192 accounting practitioners from different regions of China. The results show that on average, the P scores of Chinese accounting students and practitioners are 45.02 and 33.57, respectively. When compared with the levels of moral reasoning of their peers in Western countries, as provided in Tables 1 and 2 of Bailey et al. :1–26, 2010), Chinese accounting students exhibit post-conventional levels of moral development similar to the highest levels reported, whereas Chinese accounting practitioners report post-conventional levels of moral development similar to the lowest levels of post-conventional moral development reported by the practitioners in Western countries. Furthermore, female Chinese accounting students score significantly higher on the post-conventional level of the development stage than do the male Chinese students, but there is no significant gender effect in P scores between the male and female accounting practitioners.
Hukou identity and fairness in the ultimatum game.Jun Luo, Yefeng Chen, Haoran He & Guanlin Gao - 2019 - Theory and Decision 87 (3):389-420.details
The hukou system is a mandatory household registration system in China that assigns an individual either an urban/non-agricultural hukou or a rural/agricultural hukou based on one’s birthplace. This system favors urban residents and discriminates against rural residents in accessing state-owned resources such as employment, education, health care, and housing. To better understand how this institutionally imposed hukou identity impacts an individual’s sense of fairness in the ultimatum game, we conducted a field experiment in China using 9–12-year-old children and collected 672 observations. Subjects played a one-shot ultimatum game to allocate 20 yuan in groups of two. We employed a 2 ×\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\times $$\\end{document} 2 ×\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\times $$\\end{document} 2 experiment design and used the strategic method ultimatum game. We primed our subjects with their hukou identity before they made their decisions in the experiment. Results of this study show that hukou salience mainly affects rural hukou subjects, who belong to the perceived less-favored social group. On one hand, when the hukou identity is made salient, rural hukou proposers decrease their amount offered regardless of their responder’s hukou type. On the other hand, rural hukou responders expect higher offers from their urban hukou proposers when the hukou identity is revealed. We interpret these results as that rural hukou subjects tend to seek compensations for their perceived hukou inferiority to achieve fair distributions.
Supervisors’ Value Orientations and Ethics: A Cross-National Analysis.Chung-wen Chen, Hsiu-Huei Yu, Kristine Velasquez Tuliao, Aditya Simha & Yi-Ying Chang - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 170 (1):167-180.details
In this study, we used the framework of institutional anomie theory The future of anomie theory, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1997) to examine the relationship between supervisors’ ethics and their personal value orientation, including achievement and pecuniary materialism. We further investigated whether these individual-level associations were moderated by societal factors consisting of income inequality, government efficiency, foreign competition, and technological advancement. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze data of 16,464 supervisors from 42 nations obtained from the 2010–2014 wave of the World Values Survey. Results showed that strong achievement value orientation was positively related to willingness to justify ethically suspect behaviors; government efficiency and technological advancement, respectively, had negative and positive moderating effects on this relationship. On the other hand, foreign competition had a positive moderating effect on the association between pecuniary materialism and ethicality.
Are Big Gods a Big Deal in the Emergence of Big Groups?Quentin D. Atkinson, Andrew J. Latham & Joseph Watts - 2015 - Religion, Brain and Behavior 5 (4):266-274.details
In Big Gods, Norenzayan (2013) presents the most comprehensive treatment yet of the Big Gods question. The book is a commendable attempt to synthesize the rapidly growing body of survey and experimental research on prosocial effects of religious primes together with cross-cultural data on the distribution of Big Gods. There are, however, a number of problems with the current cross-cultural evidence that weaken support for a causal link between big societies and certain types of Big Gods. Here we attempt to clarify these problems and, in so doing, correct any potential misinterpretation of the cross-cultural findings, provide new insight into the processes generating the patterns observed, and flag directions for future research.
De Pulchritudine non est Disputandum? A cross‐cultural investigation of the alleged intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgment.Florian Cova, Christopher Y. Olivola, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, David Rose, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Vilius Dranseika, Ángeles E. Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Ivar Hannikainen, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Yeonjeong Kim, Minwoo Lee, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Carlos Romero, Alejandro Rosas, Massimo Sangoi, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Paulo Sousa, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, Alejandro V. del Mercado, Giorgio Volpe, Hrag A. Vosgerichian, Xueyi Zhang & Jing Zhu - 2019 - Mind and Language 34 (3):317-338.details
Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general.
Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Meaning of Quantifiers: Implications for Pragmatic Enrichment.Penka Stateva, Arthur Stepanov, Viviane Déprez, Ludivine Emma Dupuy & Anne Colette Reboul - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.details
One of the most experimentally studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of some is entailed by the truth of all, some is felicitous only when all is false. This opens the possibility that some would be felicitous if, e.g., 99% of the objects in the domain of quantification fall under it, a conclusion that clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier meanings in English, French, Slovenian and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier some in English and quelques in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that some and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment.
(2 other versions)Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style.Edouard Macher, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich - 2008 - In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols, Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.details
The Ship of Theseus Puzzle.David Rose, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Florian Cova, Vilius Dranseika, Angeles Eraña Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Ivar Hannikainen, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Yeonjeong Kim, Min-Woo Lee, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Christopher Y. Olivola, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Alejandro Rosas, Carlos Romero, Massimo Sangoi, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Paulo Sousa, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, Alejandro Vázquez Del Vázquez Del Mercado, Giorgio Volpe, Hrag A. Vosgerichian, Xueyi Zhang & Jing Zhu - 2014 - In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols, Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 158-174.details
Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence.
Chinese philosophy as experimental philosophy.Ryan Nichols & Hagop Sarkissian - 2016 - In Sor-Hoon Tan, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies. New York: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University. pp. 353-366.details
In this chapter, we outline the methods and aims of experimental philosophy as a methodological movement within philosophy, and suggest ways in which it may be employed in the study of Chinese philosophy.
Nothing at Stake in Knowledge.David Rose, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Florian Cova, Vilius Dranseika, Ángeles Eraña Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Ivar Hannikainen, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Yeonjeong Kim, Minwoo Lee, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Christopher Y. Olivola, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Carlos Romero, Alejandro Rosas Lopez, Massimo Sangoi, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Paulo Sousa, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado, Giorgio Volpe, Hrag Abraham Vosgerichian, Xueyi Zhang & Jing Zhu - 2019 - Noûs 53 (1):224-247.details
In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism.
Experimental ordinary language philosophy: a cross-linguistic study of defeasible default inferences.Eugen Fischer, Paul E. Engelhardt, Joachim Horvath & Hiroshi Ohtani - 2019 - Synthese 198 (2):1029-1070.details
This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot help making stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception, suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy.
Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds by Édouard Machery.Jonathan Lewis - 2018 - Metapsychology 22 (48).details
Knowledge, certainty, and skepticism: A cross-cultural study.John Philip Waterman, Chad Gonnerman, Karen Yan & Joshua Alexander - 2017 - In Stephen Stich, Masaharu Mizumoto & Eric McCready, Epistemology for the rest of the world. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 187-214.details
We present several new studies focusing on “salience effects”—the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge to someone when an unrealized possibility of error has been made salient in a given conversational context. These studies suggest a complicated picture of epistemic universalism: there may be structural universals, universal epistemic parameters that influence epistemic intuitions, but that these parameters vary in such a way that epistemic intuitions, in either their strength or propositional content, can display patterns of genuine cross-cultural diversity.
Moral Integrity and Relationship Commitment: An Empirical Examination in a Cross-Cultural Setting.Fuan Li, Sixue Zhang & Xuelian Yang - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 151 (3):785-798.details
The impact of integrity on organizational and/or interpersonal relationships is well documented in the literature but its influence on customer relationships such as consumer trust and relationship commitment has been largely overlooked. The present study attempts to fill this research gap by examining the effect of integrity on consumer relationship commitment in a cross-cultural setting. Survey data from the United States and China were used to test the hypothesized relationships. The results show that integrity has significant impacts on both consumer trust and relationship commitment, and culture significantly moderates the effect of integrity on consumer commitment. Specifically, integrity was found to affect American respondents’ relationship commitment both directly and indirectly with the direct effect being greater and the indirect effect being smaller relative to those of Chinese respondents. In contrast, integrity had only indirect effect on relationship commitment with Chinese consumers, highlighting the importance of consumer trust in the integrity-commitment relationship. The implications for research and business practice were discussed.
Intuitive Moral Judgments are Robust across Variation in Gender, Education, Politics and Religion: A Large-Scale Web-Based Study.Konika Banerjee, Bryce Huebner & Marc Hauser - 2010 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 10 (3-4):253-281.details
Research on moral psychology has frequently appealed to three, apparently consistent patterns: Males are more likely to engage in transgressions involving harm than females; educated people are likely to be more thorough in their moral deliberations because they have better resources for rationally navigating and evaluating complex information; political affiliations and religious ideologies are an important source of our moral principles. Here, we provide a test of how four factors ‐ gender, education, politics and religion ‐ affect intuitive moral judgments in unfamiliar situations. Using a large-scale sample of participants who voluntarily logged on to the internet-based Moral Sense Test, we analyzed responses to 145 unique moral and conventional scenarios that varied widely in content. Although each demographic or cultural factor sometimes yielded a statistically significant difference in the predicted direction, these differences were consistently associated with extremely small effect sizes. We conclude that gender, education, politics and religion are likely to be relatively insignificant for moral judgments of unfamiliar scenarios. We discuss these results in light of current debates concerning the mechanisms underlying our moral judgments and, especially, the idea that we share a universal moral sense that constrains the range of cross-cultural variation.
(1 other version)The Gettier Intuition from South America to Asia.Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, David Rose, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Florian Cova, Vilius Dranseika, Ángeles Eraña Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Ivar Hannikainen, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Yeonjeong Kim, Minwoo Lee, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Christopher Y. Olivola, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Carlos Romero, Alejandro Rosas Lopez, Massimo Sangoi, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Paulo Sousa, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado, Giorgio Volpe, Hrag Abraham Vosgerichian, Xueyi Zhang & Jing Zhu - 2017 - Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3):517-541.details
This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “reflective” thinking.
Problems of Translation for Cross-Cultural Experimental Philosophy.Masashi Kasaki - 2017 - Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3):481-500.details
In this paper, first, I briefly discuss various types of obstacles and difficulties for cross-cultural study and in particular failure of translational equivalence of linguistic stimuli and questions by referring to the literature in cultural psychology. Second, I summarize the extant cross-cultural studies of semantic judgments about reference and truth-value with regard to proper names, with a focus on Sytsma et al.’s (2015) study that examined the differences between English and Japanese. Lastly, I introduce and discuss the two recent studies of semantic judgments in Japanese that my colleagues and I conducted. These two studies suggest that the translation Sytsma et al. used failed to consider the linguistic features characteristic of Japanese and other East Asian languages, and thereby failed to ensure translational equivalence.
Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures.Julian De Freitas, Hagop Sarkissian, George E. Newman, Igor Grossmann, Felipe De Brigard, Andres Luco & Joshua Knobe - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (S1):134-160.details
People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to behave in morally good ways. Is this belief particular to individuals with optimistic beliefs or people from Western cultures, or does it reflect a widely held cognitive bias in how people understand the self? To address this question, we tested the good true self theory against two potential boundary conditions that are known to elicit different beliefs about the self as a whole. Study 1 tested whether individual differences in misanthropy—the tendency to view humans negatively—predict beliefs about the good true self in an American sample. The results indicate a consistent belief in a good true self, even among individuals who have an explicitly pessimistic view of others. Study 2 compared true self-attributions across cultural groups, by comparing samples from an independent country and a diverse set of interdependent countries. Results indicated that the direction and magnitude of the effect are comparable across all groups we tested. The belief in a good true self appears robust across groups varying in cultural orientation or misanthropy, suggesting a consistent psychological tendency to view the true self as morally good.
Cultural differences in visual search for geometric figures.Yoshiyuki Ueda, Lei Chen, Jonathon Kopecky, Emily S. Cramer, Ronald A. Rensink, David E. Meyer, Shinobu Kitayama & Jun Saiki - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (1):286-310.details
While some studies suggest cultural differences in visual processing, others do not, possibly because the complexity of their tasks draws upon high-level factors that could obscure such effects. To control for this, we examined cultural differences in visual search for geometric figures, a relatively simple task for which the underlying mechanisms are reasonably well known. We replicated earlier results showing that North Americans had a reliable search asymmetry for line length: Search for long among short lines was faster than vice versa. In contrast, Japanese participants showed no asymmetry. This difference did not appear to be affected by stimulus density. Other kinds of stimuli resulted in other patterns of asymmetry differences, suggesting that these are not due to factors such as analytic/holistic processing but are based instead on the target-detection process. In particular, our results indicate that at least some cultural differences reflect different ways of processing early-level features, possibly in response to environmental factors.
Gettier Across Cultures.Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, David Rose, Amita Chatterjee, Kaori Karasawa, Noel Struchiner, Smita Sirker, Naoki Usui & Takaaki Hashimoto - 2015 - Noûs:645-664.details
In this article, we present evidence that in four different cultural groups that speak quite different languages there are cases of justified true beliefs that are not judged to be cases of knowledge. We hypothesize that this intuitive judgment, which we call “the Gettier intuition,” may be a reflection of an underlying innate and universal core folk epistemology, and we highlight the philosophical significance of its universality.
Symposium: Does the Concept of »Truth« Have Value in the Pursuit of Cross-Cultural Philosophy? Rosemont Jr, James Maffie, John Maraldo & Sonam Thakchoe - 2014 - IsFrontMatter: put either 1 or 0: 1 if this is not an article but a \"front matter\" type of entry, e.g. a list of books received, 0 otherwise 1:150-217.details
The symposium »Does the Concept of ›Truth‹ Have Value in the Pursuit of Cross-Cultural Philosophy?« hones on a methodological question which has deep implications on doing philosophy cross-culturally. Drawing on early Confucian writers, the anchor, Henry Rosemont, Jr., attempts to explain why he is skeptical of pat, affirmative answers to this question. His co-symposiasts James Maffie, John Maraldo, and Sonam Thakchoe follow his trail in working out multi-faceted views on truth from Mexican, Japanese Confucian, and Tibetan Buddhist perspectives respectively. As these positions substantiate, the aforementioned non-Anglo-European traditions seem to draw on an integrated view of thinking, feeling, and living a human life. For their practitioners, truth is less of a correspondence with a given external reality. In fact, it enables human beings to strike the right path in living good, social lives.
Individual and Cross-Cultural Differences in Semantic Intuitions: New Experimental Findings.James R. Beebe & Ryan Undercoffer - 2016 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 16 (3-4):322-357.details
In 2004 Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich published what has become one of the most widely discussed papers in experimental philosophy, in which they reported that East Asian and Western participants had different intuitions about the semantic reference of proper names. A flurry of criticisms of their work has emerged, and although various replications have been performed, many critics remain unconvinced. We review the current debate over Machery et al.’s (2004) results and take note of which objections to their work have been satisfactorily answered and which ones still need to be addressed. We then report the results of studies that reveal significant cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions when we control for variables that critics allege have had a potentially distorting effect on Machery et al.’s findings. These variables include the epistemic perspective from which participants are supposed to understand the research materials, unintended anchoring effects of those materials, and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of speech acts within them. Our results confirm the robustness of the cross-cultural differences observed by Machery et al. and thereby strengthen the philosophical challenge they pose.
Moral Objectivism in Cross-Cultural Perspective.James Beebe, Runya Qiaoan, Tomasz Wysocki & Miguel A. Endara - 2015 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 15 (3-4):386-401.details
Moral psychologists have recently turned their attention to the study of folk metaethical beliefs. We report the results of a cross-cultural study using Chinese, Polish and Ecuadorian participants that seeks to advance this line of investigation. Individuals in all three demographic groups were observed to attribute objectivity to ethical statements in very similar patterns. Differences in participants’ strength of opinion about an issue, the level of societal agreement or disagreement about an issue, and participants’ age were found to significantly affect their inclination to view the truth of an ethical statement as a matter of objective fact. Implications for theorizing about folk morality are discussed.
(1 other version)Does gender influence managers’ ethics? A cross‐cultural analysis.Chung-wen Chen, Kristine Velasquez Tuliao, John B. Cullen & Yi-Ying Chang - 2016 - Business Ethics: A European Review 25 (4):345-362.details
The relationship between gender and ethics has been extensively researched. However, previous studies have assumed that the gender–ethics association is constant; hence, scholars have seldom investigated factors potentially affecting the gender–ethics association. Thus, using managers as the research target, this study examined the relationship between gender and ethics and analyzed the moderating effect of cultural values on the gender–ethics association. The results showed that, compared with female managers, their male counterparts are more willing to justify business-related unethical behaviors such as bribery and tax evasion, and that the gender difference in ethics becomes more pronounced under the cultural dimensions of collectivism, humane orientation, performance orientation, and gender egalitarianism. This study used data obtained through surveying 2,754 managers in 27 nations.
Where is your pain? A Cross-cultural Comparison of the Concept of Pain in Americans and South Korea.Hyo-eun Kim, Nina Poth, Kevin Reuter & Justin Sytsma - 2016 - Studia Philosophica Estonica 9 (1):136-169.details
Philosophical orthodoxy holds that pains are mental states, taking this to reflect the ordinary conception of pain. Despite this, evidence is mounting that English speakers do not tend to conceptualize pains in this way; rather, they tend to treat pains as being bodily states. We hypothesize that this is driven by two primary factors—the phenomenology of feeling pains and the surface grammar of pain reports. There is reason to expect that neither of these factors is culturally specific, however, and thus reason to expect that the empirical findings for English speakers will generalize to other cultures and other languages. In this article we begin to test this hypothesis, reporting the results of two cross-cultural studies comparing judgments about the location of referred pains between two groups—Americans and South Koreans—that we might otherwise expect to differ in how they understand pains. In line with our predictions, we find that both groups tend to conceive of pains as bodily states.
No cross-cultural differences in the Gettier car case intuition: A replication study of Weinberg et al. 2001.Minsun Kim & Yuan Yuan - 2015 - Episteme 12 (3):355-361.details
In “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions”, Weinberg, Nichols and Stich famously argue from empirical data that East Asians and Westerners have different intuitions about Gettier -style cases. We attempted to replicate their study about the Car case, but failed to detect a cross - cultural difference. Our study used the same methods and case taken verbatim, but sampled an East Asian population 2.5 times greater than NEI’s 23 participants. We found no evidence supporting the existence of cross - cultural difference about the intuition concerning the Gettier car case. Taken together with the failures of both of the existing replication studies, our results provide strong evidence that the purported cross - cultural difference in Gettier intuitions does not exist.
Public Philosophy: Cross-Cultural and Multi-Disciplinary.Anand Jayprakash Vaidya - 2015 - Comparative Philosophy 6 (2).details
In this paper I propose a future direction for comparative philosophy on which it enters the space of public philosophy by capitalizing on the fact that it is already cross-cultural, and adding multi-disciplinary research to its proper foundation. This is not a new thesis. Rather, it is an ideological articulation of thought that is already underway in what is sometimes called fusion philosophy, as found in the work of Evan Thompson, Jay Garfield, or Christian Coseru. My articulation begins with a non-exhaustive delineation of distinct types of public-philosophy that are already well known in the public space. One core distinction I draw concerns how the very notion of ‘public philosophy’ can be understood. I distinguish between the philosophy-to-public direction of fit, on which philosophers enter the public space for some public benefit, and the public-to-philosophy direction of fit, on which the public plays a constructive role in guiding philosophers in some important epistemic manner. Because my position engages the issue of whether “philosophy” can truly be found outside of the west, I offer an account of the relation between science, religion, and philosophy with respect to inquiry into the human condition. In doing so I offer an argument against the view that philosophy can only be found in the west based on the difference between a term in a language and what the term picks out. I close with a discussion of how analytic philosophy, comparative philosophy, and experimental philosophy can come together to form one kind of bidirectional public philosophy.
Experimental Philosophy of Language.Nathaniel Hansen - 2015 - Oxford Handbooks Online.details
Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert judgments vs. the judgments of ordinary speakers, the role that ambiguity plays in influencing responses to experiments, and the reliability of metalinguistic judgments are also assessed.
Reproducibility of empirical findings: experiments in philosophy and beyond.Hamid Seyedsayamdost - unknowndetails
The field of experimental philosophy has received considerable attention, essentially for producing results that seem highly counter-intuitive and at the same time question some of the fundamental methods used in philosophy. A substantial part of this attention has focused on the role of intuitions in philosophical methodology. One of the major contributions of experimental philosophy on this topic has been concrete evidence in support of intuitional diversity; the idea that intuitions vary systematically depending on variables such as ethnicity, socioeconomic background, or gender. Because of the important implications, these findings have been the subject of extensive debate. Despite the seeming significance of the findings and despite all the debates that the experimental philosophy movement has prompted, what has not been examined systematically is the reproducibility of the results. Instead, the reported findings have been simply accepted as established facts. We set out to replicate a wide range of experiments and surprisingly failed to reproduce many of the reported findings, some of which are from the most cited and attention grabbing papers of the field. We draw two conclusions from our findings. The first is that the instability of intuitions has been exaggerated by experimental philosophers. Intuitions appear to be more uniform across different demographic groups. The argument that intuitions need to be discarded because they depend on arbitrary factors such as ethnicity, socioeconomic background, or gender does not seem tenable anymore. The second conclusion is that experimental philosophy needs a better system to ensure the reproducibility of published findings. The current research-publication system of various empirical fields, especially those employing statistical methods, leads to an overproduction of false-positive findings in the published literature. Unless changes are made to the current research-publication system, this overproduction is likely to continue, in experimental philosophy as well as other disciplines.
Philosophy and WEIRD intuition.Stephen Stich - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3):110-111.details
From Plato to the present, philosophers have relied on intuitive judgments as evidence for or against philosophical theories. Most philosophers are WEIRD, highly educated, and male. The literature reviewed in the target article suggests that such people might have intuitions that differ from those of people in other groups. There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that they do.
Cultural Differences in Belief Bias Associated with Deductive Reasoning?Sara J. Unsworth & Douglas L. Medin - 2005 - Cognitive Science 29 (4):525-529.details
Norenzayan, Smith, Jun Kim, and Nisbett (2002) investigated cultural differences in the use of intuitive versus formal reasoning in 4 experiments. Our comment concerns the 4th experiment where Norenzayan et al. reported that, although there were no cultural differences in accuracy on abstract logical arguments, Koreans made more errors than U.S. undergraduates in judging the logical validity of concrete arguments. Norenzayan et al. concluded that Koreans are less likely than European Americans to decontextualize an argument's content from its logical structure, as Koreans were more likely to consider the believability of the conclusion when assessing an argument's validity (a belief bias). Notably, Korean participants were more conservative (less likely to say an argument is valid) than European American participants when assessing arguments. An analysis of the average of the hit and correct rejection rates in each of the conditions (abstract, concrete–believable, concrete–nonbelievable) revealed that, contrary to conclusions of Norenzayan et al., European Americans were no better than Koreans at determining the validity of concrete deductive arguments with conclusions varying in believability.
The 'Gödel' effect.Gary Ostertag - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):65-82.details
In their widely discussed paper, “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style”, Machery et al. argue that Kripke’s Gödel–Schmidt case, generally thought to undermine the description theory of names, rests on culturally variable intuitions: while Western subjects’ intuitions conflict with the description theory of names, those of East Asian subjects do not. Machery et al. attempt to explain this discrepancy by appealing to differences between Western and East Asian modes of categorization, as identified in an influential study by Nisbett et al. I claim that these differences fail to explain the conflicting intuitions. Moreover, Machery et al.’s initial conjecture—that the relevant cultural differences would manifest themselves in differing semantic intuitions—is legitimate only if we assume that the Gödel–Schmidt case is used both to undermine descriptivism and establish the causal theory. But, as I argue, this is not Kripke’s intention. This misunderstanding persists in the recent clarification of their views in “If Folk Intuitions Vary, Then What?” (Machery et al., Philos Phenomenol Res, 2012).
On Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions: Failure of Replication.Hamid Seyedsayamdost - 2015 - Episteme 12 (1):95-116.details
In one of the earlier influential papers in the field of experimental philosophy titled Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions published in 2001, Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich reported that respondents answered Gettier type questions differently depending on their ethnic background as well as socioeconomic status. There is currently a debate going on, on the significance of the results of Weinberg et al. (2001) and its implications for philosophical methodology in general and epistemology in specific. Despite the debates, however, to our knowledge, there has not been a replication attempt of the experiments of the original paper. We collected data from four different sources (two on-line and two in-person) to replicate the experiments. Despite several different data sets and in various cases larger sample sizes and hence greater power to detect differences, we failed to detect significant differences between the above-mentioned ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Our results suggest that epistemic intuitions are more robust across ethnic and socioeconomic groups than Weinberg et al. (2001) indicates. Given our data, we believe that the notion of differences in epistemic intuitions among different ethnic and socioeconomic groups that follows from Weinberg et al. (2001) needs to be corrected.
Gender and the Philosophy Club.Stephen Stich & Wesley Buckwalter - 2011 - The Philosophers' Magazine 52 (52):60-65.details
If intuitions are associated with gender this might help to explain the fact that while the gender gap has disappeared in many other learned clubs, women are still seriously under-represented in the Philosophers Club. Since people who don’t have the intuitions that most club members share have a harder time getting into the club, and since the majority of Philosophers are now and always have been men, perhaps the under-representation of women is due, in part, to a selection effect.
(1 other version)Gender and Philosophical Intuition.Wesley Buckwalter & Stephen Stich - 2013 - In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols, Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2. New York, US: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 307-346.details
In recent years, there has been much concern expressed about the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. Our goal in this paper is to call attention to a cluster of phenomena that may be contributing to this gender gap. The findings we review indicate that when women and men with little or no philosophical training are presented with standard philosophical thought experiments, in many cases their intuitions about these cases are significantly different. In section 1 we review some of the data on the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. In section 2 we explain how we use the term 'intuition,' and offer a brief account of how intuitions are invoked in philosophical argument and philosophical theory building. In the third section we set out the evidence for gender differences in philosophical intuition and mention some evidence about gender differences in decisions and behaviors that are (or should be) of considerable interest to philosophers. In the fourth section, our focus changes from facts to hypotheses. In that section we explain how differences in philosophical intuition might be an important part of the explanation for the gender gap in philosophy. The fifth section is a brief conclusion.
Semantics, cross-cultural style.Edouard Machery [ - 2008 - In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols, Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.details
Experimental philosophy and the theory of reference.Max Deutsch - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (4):445-466.details
It is argued on a variety of grounds that recent results in 'experimental philosophy of language', which appear to show that there are significant cross-cultural differences in intuitions about the reference of proper names, do not pose a threat to a more traditional mode of philosophizing about reference. Some of these same grounds justify a complaint about experimental philosophy as a whole.
Are cantonese speakers really descriptivists? Revisiting cross-cultural semantics.Barry Lam - 2010 - Cognition 115 (2):320–32.details
In an article in Cognition, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [Machery et al., 2004] present data which purports to show that “East Asian” native Cantonese speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while “Western” native English speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al take this finding to support the view that some intuitions, the universality of which they claim is central to philosophical theories, vary according to cultural background. Machery et al hypothesize that the differences in intuitions about reference stem from general psychological differences between Eastern and Western subjects. Machery et al conclude from their findings that the philosophical methodology of consulting intuitions about hypothetical cases is flawed vis ` a vis the goal of determining truths about some philosophical domains. To quote Machery et al, “our data indicate that philosophers must radically revise their methodology” because “the intuitions philosophers pronounce from their armchairs are likely to be a product of their own culture and their academic training” ( [Machery et al., 2004] pp.B9). “The evidence suggests that it is wrong for philosophers to assume a priori the universality of their own semantic intuitions” ( [Machery et al., 2004] pp. B8). In the following study, I present data incompatible with Machery et al’s results. Native Cantonese-speaking immigrants from a Cantonese diaspora 1 in Southern California do not have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names when presented with a Cantonese story and Cantonese questions about reference and truth-value. This data raises questions about the quality of Machery et al’s study and the conclusions they draw from it.
Verbal counting and spatial strategies in numerical tasks: Evidence from indigenous australia.Brian Butterworth & Robert Reeve - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (4):443 – 457.details
In this study, we test whether children whose culture lacks CWs and counting practices use a spatial strategy to support enumeration tasks. Children from two indigenous communities in Australia whose native and only language (Warlpiri or Anindilyakwa) lacked CWs and were tested on classical number development tasks, and the results were compared with those of children reared in an English-speaking environment. We found that Warlpiri- and Anindilyakwa-speaking children performed equivalently to their English-speaking counterparts. However, in tasks in which they were required to match the number of objects in a display, they were more likely to reconstruct part or all of the spatial arrangement of the target than were their English-speaking counterparts. Following John Locke's interpretation of users of similar American languages and in contrast with later Whorfian interpretations, we suggest that CWs may be strategically useful, but that in their absence, other task-specific strategies will be deployed.
Semantic intuitions, conceptual analysis, and cross-cultural variation.Henry Jackman - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 146 (2):159 - 177.details
While philosophers of language have traditionally relied upon their intuitions about cases when developing theories of reference, this methodology has recently been attacked on the grounds that intuitions about reference, far from being universal, show significant cultural variation, thus undermining their relevance for semantic theory. I’ll attempt to demonstrate that (1) such criticisms do not, in fact, undermine the traditional philosophical methodology, and (2) our underlying intuitions about the nature of reference may be more universal than the authors suppose.

Experimental Philosophy, Misc

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The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy.Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.) - 2023 - Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.details
The relatively new movement of Experimental Philosophy applies different systematic experimental methods to further illuminate classical philosophical issues. This book brings together experts from the field to give the reader a compact yet extensive overview, offering a ready at hand introduction to the state of the art.
Changing Working Environments in Philosophy: Reflections from a Case Study.Alison K. McConwell, Magdalena T. Bogacz, Char Brecevic, Matthew H. Haber, Jingyi Wu & Sarah M. Roe - 2025 - Philosophy of Science 92 (3):708-731.details
There is an “underrepresentation problem” in philosophy departments and journals. Empirical data suggest that while we have seen some improvements since the 1990s, the rate of change has slowed down. Some posit that philosophy has disciplinary norms making it uniquely resistant to change. We present results from an empirical case study of a philosophy department that achieved and maintained male-female gender parity among its faculty as early as 2014. Our analysis extends beyond matters of gender parity because that is only one, albeit important, dimension of inclusion. We build from the study to reflect on strategies that may catalyze change.
(1 other version)The Experimental Turn and the Methods of Philosophy.Michael J. Shaffer - 2018 - Routledge.details
Experimental philosophy is one of the most controversial and potentially revolutionary areas of philosophical research today. X-Phi, as it is known by many of its practitioners, questions many basic concepts regarding human intuitions—concepts which have guided centuries of modern philosophers. In their place, x-phi steers philosophical research back to scientific investigations in order to better understand human intuitions, using research techniques borrowed from current research in psychology and neuroscience. While scholars debate whether experimental philosophy signals a sea change or is merely a faddish detour, no existing book looks at the X-Phi movement in reference to its methodology. In _The Experimental Turn and the Methods of Philosophy_, Michael J.Shaffer addresses this need, suggesting that the significance of experimental philosophy can best be assessed and understood in methodological terms. By comparing and contrasting traditional views of philosophical methodology with those of experimental philosophy, Shaffer traces the roots of the movement to Quinean naturalism and also demonstrates the deep, revolutionary significance of the experimental turn.
(1 other version)Philosophy Made Visual: An Experimental Study.Nevia Dolcini - 2016 - In Thomas Durlacher, Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Springer Verlag. pp. 101-118.details
The advent of experimental philosophy has recently expanded the domain of philosophical debates so as to include discussions about survey-based methodology and the validity of its employment in philosophical inquiry. One of the main criticisms of this approach questions the alleged response-intuition equation, by claiming that ‘pragmatic cues’ might prevent the subjects from reporting their genuine intuitions about the survey scenarios and questions. The pragmatic cues discussed by the literature include aspects of a quite different nature, ranging from thinking-styles to semantic ambiguities. In order to distinguish between language-related pragmatic cues, and other features not strictly dependent on language, the distinction between the ‘response problem’ and the ‘interpretation problem’—potentially triggered by language-related pragmatic cues—is introduced. By employing an illustrated survey, this study aims at revealing the extent to which the use of ‘non-linguistic’ vignettes might constitute a valid aid to the traditional ‘linguistic’ vignette. A positive response would encourage the usage of illustrations and other non-linguistic or minimally-linguistic models in survey-based studies, which considerably restricts the liability of surveys for the interpretation problem.
Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers.Michael Prinzing & Michael Vazquez - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association:1-19.details
Many philosophers think that doing philosophy cultivates valuable intellectual abilities and dispositions. Indeed, this is a premise in a venerable argument for philosophy’s value. Unfortunately, empirical support for this premise has heretofore been lacking. We provide evidence that philosophical study has such effects. Using a large dataset (including records from over half a million undergraduates at hundreds of institutions across the United States), we investigate philosophy students’ performance on verbal and logical reasoning tests, as well as measures of valuable intellectual dispositions. Results indicate that students with stronger verbal abilities, and who are more curious, open-minded, and intellectually rigorous, are more likely to study philosophy. Nonetheless, after accounting for such baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform all other majors on tests of verbal and logical reasoning and on a measure of valuable habits of mind. This offers the strongest evidence to date that studying philosophy does indeed make people better thinkers.
What should philosophers do with “deceptive” intuition pumps? Restrictionism vs reformism.Arata Matsuda & Masashi Takeshita - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.details
Philosophers commonly use thought experiments to elicit intuitions that serve as evidence for or against philosophical theories. Daniel Dennett calls such thought experiments “intuition pumps” and expresses concern that some of them are “deceptive” in that they elicit conflicting intuitions and thus lead to conflicting conclusions. What, then, should philosophers do with “deceptive” intuition pumps? Dennett proposes what might be called restrictionism, according to which philosophers should restrict the use of deceptive intuition pumps. In this paper, however, we argue that it faces what we call the problem of over-restriction: if philosophers restrict the use of deceptive intuition pumps, then they end up restricting the use of so many intuition pumps that they cannot continue philosophical inquiry. Then, as an alternative, we propose reformism, according to which philosophers should continue the use of deceptive intuition pumps after reforming them. We argue that reformism is more attractive than restrictionism, because it deals with the deceptiveness of intuition pumps while avoiding the problem of over-restriction. Overall, through criticizing Dennett’s restrictionism, we aim to illuminate the attractiveness of reformism, which has been underappreciated as a response to the deceptiveness of intuition pumps, and to call for future research in the reformist research program.
Explainable AI and Stakes in Medicine: A User Study.Sam Baron, Andrew J. Latham & Somogy Varga - 2025 - Artificial Intelligence 340 (C):104282.details
The apparent downsides of opaque algorithms has led to a demand for explainable AI (XAI) methods by which a user might come to understand why an algorithm produced the particular output it did, given its inputs. Patients, for example, might find that the lack of explanation of the process underlying the algorithmic recommendations for diagnosis and treatment hinders their ability to provide informed consent. This paper examines the impact of two factors on user perceptions of explanations for AI systems in medical contexts. The factors considered were the stakes of the decision—high versus low—and the decision source—human versus AI. 484 participants were presented with vignettes in which medical diagnosis and treatment plan recommendations were made by humans or by AI. Separate vignettes were used for high stakes scenarios involving life-threatening diseases, and low stakes scenarios involving mild diseases. In each vignette, an explanation for the decision was given. Four explanation types were tested across separate vignettes: no explanation, counterfactual, causal and a novel ‘narrative-based’ explanation, not previously considered. This yielded a total of 16 conditions, of which each participant saw only one. Individuals were asked to evaluate the explanations they received based on helpfulness, understanding, consent, reliability, trust, interests and likelihood of undergoing treatment. We observed a main effect for stakes on all factors and a main effect for decision source on all factors except for helpfulness and likelihood to undergo treatment. While we observed effects for explanation on helpfulness, understanding, consent, reliability, trust and interests, we by and large did not see any differences between the effects of explanation types. This suggests that the effectiveness of explanations may not depend on type of explanation but instead, on the stakes and decision source.
The Calibration Challenge to Philosophical Intuitions.Paul O. Irikefe - 2025 - Synthese 205 (94):1-25.details
To several critics of the philosophical method of cases—Robert Cummins, Jonathan Weinberg and his colleagues, and Avner Baz—the fact that philosophical intuitions cannot be calibrated means that we cannot rule out the skeptical hypothesis that the outcome of our theorizing based on these intuitions is deeply distorted by our cognitive artifacts. Moreover, they take this hypothesis to license the negative conclusion that we are unable to have much of the armchair knowledge we typically attribute to ourselves when philosophizing based on appeal to philosophical intuitions. This paper addresses this skeptical argument and shows how this negative conclusion can be resisted.
Reading at university in the time of GenA.Thomas Corbin, Yifei Liang, Margaret Bearman, Tim Fawns, Gene Flenady, Paul Formosa, Lucinda McKnight, Jack Reynolds & Jack Walton - 2024 - Learning Letters 3 (35):1-8.details
Concerns around Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in higher education have so far largely centred on assessment integrity, resulting in fundamental questions about students’ broader engagement with these tools remaining underexplored. This paper reports on the findings of a survey that forms part of a wider study, comprising the first empirical investigation of GenAI use by university students as a method of engaging with their academic readings. Our survey of 101 students shows that over half of all students surveyed used GenAI to some degree as a method of engaging with their unit readings. Our findings suggest that students turn to these tools in response to time constraints and conceptual difficulties, while maintaining complex attitudes toward their use: most welcome their availability, yet few report trusting or relying on GenAI-generated interpretations or summaries of texts. Importantly, our data reveals substantial demographic variations in usage patterns, with international students and those taking subjects as electives showing significantly higher rates of AI use to assist with reading. This suggests GenAI tools may be serving as important mediators for attempting to overcome epistemic barriers to learning, particularly for students who face additional linguistic or disciplinary challenges.
Carnap’s Robot Redux: LLMs, Intensional Semantics, and the Implementation Problem in Conceptual Engineering (extended abstract).Bradley Allen - manuscriptdetails
In his 1955 essay \"Meaning and synonymy in natural languages\", Rudolf Carnap presents a thought experiment wherein an investigator provides a hypothetical robot with a definition of a concept together with a description of an individual, and then asks the robot if the individual is in the extension of the concept. In this work, we show how to realize Carnap's Robot through knowledge probing of an large language model (LLM), and argue that this provides a useful cognitive tool for conceptual engineers to compare the extension of a proposed concept definition to the extensional knowledge represented as facts in a given knowledge base, providing a possible solution to the implementation problem in conceptual engineering.
The End of Thought Experiments?Mark Maller - 2024 - Logos and Episteme 15 (3):359-367.details
This reply is a refutation of Santiago Vrech’s article “The End of the Case? A Metaphilosophical Critique of Thought Experiments” (2022) which argues that thought experiments used in argumentation cannot hold in All Possible Worlds (APW) modality, and thus should end. Cases are used to justify or refute a philosophical theory, but should not have the power to refute an entire theory, especially ad infinitum. Significant variations in intuitions, he argues, invalidate cases and are not proven. I argue some variation is acceptable and expected, and his bar of criteria is too high—APW validity is unnecessary. Vrech’s three arguments are faulty and/ or too weak, and his thought experiment is of questionable value. Experimental and armchair philosophy (or philosophers) are misnomers, misleading and false dichotomy.
(1 other version)Women and ‘the philosophical personality’: evaluating whether gender differences in the Cognitive Reflection Test have significance for explaining the gender gap in philosophy.Christina Easton - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):139-167.details
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is purported to test our inclination to overcome impulsive, intuitive thought with effortful, rational reflection. Research suggests that philosophers tend to perform better on this test than non-philosophers, and that men tend to perform better than women. Taken together, these findings could be interpreted as partially explaining the gender gap that exists in Philosophy: there are fewer women in Philosophy because women are less likely to possess the ideal ‘philosophical personality’. If this explanation for the gender gap in Philosophy is accepted, it might be seen to exonerate Philosophy departments of the need to put in place much-needed strategies for promoting gender diversity. This paper discusses a number of reasons for thinking that this would be the wrong conclusion to draw from the research. Firstly, the CRT may not track what it is claimed it tracks. Secondly, the trait tracked by the CRT may not be something that we should value in philosophers. Thirdly, even if we accept that the CRT tracks a trait that has value, this trait might be of limited importance to good philosophising. Lastly, the causal story linking the gender gap in CRT score and the gender gap in Philosophy is likely to be far more complex than this explanation implies.
(1 other version)Estimating the reproducibility of experimental philosophy.Florian Https://Orcidorg Cova, Brent Strickland, Angela Abatista, Aurélien Allard, Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer & Kevin Https://Orcidorg Reuter - 2021 - .details
Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project (XRP) to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy (osf.io/dvkpr). Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward.
The Method in Political Philosophy and the Challenge from Experimental Philosophy.Sebastian Johansen Conte - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Oslodetails
In this thesis, I investigate whether the challenge from experimental philosophy succeeds in undermining the method of reflective equilibrium (MRE). This challenge builds on recent empirical investigations of intuitions about cases conducted by experimental philosophers. It is argued that these investigations have provided evidence suggesting that intuitions should not play an important epistemic role. Moreover, some have suggested that this, in turn, suggests that MRE should be rejected. The assumption is that intuitions play an essential epistemic role in MRE.
First, I consider a response to the challenge from experimental philosophy according to which the common belief that intuitions play a significant epistemic role in philosophical inquiries is false. If most philosophers apply MRE, but do not rely on intuitions, then the challenge from experimental philosophy does not undermine MRE. I argue, however, that philosophers rely on intuitions in moral inquiries.
Second, I consider whether intuitions play an essential epistemic role in MRE. I argue that they do not play an essential role in (some) wide interpretations of the ideal of MRE. Therefore, the challenge does not undermine those versions of MRE. However, I also argue that the challenge does undermine implementations of MRE according to which the assumption that intuitions play a central epistemic role is treated as fixed.
Language Models as Critical Thinking Tools: A Case Study of Philosophers.Andre Ye, Jared Moore, Rose Novick & Amy Zhang - manuscriptdetails
Current work in language models (LMs) helps us speed up or even skip thinking by accelerating and automating cognitive work. But can LMs help us with critical thinking -- thinking in deeper, more reflective ways which challenge assumptions, clarify ideas, and engineer new concepts? We treat philosophy as a case study in critical thinking, and interview 21 professional philosophers about how they engage in critical thinking and on their experiences with LMs. We find that philosophers do not find LMs to be useful because they lack a sense of selfhood (memory, beliefs, consistency) and initiative (curiosity, proactivity). We propose the selfhood-initiative model for critical thinking tools to characterize this gap. Using the model, we formulate three roles LMs could play as critical thinking tools: the Interlocutor, the Monitor, and the Respondent. We hope that our work inspires LM researchers to further develop LMs as critical thinking tools and philosophers and other 'critical thinkers' to imagine intellectually substantive uses of LMs.
(1 other version)Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 5.Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe (eds.) - 2024 - Oxford University Press.details
The new field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field. It features papers by philosophers, papers by psychologists, and papers co-authored by people in both disciplines. The series heralds the emergence of a truly interdisciplinary field in which people from different disciplines are working together to address a shared set of questions. This new volume of Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy showcases the continuing development of the field. The submitted papers go ever more deeply into some of the issues that have long been central topics of experimental philosophy research (epistemic intuitions, metaethical intuitions, intuitions about causation) but also venture into new topics that illustrate the broadening the scope of experimental philosophy research (slurs, experimental economics, Socratic questionnaires). The volume concludes with three specially commissioned essays reviewing recent work on three central topics: causal judgment, knowledge ascription, and the experimental philosophy of consciousness.
Teaching Philosophy during a Pandemic \"in the Most Unequal Society in the World\".Yolandi M. Coetser & Jacqueline Batchelor - 2024 - Teaching Philosophy 47 (1):1-21.details
According to the World Bank, South Africa is the most unequal society in the world. It follows that teaching philosophy takes on a unique character in this country. During the initial COVID-19 outbreak, all universities were compelled to move online, entailing that the teaching of philosophy also moved online. However, because of their socio-economic realities, students faced many barriers, and this served to further marginalise already marginalised students. The university campus provides structural support to many of these students that they do not have at home—computer labs, internet access, and residences. With campuses shutting down and learning to move online, many (if not most) of our students faced significant challenges. This paper explores the challenges encountered during this time through empirical research. Five interviews were conducted with philosophy lecturers, and the data was analysed using Atlas.ti. This article therefore provides empirical insight into the challenges faced by philosophy lecturers as they taught philosophy during a pandemic in the “most unequal society in the world.”.
Book Review: Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction by Joshua Alexander.Torfinn Thomesen Huvenes - 2012 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1.details
Confronting value-based argumentation frameworks with people’s assessment of argument strength.Gustavo A. Bodanza & Esteban Freidin - 2023 - Argument and Computation 14 (3):247-273.details
We reported a series of experiments carried out to confront the underlying intuitions of value-based argumentation frameworks (VAFs) with the intuitions of ordinary people. Our goal was twofold. On the one hand, we intended to test VAF as a descriptive theory of human argument evaluations. On the other, we aimed to gain new insights from empirical data that could serve to improve VAF as a normative model. The experiments showed that people’s acceptance of arguments deviates from VAF’s semantics and is rather correlated with the importance given to the promoted values, independently of the perceptions of argument interactions through attacks and defeats. Furthermore, arguments were often perceived as promoting more than one value with different relative strengths. Individuals’ analyses of scenarios were also affected by external factors such as biases and arguments not explicit in the framework. Finally, we confirmed that objective acceptance, that is, the acceptance of arguments under any order of the values, was not a frequent behavior. Instead, participants tended to accept only the arguments that promoted the values they subscribe.
The Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Formal Epistemology: Conditionals.Igor Douven, Shira Elqayam & Karolina Krzyżanowska - 2023 - In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser, The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 211-236.details
Classical logic was long believed to provide the norms of reasoning. But more recently researchers interested in the norms of reasoning have shifted their attention toward probability theory and various concepts and rules that can be defined in probabilistic terms. In philosophy, this shift gave rise to formal epistemology, while in psychology, it led to the New Paradigm psychology of reasoning. Whereas there has traditionally been a clear division of labor between philosophers and psychologists working on reasoning, the past decade has seen an increasing collaboration between philosophers and psychologists, from which an experimental philosophy of logic and formal epistemology emerged. An area in which the fruits of this collaboration have been particularly in evidence is the research concerned with conditionals and conditional reasoning. This chapter showcases contributions to this area to underline the value of the said branch of experimental philosophy more generally.
The Effect of Philosophy Education for Children (P4C) on Students' Conceptual Achievement and Critical Thinking Skills: A Mixed Method Research.Fatih Pala - 2022 - Education Quarterly Reviews 5 (3):27-41.details
The research aims to investigate the effect of philosophy education for children in social studies course on students' conceptual success and critical thinking skills. Sequential descriptive model, one of the mixed methods research approaches, was used in this study. The study group of the research consists of 64 students studying in 5th grade in a secondary school affiliated with the Ministry of National Education located within the provincial borders of Istanbul city. The students included in the study group studied in the same primary school. The students were randomly selected by the researcher considering their primary school grade score averages, gender characteristics and their economic conditions. Quantitative data of the study were collected using Conceptual Achievement Exam and Critical Thinking Skills Scale, on the other hand qualitative data was collected using Semi-Structured Interview Form. In order to reveal the effects of philosophy education practices for children on students' conceptual success and critical thinking skills, a 10-week practice was conducted in the context of “Technology and Life” unit in 5th-grade social studies course book. Quantitative data of the research were analyzed with SPSS package program, and qualitative data were analyzed with MAXQDA program. According to the results of the research, before practices of Philosophy Education for Children, no significant difference was found between mean rank of experimental group's Conceptual Achievement Exam and Critical Thinking Skills Scale pre-test scores and control group's Conceptual Achievement Exam and Critical Thinking Skills Scale pre-test scores. After the practices of Philosophy Education for Children, a significant difference was found between mean rank of experimental group's Conceptual Achievement Exam and Critical Thinking Skills Scale post-test scores and control group's Conceptual Achievement Exam and Critical Thinking Skills' post-test scores on behalf of the experimental group. Experimental group students made a comprehensive evaluation of practices of philosophy education for children. The students stated that philosophy practices for children not only improved their skills in different ways but influenced their critical thinking and also creative, social, verbal and empathy skills as well.
The influence of philosophical training on the evaluation of philosophical cases: a controlled longitudinal study.Bartosz Maćkiewicz, Katarzyna Kuś & Witold M. Hensel - 2023 - Synthese 202 (4):1-92.details
According to the expertise defense, practitioners of the method of cases need not worry about findings that ordinary people’s philosophical intuitions depend on epistemically irrelevant factors. This is because, honed by years of training, the intuitions of professional philosophers likely surpass those of the folk. To investigate this, we conducted a controlled longitudinal study of a broad range of intuitions in undergraduate students of philosophy (n = 226), whose case judgments we sampled after each semester throughout their studies. Under the assumption, made by proponents of the expertise defense, that formal training in philosophy gives rise to the kind of expertise that accounts for changes in the students’ responses to philosophically puzzling cases, our data suggest that the acquired cognitive skills only affect single case judgments at a time. There does not seem to exist either a general expertise that informs case judgments in all areas of philosophy, or an expertise specific to particular subfields. In fact, we argue that available evidence, including the results of cross-sectional research, is best explained in terms of differences in adopted beliefs about specific cases, rather than acquired cognitive skills. We also investigated whether individuals who choose to study philosophy have atypical intuitions compared to the general population and whether students whose intuitions are at odds with textbook consensus are more likely than others to drop out of the philosophy program.
Is Philosophy Exceptional? A Corpus-Based, Quantitative Study.Moti Mizrahi & Michael Adam Dickinson - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (5):666-683.details
Drawing on the epistemology of logic literature on anti-exceptionalism about logic, we set out to investigate the following metaphilosophical questions empirically: Is philosophy special? Are its methods (dis)continuous with science? More specifically, we test the following metaphilosophical hypotheses empirically: philosophical deductivism, philosophical inductivism, and philosophical abductivism. Using indicator words to classify arguments by type (namely, deductive, inductive, and abductive arguments), we searched through a large corpus of philosophical texts mined from the JSTOR database (N = 435,703) to find patterns of argumentation. The results of our quantitative, corpus-based study suggest that deductive arguments are significantly more common than abductive arguments and inductive arguments in philosophical texts overall, but they are gradually and steadily giving way to non-deductive (i.e. inductive and abductive) arguments in academic philosophy.
Advances in experimental philosophy of medicine.Kristien Hens & Andreas de Block (eds.) - 2023 - New York: Bloomsbury Academic.details
This open access collection brings together a team of leading scholars and rising stars to consider what experimental philosophy of medicine is and can be. While experimental philosophy of science is an established field, attempts to tackle issues in philosophy of medicine from an experimental angle are still surprisingly scarce. A team of interdisciplinary scholars demonstrate how we can make progress by integrating a variety of methods from experimental philosophy, including experiments, sociological surveys, simulations, as well as history and philosophy of science, in order to yield meaningful results about the core questions in medicine. They focus on concepts central to philosophy of medicine and medical practice, such as death, pain, disease and disorder, advance directives, medical explanation, disability and informed consent. Presenting empirical findings and providing a crucial foundation for future work in this dynamic field, this collection explores new ways for philosophers to cooperate with scientists and reveals the value of these collaborations for both philosophy and medicine. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections[dot]com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant.
Experimental Philosophy and Ordinary Language Philosophy.Masaharu Mizumoto - 2023 - In David Bordonaba-Plou, Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 31-56.details
This chapter tries to elucidate the complex relationship between ordinary language philosophyordinary language philosophy (OLP) and experimental philosophy (X-Phi) from the perspective of the contrast between the positive and the negative programs of X-Phi. I will first show the relevance of language to the various fields of contemporary philosophy, through what I call the Argument from Cross-Linguistic Diversity and the Argument from Intra-Linguistic Variance, together with empirical data. This will partly vindicate OLP, which is generally thought to be obsolete today. I will then examine the reasons for the demise of OLP, and show that the contemporary meta-philosophical debates over X-Phi are in fact a revival of the debates in the heyday of OLP. This will then also indicate a parallel between Wittgenstein’s negative programnegative program, called quietism, and the negative program of X-Phi, especially Stich’s. The positive program of X-Phi can no doubt contribute to science, but the question of whether it is philosophy may depend on our conception of philosophy. The negative program of X-Phi is no doubt philosophy, but the question is whether it can make any positive contribution to philosophy, let alone science. I will answer “yes” to it, by sketching a radical negative picture of philosophy in general.
The Concept of Innateness as an Object of Empirical Enquiry.Richard Samuels - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 504–519.details
The concept of innateness has historically exerted an influence in many regions of biology and it continues to play a significant role in cognitive science especially, developmental psychology and linguistics. This chapter provides an overview of some recent efforts to empirically study the innateness concept, both as deployed in folk contexts and among scientists. It considers whether this research really bolsters the standard criticism. The chapter describes research by Paul Griffiths and his collaborators, which seeks to assess whether the folk concept of innateness is a manifestation of the folk biology. It reviews further research, largely due to Josh Knobe and Richard Samuels, on folk innateness judgments. The chapter describes how this research was extended in order to explore the issue of whether scientists’ innateness judgments rely on a distinctly scientific innateness concept, or whether they merely redeploy the folk concept.
Personality and Philosophical Bias.Adam Feltz & Edward T. Cokely - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 578–589.details
Heritable personality traits often predict fundamental philosophical disagreement. This conclusion is based on studies of more than 15,000 people sampled from diverse cultures and educational backgrounds, including verifiable experts. In this chapter, we review some of this research showing links between personality and philosophical bias in free will, intentional action, and ethics. Our discussion focuses on serious challenges that these philosophical biases pose (e.g., limits on the use of philosophical intuitions as evidence). We close with discussion of the Philosophical Personality Argument and brief consideration of emerging projects in applied experimental philosophy.
Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophical Tradition.Stephen Stich & Kevin P. Tobia - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 3–21.details
Many experimental philosophers are philosophers by training and professional affiliation, but some best work in experimental philosophy has been done by people who do not have advanced degrees in philosophy and do not teach in philosophy departments. This chapter explains that the experimental philosophy is the empirical investigation of philosophical intuitions, the factors that affect them, and the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie them. It explores what are philosophical intuitions, and why do experimental philosophers want to study them using the methods of empirical science. The positive program in experimental philosophy shares the goal of the substantial part of traditional philosophy that is concerned with the analysis of important philosophical concepts. The negative program has implications for philosophical projects whose goal is conceptual analysis. There have been a number of responses to the challenge posed by experimental philosophy's negative program. The chapter also focuses on the expertise defense.
Experience, Metaphysics, and Cognitive Science.Laurie Paul - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 419–433.details
This chapter explores how to understand the contributions of experience, especially with respect to the role of cognitive science, in developing and assessing metaphysical theories of reality. Further, it develops a methodological basis for the idea that, independently of work in experimental philosophy focused on explications of concepts, contemporary metaphysical theories with a role for experiential evidence can be fruitfully connected to empirical work in psychology, especially cognitive science. While there are different ways to flesh out the connection between cognitive science and metaphysics, one way to understand the methodological issue concerns the evaluation of Moorean facts about the manifest. The chapter deals with Moorean facts about experience, in particular, with features of the manifest image that are drawn from ordinary experience. It also explores how temporal experience relates to the nature of time.
Na abund'ncia das intuições Filosofia experimental negativa e a orientação do pensamento.Hilan Bensusan - 2017 - Analytica. Revista de Filosofia 20 (2):101-115.details
This work explores the impact of negative X-Phi in the philosophical practice of relying on intuitions. After analyzing how intuitions work, their different types and how they orient thought, I argue that there are several interesting ways for philosophy to deal with the abundance of intuitions that sometimes are in conflict. The emerging image is one where philosophy responds directly or indirectly to truth and doesn't have in intuitions its sole evidential basis.Resumo: O texto explora o impacto da filosofia experimental negativa na prática filosófica de se balizar em intuições. Após uma análise de como funcionam as intuições, dos seus diferentes tipos e de como elas orientam o pensamento, argumento que há modos interessantes da filosofia conviver com a abundância de intuições, muitas vezes contrastantes e em conflito. A imagem que emerge é que a filosofia não tem nas intuições sua única base de evidência e que ela responde, antes, direta ou indiretamente à verdade de suas teses.
O Desafio da Filosofia Experimental à \"Grande Tradição\".Stephen Stich & Kevin Tobia - 2017 - Analytica. Revista de Filosofia 20 (2):9-40.details
Abstract:Appeal to intuition has played an important role in philosophical debates. Recent research in experimental philosophy empirically investigates philosophical intuitions, the factors that affect them, and the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie them. We distinguish between two common ways in which intuitions are used as philosophical evidence and present experimental philosophical studies that problematize these uses of philosophical intuitions. These studies indicate the influence of various prima facie irrelevant factors, such as language and order of presentation, on philosophical intuitions. We consider three versions of the “expertise defense” of philosophical intuition and identify deficiencies in those defenses. We do not conclude that intuitions should never be used as philosophical evidence. Instead, we contend that experimental philosophy, broadly construed, has a crucial role to play in assessing and improving philosophical methodology Resumo: O apelo à intuição desempenhou até o presente um papel importante em debates filosóficos. Pesquisas recentes em filosofia experimental examinam as intuições filosóficas empiricamente, os fatores que as afetam e os mecanismos psicológicos e neurológicos que as subjazem. Distinguimos entre dois modos comuns nos quais as intuições são usadas como evidência filosófica e apresentamos estudos experimentais filosóficos que problematizam esses usos das intuições filosóficas. Esses estudos indicam a iFilosofia nfluência de diversos fatores prima facie irrelevantes, como a linguagem e a ordem de apresentação. Consideramos três versões da “defesa do especialista” da intuição filosófica e identificamos deficiências nessas defesas. Não concluímos que as intuições nunca devam ser usadas como evidência filosófica. Em vez disso, argumentamos que a filosofia experimental, amplamente concebida, tem um papel crucial a desempenhar na avaliação e na melhoria da metodologia filosófica.
"Men" and "Women" in Everyday English.Edward Jarvis - 2022 - Journal of Controversial Ideas 2 (1).details
What kind of distinction are the words “men” and “women” used to mark in everyday English—one of biological sex, social role, or something else, such as gender identity? Consensus on this question would clarify and thereby improve public discussions about the relative interests of transgender and cisgender people, where the same sentence can seem to some to state an obvious truth but to others a logical or metaphysical impossibility (“Transwomen are women” and “Some men have cervixes” are topical examples). It is with this in view that I report here the results of five recent surveys.
What is it like to be colour‐blind? A case study in experimental philosophy of experience.Keith Allen, Philip Quinlan, James Andow & Eugen Fischer - 2021 - Mind and Language 37 (5):814-839.details
What is the experience of someone who is “colour‐blind” like? This paper presents the results of a study that uses qualitative research methods to better understand the lived experience of colour blindness. Participants were asked to describe their experiences of a variety of coloured stimuli, both with and without EnChroma glasses—glasses which, the manufacturers claim, enhance the experience of people with common forms of colour blindness. More generally, the paper provides a case study in the nascent field of experimental philosophy of experience.
On Second Thought: Reflections on the Reflection Defense.Markus Kneer, David Colaco, Joshua Alexander & Edouard Machery - 2022 - In Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe, Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 4. Oxford University Press. pp. 257–296.details
This chapter sheds light on a response to experimental philosophy that has not yet received enough attention: the reflection defense. According to proponents of this defense, judgments about philosophical cases are relevant only when they are the product of careful, nuanced, and conceptually rigorous reflection. The chapter argues that the reflection defense is misguided: Five studies (N>1800) are presented, showing that people make the same judgments when they are primed to engage in careful reflection as they do in the conditions standardly used by experimental philosophers.
Exploring Metaphor’s Communicative Effects in Reasoning on Vaccination.Francesca Ervas, Pietro Salis, Cristina Sechi & Rachele Fanari - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13 (1027733.):1-15.details
Introduction: The paper investigates the impact of the use of metaphors in reasoning tasks concerning vaccination, especially for defeasible reasoning cases. We assumed that both metaphor and defeasible reasoning can be relevant to let people understand vaccination as an important collective health phenomenon, by anticipating possible defeating conditions.
Methods: We hypothesized that extended metaphor could improve both the argumentative and the communicative effects of the message. We designed an empirical study to test our main hypotheses: participants (N = 196, 78% females; Meanage = 27.97 years, SDage = 10.40) were presented with a text about vaccination, described in either literal or metaphorical terms, based on uncertain vs. safe reasoning scenarios.
Results: The results of the study confirmed that defeasible reasoning is relevant for the communicative impact of a text and that an extended metaphor enhances the overall communicative effects of the message, in terms of understandability, persuasion, perceived safety, and feeling of control over the health situation, collective trust in expertise and uptake of experts' advice. However, the results show that this effect is significantly nuanced by the type of defeasible reasoning, especially in the case of participants' trust in expertise and commitment to experts' advice.
Conclusion: Both communicative and defeasible reasoning competences are needed to enhance trust in immunization, with possible different outcomes at an individual and collective level.
The Concept of Intuition in Experimental Philosophy.Krzysztof Sękowski - 2022 - Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal 12 (1):111-128.details
Although the concept of intuition has a central place in experimental philosophy, it is still far from being clear. Moreover, critics of that movement often argue that the concept of intuition in experimental philosophy does not correspond to the concept of intuition used in traditional, armchair philosophy. However, such a claim is problematic, because most attempts to define this concept are made with regard to the armchair philosophy’s point of view and not that of experimental philosophy. In the article I analyse the concept of intuition in experimental philosophy by taking into account its theoretical assumptions, and the research practice of its representatives. By analysing the most influential experimental philosophers’ views, I formulate its core characteristics. According to them, intuition is a mental state that is a reaction to the described case, which is revealed in the readiness to express a judgment about this case. Then, I investigate step by step the frequently postulated methodological, phenomenological, and etiological conditions that could narrow down the initial definition. I show that the only condition coherent with experimental philosophy’s assumptions and its practice is an etiological one, as the mental state that could be classified as intuition has to be shaped by pragmatic, and not only semantic factors. In the last parts of the text, I draw out some of the consequences of the position that I have presented, regarding the methodology of experimental philosophy and philosophy in general.
The Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy.Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.) - 2020 - Oxford University Press.details
The philosophy of luck and experimental philosophy.Joe Milburn & Edouard Machery - 2019 - In Ian M. Church & Robert J. Hartman, The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Luck. New York: Routledge.details
(1 other version) Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, vol 5.Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.) - forthcoming - Oxford University Press.details
Tell Us What You Really Think: A think aloud protocol analysis of the verbal cognitive reflection test.Nick Byrd, Brianna Joseph, Gabriela Gongora & Miroslav Sirota - 2023 - Journal of Intelligence 11 (4).details
The standard interpretation of cognitive reflection tests assumes that correct responses are reflective and lured responses are unreflective. However, prior process-tracing of mathematical reflection tests has cast doubt on this interpretation. In two studies (N = 201), we deployed a validated think-aloud protocol in-person and online to test how this assumption is satisfied by the new, validated, less familiar, and less mathematical verbal Cognitive Reflection Test (vCRT). Importantly, thinking aloud did not disrupt test performance compared to a control group. Moreover, verbalized thoughts in both studies revealed that most (but not all) correct responses involved reflection and that most (but not all) lured responses lacked reflection. These data suggest that the vCRT usually satisfies the standard interpretation of the reflection tests (albeit not without exceptions) and that the vCRT can be a good measure of the construct theorized by the two-factor explication of ‘reflection’ (as deliberate and conscious).
Intuitions in the Ontology of Musical Works.Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (2):455-474.details
An impressive variety of theories of ontology of musical works has been offered in the last fifty years. Recently, the ontologists have been paying more attention to methodological issues, in particular, the problem of determining criteria of a good theory. Although different methodological approaches involve different views on the importance and exact role of intuitiveness of a theory, most philosophers writing on the ontology of music agree that intuitiveness and compliance with musical practice play an important part when judging theories. A multitude of diverse claims exist regarding folk intuitions and matters of musical practice in the literature on the ontology of musical works. In this review paper, a systematized collection of about one hundred empirical claims extracted from the theoretical literature is presented. All of the empirical claims are categorized thematically. The paper also includes a short discussion on the role of appeals to common intuitions in methodological literature, as well as some suggestions for future research.
Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics: A. Aberdein and M. Inglis, editors, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 291 pp. $28.76. ISBN 978-1-3500-3902-5.Yuri Sato - 2021 - History and Philosophy of Logic 43 (3):305-307.details
This book is a collection of articles on research that attempts to connect logic and mathematics with empirical and cognition. There have been various such a...
The wisdom-of-crowds: an efficient, philosophically-validated, social epistemological network profiling toolkit.Colin Klein, Marc Cheong, Marinus Ferreira, Emily Sullivan & Mark Alfano - 2023 - In Hocine Cherifi, Rosario Nunzio Mantegna, Luis M. Rocha, Chantal Cherifi & Salvatore Miccichè, Complex Networks and Their Applications XI: Proceedings of The Eleventh International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications: COMPLEX NETWORKS 2022 — Volume 1. Springer.details
The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on an open-source reimplementation of their algorithm in Python, optimized to be usable on much larger networks. In addition to the algorithm and package, we also show the ability to scale up our package to large synthetic social network graph profiling, and finally demonstrate its utility in analyzing real-world empirical evidence of ‘echo chambers’ on online social media, as well as evidence of interdisciplinary diversity in an academic communications network.
How to Vindicate the Armchair.James Andow - 2022 - Analysis 82 (2):306-321.details
Strevens’s Thinking Off Your Feet promises to vindicate philosophical analysis. My comments take a narrow, critical focus. I argue that Strevens doesn’t deliver on this promise. Given my understanding of (i) what is required from a vindication of philosophical analysis and (ii) Strevens’s grounds for ‘optimism’ about philosophical analysis, Strevens hasn’t done enough to vindicate philosophical analysis. Indeed, Strevens’s supposed grounds for optimism about armchair philosophy in fact provide motivation for philosophical analysis to give up some ground to experimental philosophy. Although my comments are critical, my overall view of the book is not. Strevens does important and interesting work presenting and analysing various models of how armchair philosophy might work and what it might achieve. The book deserves a central place in future discussions about these issues.
The cartesian folk theater: People conceptualize consciousness as a spatio-temporally localized process in the human brain.Matthias Forstmann & Pascal Burgmer - 2022 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 151 (4):781-803.details
The present research (total N = 2,057) tested whether people’s folk conception of consciousness aligns with the notion of a “Cartesian Theater” (Dennett, 1991). More precisely, we tested the hypotheses that people believe that consciousness happens in a single, confined area (vs. multiple dispersed areas) in the human brain, and that it (partly) happens after the brain finished analyzing all available information. Further, we investigated how these beliefs arerelated to participants’ neuroscientific knowledge as well as their reliance on intuition, and which rationale they use to explain their responses. Using a computer-administered drawing task, we found that participants located consciousness, but not unrelated neurological processes (Studies 1a & 1b) or unconscious thinking (Study 2) in a single, confined area in the prefrontal cortex, and that they considered most of the brain not involved in consciousness. Participants mostly relied on their intuitions when responding, and they were not affected by prior knowledge about the brain. Additionally, they considered the conscious experience of sensory stimuli to happen in a spatially more confined area than the corresponding computational analysis of these stimuli (Study 3). Furthermore, participants’ explicit beliefs about spatial and temporal localization of consciousness (i.e., consciousness happening after the computational analysis of sensory information is completed) are independent, yet positively correlated beliefs (Study 4). Using a more elaborate measure for temporal localization of conscious experience, our final study confirmed that people believe consciousness to partly happen even after information processing is done (Study 5).
(1 other version)Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 4.Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe (eds.) - 2022 - Oxford University Press.details
The new interdisciplinary field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field, by both philosophers and psychologists.
Opressões da Corporalidade na Pedagógica Brasileira e Possibilidades de Libertação a partir das culturas populares revolucionárias.Hugo Allan Matos - 2012 - Dissertation, details
Minha dissertação de mestrado em educação. Trata-se de uma reflexão filosófica aprofundada sobre a cultura brasileira numa perspectiva áltera da corporalidade desde a filosofia de Enrique Dussel mostrando como é possível partir das culturas populares revolucionárias para pensar filosóficamente a cultura.
Experiences, knowledge of functions, and social acceptance of robots: an exploratory case study focusing on Japan.Tatsuya Nomura & Motoharu Tanaka - 2022 - AI and Society 37 (1):367-374.details
Although Japanese society has become aware of some types of robots, social acceptance of robots is still not widespread. This study conducted an online questionnaire survey to investigate the relationships between experiences with and knowledge of vacuum, pet-type, and communication robots and acceptance of these robots, including the intention to use and trust. The results suggested that experiences with, knowledge of functions, and acceptance of the robots differed depending on the type of robot, and the influence of these factors on acceptance of the robots also differed depending on the robot types.
How do philosophers and nonphilosophers think about philosophy? And does personality make a difference?James Andow - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2).details
Recent metaphilosophical debates have focused on the methods/epistemology of philosophy (e.g., the role of intuitions), and the structure of the discipline (e.g., which subfields are considered central to philosophy). The paper reports the results of an exploratory study examining the relationship between personality and both kinds of metaphilosophical view. The findings reported are (a) No important link between personality and attitudes to intuitions, (b) Apparent differences between experts and non-experts as to which subfields are considered central, (c) Only limited evidence that perceptions of centrality are related to personality in minor ways. Although no dramatic relationships between personality and metaphilosophical view are found, the results nonetheless prompt some reflection about the role played by judgements about the centrality of subfields within the discipline.
The public relevance of philosophy.Stijn Conix, Olivier Lemeire & Pei-Shan Chi - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-28.details
Various authors have recently expressed doubts about the public relevance of philosophy. These doubts target both academic philosophy in general and particular subfields of philosophy. This paper investigates whether these doubts are justified through two tests in which the lack of public relevance of a philosophical paper is operationalized as the degree to which that paper is isolated. Both tests suggest that academic philosophy in general is more isolated from the broader public than it should be, and confirm the hypothesis that some subfields of philosophy are more isolated than others. We argue that this lack of public relevance is caused by the incentive structure of academic philosophy and discuss a range of individual-level and incentive-level solutions.
Psychophysiological approach to the Liar paradox: Jean Buridan’s virtual entailment principle put to the test.Konrad Rudnicki & Piotr Łukowski - 2019 - Synthese 198 (S22):5573-5592.details
This article presents an empirical examination of the consequences of the virtual entailment principle proposed by Jean Buridan to resolve the Liar paradox. This principle states that every sentence in natural language implicitly asserts its own truth. Adopting this principle means that the Liar sentence is not paradoxical but false, because its content is contradictory to what is virtually implied. As a result, humans should perceive the Liar sentence the same way as any other false sentence. This solution to the Liar paradox received criticism for making ad hoc claims about the natural language. However, thanks to modern advancements in psychophysiology, it became possible to empirically investigate if the human brain really perceives the Liar sentence like a false sentence. We designed and conducted an experiment to examine brain activity in response to true sentences, false sentences and self-referential sentences. Our results provide support for the Buridan’s hypothesis and show that the Liar sentence is processed by the human brain identically to false sentences, while the Truthteller sentence is perceived identically to true sentences. This agrees with predictions derived from the virtual entailment principle and supports the idea that humans think with the logic of truth—a logic for which the truth is a designated value of its adequate semantics.
(1 other version)Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, vol 4.Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.) - 2021 - Oxford University Press.details
For and Against Scientism: Science, Methodology, and the Future of Philosophy.Moti Mizrahi (ed.) - 2022 - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.details
The term scientism is used in several ways. It is used to denote an epistemological thesis according to which science is the source of our knowledge about the world and ourselves. Relatedly, it is used to denote a methodological thesis according to which the methods of science are superior to the methods of non-scientific fields or areas of inquiry, or even used to put forward a metaphysical thesis that what exists is what science says exists. In recent decades, the term scientism has acquired a derogatory meaning when it is used in defense of non-scientific ways of knowing. In particular, some philosophers level the charge of “scientism” against those (mostly scientists) who are dismissive of philosophy. Other philosophers, however, embrace scientism, or some variant thereof, and object to the pejorative use of the term scientism. This book critically examines the arguments for and against scientism of various kinds to answer the central question: does scientism pose an existential threat to philosophy, or should philosophy become more scientific?
Reflective Reasoning & Philosophy.Nick Byrd - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (11):e12786.details
Philosophy is a reflective activity. So perhaps it is unsurprising that many philosophers have claimed that reflection plays an important role in shaping and even improving our philosophical thinking. This hypothesis seems plausible given that training in philosophy has correlated with better performance on tests of reflection and reflective reasoning has correlated with demonstrably better judgments in a variety of domains. This article reviews the hypothesized roles of reflection in philosophical thinking as well as the empirical evidence for these roles. This reveals that although there are fairly reliable links between reflection and philosophical judgment among both laypeople and philosophers, the role of reflection in philosophical thinking may nonetheless depend in part on other factors, some of which have yet to be determined. So progress in research on reflection in philosophy may require further innovation in experimental methods and psychometric validation of philosophical measures.
Empirical Conceptual Analysis: An Exposition.Hristo Valchev - 2021 - Philosophia 50 (2):757-776.details
Conceptual analysis as traditionally understood can be improved by allowing the use of a certain kind of empirical investigation. The conceptual analysis in which the kind of empirical investigation in question is used can be called “empirical conceptual analysis”. In the present inquiry, I provide a systematic exposition of empirical conceptual analysis, so understood, considering what exactly empirical conceptual analysis is, the different kinds of empirical conceptual analysis, and the main application of the method within philosophy. It can be defined as a method that consists in drawing a conclusion about the semantic application conditions of a predicate on the basis of observation of the manifestations of semantic intuitions. The different kinds of empirical conceptual analysis are distinguished according to the way the manifestations of semantic intuitions are observed. The main application of the method is solving conceptual disputes – situations in which different competent speakers of a language disagree about the semantic application conditions of a predicate from that language, and their disagreement is caused by the fact that they have different semantic intuitions about that predicate.
Structure-sensitive testimonial norms.Benedikt T. A. Höltgen - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-23.details
Although there has been a lot of investigation into the influence of the network structure of scientific communities on the one hand and into testimonial norms on the other, a discussion of TNs that take the network structure into account has been lacking. In this paper, I introduce two TNs which are sensitive to the local network structure. According to these norms, scientists should give less weight to the results of well-connected colleagues, as compared to less connected ones. I employ an Agent Based Model to test the reliability of the two novel TNs against different versions of conventional, structure-insensitive TNs in networks of varying size and structure. The results of the simulations show that the novel TNs are more reliable. This suggests that it would be beneficial for scientific communities if their members followed such norms. For individual scientists, I show that there are both reasons for and reasons against adopting them.
In Defense of Conceptual Engineering.Steffen Koch - 2021 - Dissertation, Ruhr-Universität Bochumdetails
In this cumulative phd thesis, I provide an account of conceptual engineering and defend it against various challenges. The thesis contains five chapters (plus an introduction and a conclusion): 1. Engineering what? On concepts in conceptual engineering (Synthese, 2020); 2. The externalist challenge to conceptual engineering (Synthese, 2021); 3. There is no dilemma for conceptual engineering. Reply to Max Deutsch (Philosophical Studies, 2020); 4. Why conceptual engineers should not worry about topics (Erkenntnis, forthcoming); 5. Carnapian explication, experimental philosophy, and fruitful concepts (Inquiry, 2019).
Interpretation of Modern Art Masterpieces: No Motor Reflection.Paolo Bartolomeo Pascolo & Andrea Bucci - 2021 - Progress in Neuroscience 5 (4-5):12.details
The article is an experiment that deals with "Embodied Simulation" and " Embodied Cognition". This work follows the procedures of studies of the Parma Group and against them try to demonstrate their failure. The cognition is not embodied at all, maybe a little and at least.
The psychology of philosophy: Associating philosophical views with psychological traits in professional philosophers.David B. Yaden & Derek E. Anderson - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (5):721-755.details
Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, well-being, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included non-technical ‘translations’ of these views for eventual use in other populations. We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism. We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value.
Unjustifiably Irresponsible: The Effects of Social Roles on Attributions of Intent.Stephen Rowe, Andy Vonasch & Michael-John Turp - 2021 - Social Psychological and Personality Science 12 (8):1446-1456.details
How do people’s social roles change others’ perceptions of their intentions to cause harm? Three preregistered vignette-based experiments (N = 788) manipulated the social role of someone causing harm and measured how intentional people thought the harm was. Results indicate that people judge harmful consequences as intentional when they think the actor unjustifiably caused harm. Social roles were shown to alter intention judgments by making people responsible for preventing harm (thereby endering the harm as an intentional neglect of one’s responsibilities) or for causing the harm (thereby excusing it as an unintentional byproduct of the role). Additionally, Experiment 3 conceptually replicated and moderated the side-effect effect—revealing that people think harmful side effects are intentional when the harm is unjustified but not when a role’s responsibility justifies it. We discuss the importance of social information—including roles—in how people judge others’ intentions.
The Ordinary Concept of True Love.Brian Earp, Daniel Do & Joshua Knobe - 2024 - In Christopher Grau & Aaron Smuts, "Introduction" for the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love. Oxford University Press.details
When we say that what two people feel for each other is 'true love,' we seem to be doing more than simply clarifying that it is in fact love they feel, as opposed to something else. That is, an experience or relationship might be a genuine or actual instance of love without necessarily being an instance of true love. But what criteria do people use to determine whether something counts as true love? This chapter explores three hypotheses. The first holds that the ordinary concept of true love picks out love that is highly prototypical. The second, that it picks out love that is especially good or valuable. The third, that people distinguish between psychological states that are 'real' or not, and that it picks out love that is real. Two experiments provide evidence against the first hypothesis and in favor of the second and third. Implications for real-life disagreements about love are also discussed.
You Just Can’t Count on (Un)Reliability.Joshua Alexander & Jonathan M. Weinberg - 2020 - Analysis 80 (4):737-751.details
Edouard Machery argues that many traditional philosophical questions are beyond our capacity to answer. Answering them seems to require using the method of cases, a method that involves testing answers to philosophical questions against what we think about real or imagined cases. The problem, according to Machery, is that this method has proved unreliable ; what we think about these kinds of cases is both problematically heterogeneous and volatile. His bold solution: abandon the method of cases altogether and with it many of the questions that we have come to associate with philosophy itself. Many of the critical responses to Machery’s book have focused on whether empirical work on judgements about philosophical cases supports his claim that the method of cases is unreliable. Our problem with these responses is that they accept that reliability is the right way to frame empirically informed concerns about the method of cases, and we think that it is not. The reason is simple: the kind of unreliability thesis that Machery needs proves to be empirically intractable, at least by anything like the current methods used by experimental philosophers, or so we shall argue here. While we have empirical grounds for thinking that unreliability arguments don’t give us reason to abandon the method of cases, we do think that there are empirical grounds for thinking that it needs to be reformed. There are other standards that we expect our methods to meet beyond mere reliability, especially standards of practical rationality, which are too often forgotten in metaphilosophical discussions that tend to focus exclusively on epistemological considerations. Methodological considerations, after all, are not just matters of epistemic normativity, but practical rationality as well. What’s more, considerations of practical rationality become particularly important when we move from the kind of extreme scepticism that Machery endorses to the kind of progressive reformation that we think should be pursued. And so we conclude by arguing that thinking about philosophical inquiry in terms of standards of practical rationality allows us both to better understand what kinds of problems recent empirical work on philosophical cognition raises for the method of cases and also how that work can point the way to reforming it.
Research Misconduct in the Fields of Ethics and Philosophy: Researchers’ Perceptions in Spain.Ramón A. Feenstra, Emilio Delgado López-Cózar & Daniel Pallarés-Domínguez - 2021 - Science and Engineering Ethics 27 (1):1-21.details
Empirical studies have revealed a disturbing prevalence of research misconduct in a wide variety of disciplines, although not, to date, in the areas of ethics and philosophy. This study aims to provide empirical evidence on perceptions of how serious a problem research misconduct is in these two disciplines in Spain, particularly regarding the effects that the model used to evaluate academics’ research performance may have on their ethical behaviour. The methodological triangulation applied in the study combines a questionnaire, a debate at the annual meeting of scientific association, and in-depth interviews. Of the 541 questionnaires sent out, 201 responses were obtained, with a significant difference in the participation of researchers in philosophy and in ethics ; 26 researchers took part in the debate and 14 interviews were conducted. The questionnaire results reveal that 91.5% of the respondents considered research misconduct to be on the rise; 63.2% considered at least three of the fraudulent practices referred to in the study to be commonplace, and 84.1% identified two or more such practices. The researchers perceived a high prevalence of duplicate publication and self-plagiarism, use of personal influence and citation manipulation, in contrast to a low perceived incidence of data falsification or fabrication. The debate and the interviews corroborated these data. Researchers associated the spread of these misconducts with the research evaluation model applied in Spain.
Experimental philosophy and the method of cases.Joachim Horvath & Steffen Koch - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 16 (1):e12716.details
In this paper, we first briefly survey the main responses to the challenge that experimental philosophy poses to the method of cases, given the common assumption that the latter is crucially based on intuitive judgments about cases. Second, we discuss two of the most popular responses in more detail: the expertise defense and the mischaracterization objection. Our take on the expertise defense is that the available empirical data do not support the claim that professional philosophers enjoy relevant expertise in their intuitive judgments about cases. In contrast, the mischaracterization objection seems considerably more promising than its largely negative reception has suggested. We argue that the burden of proof is thus on philosophers who still hold that the method of cases crucially relies on intuitive judgments about cases. Finally, we discuss whether conceptual engineering provides an alternative to the method of cases in light of the challenge from experimental philosophy. We argue that this is not clearly the case, because conceptual engineering also requires descriptive information about the concepts it aims to improve. However, its primarily normative perspective on our concepts makes it largely orthogonal to the challenge from experimental philosophy, and it can also benefit from the empirical methods of the latter.
(1 other version)Conceptual engineering via experimental philosophy.Jennifer Nado - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (1-2):76-96.details
ABSTRACT Conceptual engineering provides a prima facie attractive alternative to traditional, conceptual analysis based approaches to philosophical method – particularly for those with doubts about the epistemic merits of intuition. As such, it seems to be a natural fit for those persuaded by the critiques of intuition offered by experimental philosophy. Recently, a number of authors [Schupbach, J. 2015. “Experimental Explication.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 : 672–710; Shepherd, J., and J. Justus. 2015. “X-Phi and Carnapian Explication.” Erkenntnis 80 : 381–402; Fisher, J. 2015. “Pragmatic Experimental Philosophy.” Philosophical Psychology 28: 412–433; Machery, E. 2017. Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds. Oxford University Press] have suggested that experimental philosophy might be employed in service of conceptual engineering. In this paper, I provide a novel argument for x-phi’s relevance to conceptual engineering, based on a ‘functionalist’ approach to conceptual engineering. In short, I argue that experimental philosophy is distinctively well-suited to investigation of the purposes or functions which our concepts serve, and the means by which they fulfil those functions. Experimental philosophy thereby uncovers potential engineering solutions that may serve as models for the conceptual engineer.
Value-based Essentialism: Essentialist Beliefs about Social Groups with Shared Values.April Bailey, Joshua Knobe & Newman George - forthcoming - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.details
Psychological essentialism has played an important role in social psychology, informing influential theories of stereotyping and prejudice as well as questions about wrongdoers’ accountability and their ability to change. In the existing literature, essentialism is often tied to beliefs in shared biology—i.e., the extent to which members of a social group are seen as having the same underlying biological features. Here we investigate the possibility of “value-based essentialism” in which people think of certain social groups in terms of an underlying essence, but that essence is understood as a value. Study 1 explored beliefs about a wide range of social groups and found that both groups with shared biology (e.g., women) and shared values (e.g., hippies) elicited similar general essentialist beliefs relative to more incidental social categories (e.g., English-speakers). In Studies 2-4, participants who read about a group either as being based in biology or in values reported higher general essentialist beliefs compared to a control condition. Because biological essences about social groups have been connected to a number of downstream consequences, we also investigated two test cases concerning value-based essentialism. In Study 3, beliefs about both shared biology and shared values increased inductive generalizations about the social group relative to control, but in Study 4, only the shared biology condition reduced blame for wrongdoing. Together these findings join with recent work to support a broader theoretical framework of essentialism about social groups that can be arrived at through multiple pathways, including, in the present case, shared values.
Fuller and the Folk: The Inner Morality of Law Revisited.Raff Donelson & Ivar R. Hannikainen - 2020 - In Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe, Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3. Oxford University Press. pp. 6-28.details
The experimental turn in philosophy has reached several sub-fields including ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. This paper is among the first to apply experimental techniques to questions in the philosophy of law. Specifically, we examine Lon Fuller's procedural natural law theory. Fuller famously claimed that legal systems necessarily observe eight principles he called "the inner morality of law." We evaluate Fuller's claim by surveying both ordinary people and legal experts about their intuitions about legal systems. We conclude that, at best, we should be skeptical of Fuller's inner morality of law in light of the experimental data.
‘Bisexual oysters’: A diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis of bisexual representation in The Times between 1957 and 2017.Mark Wilkinson - 2019 - Discourse and Communication 13 (2):249-267.details
Recent decades have witnessed an increase in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex visibility in the British media. Increased representation has not been equally distributed, however, as bisexuality remains an obscured sexual identity in discourses of sexuality. Through the use of diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis, this study seeks to uncover how bisexual people have been represented in the British press between 1957 and 2017. By specifically focusing on the discursive construction of bisexuality in The Times, the results reveal how bisexual people are represented as existing primarily in discourses of the past or in fiction. The Times corpus also reveals significant variation in the lexical meaning of bisexual throughout the 60 years in question. These findings contribute to contemporary theories of bisexual erasure which posit that bisexual people are denied the same ontological status as monosexual identities, that is, homosexuality and heterosexuality.
Lingering stereotypes: Salience bias in philosophical argument.Eugen Fischer & Paul E. Engelhardt - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (4):415-439.details
Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility ratings with pupillometry to document this “salience bias.” We find that under certain conditions, competent speakers automatically make stereotypical inferences they know to be inappropriate.
Students' Opinions on Philosophy Courses.Oleksandr Kulyk - 2020 - Granì 23 (6-7):111-118.details
Universities seeking to provide modern education face a constant need to update their courses. This study was conducted to collect and analyze empirical data to help philosophy course designers consider the views of Ukrainian students about effective ways to learn this subject. A survey was conducted among 40 humanities students and 34 social science students to determine participants’ views on a number of key issues related to the organization of the learning process in the Philosophy course. Most of the students surveyed said that of the types of skills and knowledge that can be acquired during the course, they will find critical thinking skills and the skills needed to build and argue their own positions on ethical, social and worldview issues most valuable in their future professional activities. The majority of respondents named traditional lectures and discussions of lecture videos as their preferred forms of learning philosophy. Their preferred forms of assessment of students’ knowledge and skills in philosophy were essays, as well as reports and participation in the discussion during practical lessons. The study also identified three significant differences in the responses of the surveyed humanities and social science students. First, socio-scientific students valued the opportunity to develop their communication skills in the framework of the Philosophy course significantly more than humanities students. Second, humanities students included thought experiments among the most desirable ways of learning philosophy, unlike social science students, who included case studies. Third, in contrast to humanities students, social science students considered quizzes to be one of the best forms of assessment for the course. In addition to the above, this study also compared the data on the opinions of social sciences and humanities students with the results of the previous survey of 60 STEM students about their thoughts on the course. The comparative analysis revealed five common features and two significant differences in the responses of students from these three fields of knowledge. The common belief among surveyed students in all three groups is that learning philosophy can provide them with the skills and knowledge they will need in their professional activities after graduation from university. Moreover, they prefer skills to knowledge. In all three groups of respondents, a large number of students named critical thinking and argumentation skills as the ultimate achievements in the learning of philosophy. Another finding was that surveyed students from all three groups do not give priority to learning the concepts of modern philosophers over learning the ideas of ancient philosophers. In addition, respondents from all three fields showed the least interest in those forms of knowledge and skills that are difficult to use outside of highly specialized philosophical activities. As for the differences, the study showed that STEM students are sign
A Survey of Effects of STS Education on the University Students' Moral Development and Epistemological Beliefs: Using DIT and EBI.Hyemin Han - 2006 - Journal of Ethics Education Studies 9:201-217.details
The purpose of this study is to assess effects of STS(Science and Technology Studies) education in natural science colleges and engineering colleges. STS is an interdisciplinary study includes ethics, history, sociology, policy of science and technology; its main purpose is elaborating students' social perspectives on science and technology. In Korea, however, there is few studies related to STS education to improve its educational effects. Therefore, this study will do exploratory investigation effects of STS education in moral development and epistemological beliefs from view point of educational psychology; moral development will be assessed by DIT(Defining Issues Test), and epistemological beliefs will be assessed by EBI(Epistemic Beliefs Inventory). The results show that, first, there was significant difference between growth in epistemological beliefs of students who attended STS course for semesters and who did not attend STS course at all or attended just once, second, students who attended historical-social based and interdisciplinary STS courses showed significantly grater growth in moral reasoning than students who attended non STS courses or field specified STS courses such as philosophy of science and technology, From the results of investigation, this study will propose some suggestions to improve STS education in Korea.
English Language and Philosophy.Jonathan Tallant & James Andow - 2020 - In S. Adolphs & D. Knight, The Routledge Handbook of English Language and Digital Humanities.details
Philosophical enquiry stands to benefit from the inclusion of methods from the digital humanities to study language use. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities have the potential to contribute to both conceptual analysis and intuition-based enquiry, two important approaches in contemporary philosophy. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities can also provide valuable metaphilosophical insights into the nature of philosophical methods themselves. The use of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy should be expected to follow a similar trajectory to another attempt to introduce empirical methods in philosophy. Experimental philosophers use empirical methods from the cognitive sciences to bear on philosophical questions. At first, we should expect the main contribution of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy to be at the metaphilosophical level. Then, given the right impetus and support, we are optimistic that methods from the digital humanities can make important and sustained contributions to first-order philosophical enquiry. This chapter gives two case studies of recent studies in which methods from the digital humanities are used to address metaphilosophical questions about the use of the word ‘intuition’ and the methods of philosophy and physics. It gives three examples of contemporary first-order philosophical debates to which methods fromthe digital humanities could make an important contribution in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. The chapter discusses some methodological challenges and limitations which are of particular importance when considering the application of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy, including concerns about the demographic representativeness of widely available corpora.
Review of Andrew Aberdein and Matthew Inglis (eds), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics: New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishers, 2019, 296 pages, $114.Mark Zelcer - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (3):1283-1287.details
Using corpus linguistics to investigate mathematical explanation.Juan Pablo Mejía Ramos, Lara Alcock, Kristen Lew, Paolo Rago, Chris Sangwin & Matthew Inglis - 2019 - In Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis, Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Press. pp. 239–263.details
In this chapter we use methods of corpus linguistics to investigate the ways in which mathematicians describe their work as explanatory in their research papers. We analyse use of the words explain/explanation (and various related words and expressions) in a large corpus of texts containing research papers in mathematics and in physical sciences, comparing this with their use in corpora of general, day-to-day English. We find that although mathematicians do use this family of words, such use is considerably less prevalent in mathematics papers than in physics papers or in general English. Furthermore, we find that the proportion with which mathematicians use expressions related to ‘explaining why’ and ‘explaining how’ is significantly different to the equivalent proportion in physics and in general English. We discuss possible accounts for these differences.
Are thought experiments “disturbing”? The case of armchair physics.Samuel Schindler & Pierre Saint-Germier - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (9):2671-2695.details
Proponents of the “negative program” in experimental philosophy have argued that judgements in philosophical cases, also known as case judgements, are unreliable and that the method of cases should be either strongly constrained or even abandoned. Here we put one of the main proponent’s account of why philosophical cases may cause the unreliability of case judgements to the test. We conducted our test with thought experiments from physics, which exhibit the exact same supposedly “disturbing characteristics” of philosophical cases.
Youth Philosophy Conferences and the Development of Adolescent Social Skills.Jane Gatley, Elliott Woodhouse & Joshua Forstenzer - 2020 - Precollege Philosophy and Public Practice 1 (2):107-125.details
In this paper we present an empirical case study into the effects of attending a philosophy conference on social skill development in 15- to 18-year-old students. We focus on the impact that the conference had on their communication skills, sociability, cooperation and teamwork skills, self-confidence, determination, social responsibility, and empathy. These are social skills previously studied in 2017 by Siddiqui et al. who found student development in these areas as a result of Philosophy for Children (P4C) sessions in primary schools. In this paper, we ask whether our conference—Pursuit of Knowledge—brought about comparable results. Overall, attendees reported that they felt that the conference had improved their communication skills, sociability, cooperation and teamwork, self-confidence, determination, social responsibility and empathy. We conclude that further research into the potential of models of philosophy akin to the model employed by the conference should be conducted. We discuss the potential of this model as a means of educating for social skills.
Insufficient Effort Responding in Experimental Philosophy.Thomas Pölzler - 2022 - In Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe, Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 4. Oxford University Press.details
Providing valid responses to a self-report survey requires cognitive effort. Subjects engaging in insufficient effort responding (IER) are unwilling to take this effort. Compared to psychologists, experimental philosophers so far seem to have paid less attention to IER. This paper is an attempt to begin to alleviate this shortcoming. First, I explain IER’s nature, prevalence and negative effects in self-report surveys in general. Second, I argue that IER might also affect experimental philosophy studies. Third, I develop recommendations as to how experimental philosophers should (and should not) try to prevent IER. Fourth, I develop recommendations as to how experimental philosophers should (and should not) try to detect IER. Fifth, I sketch how experimental philosophers ought to proceed once a subject has been identified as an insufficient effort responder. And finally, I report the results of an online survey that addresses experimental philosophers’ current knowledge, consideration and assessment of IER.
Scientific Realism in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Seven Sciences and History and Philosophy of Science.James R. Beebe & Finnur Dellsén - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (2):336-364.details
We report the results of a study that investigated the views of researchers working in seven scientific disciplines and in history and philosophy of science in regard to four hypothesized dimensions of scientific realism. Among other things, we found that natural scientists tended to express more strongly realist views than social scientists, that history and philosophy of science scholars tended to express more antirealist views than natural scientists, that van Fraassen’s characterization of scientific realism failed to cluster with more standard characterizations, and that those who endorsed the pessimistic induction were no more or less likely to endorse antirealism.
Does Skepticism Lead to Tranquility? Exploring a Pyrrhonian Theme.Mario Attie-Picker - 2020 - Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy 3:97-125.details
The State of the Discipline: New Data on Women Faculty in Philosophy.Sherri Lynn Conklin, Irina Artamonova & Nicole Hassoun - 2019 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6.details
This paper presents data on the representation of women at 98 philosophy departments in the United States, which were ranked by the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR) in 2015 as well as all of those schools on which data from 2004 exist. The paper makes four points in providing an overview of the state of the field. First, all programs reveal a statistically significant increase in the percentage of women tenured/tenure-track faculty, since 2004. Second, out of the 98 US philosophy departments selected for evaluation by Julie Van Camp in 2004, none in 2015 has 50% women philosophy faculty overall, while one has 50% women who are tenured/tenure track. Third, as of 2015, there is a clear pyramidal shape to the discipline: Women are better represented as Assistant than Associate and as Associate than Full professors. Fourth, women philosophy faculty, especially those who are tenured/tenure track, are better represented at Non-PGR ranked programs than at PGR ranked and PGR Top-20 programs in 2015.
Experimental Philosophy, Ethnomethodology, and Intentional Action: A Textual Analysis of the Knobe Effect.Gustav Lymer & Olle Blomberg - 2019 - Human Studies 42 (4):673-694.details
In “Intentional action and side-effects in ordinary language” (2003), Joshua Knobe reported an asymmetry in test subjects’ responses to a question about intentionality: subjects are more likely to judge that a side effect of an agent’s intended action is intentional if they think the side effect is morally bad than if they think it is morally good. This result has been taken to suggest that the concept of intentionality is an inherently moral concept. In this paper, we draw attention to the fact that Knobe’s original interpretation of the results is based on an abstract rendering of the central scenario that is significantly different from the vignettes presented to the survey participants. In particular, the experimental vignettes involve temporal and social dimensions; they portray sequences of social actions involving an agent and an interlocutor, rather than a lone agent making a momentary decision in light of certain attitudes. Through textual analyses of a set of vignettes used to study the Knobe effect, drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology, we show that there are many differences between the experimental conditions besides the moral valence of the side effect. In light of our textual analyses, we discuss vignette methodology in experimental philosophy and suggest an alternative interpretation of Knobe’s original experimental results. We also argue that experimental philosophy could benefit from considering research on naturally occurring social interaction as an alternative source of empirical findings for discussions of folk-psychological concepts.
Reports of the Death of Value-Free Science Are Greatly Exaggerated.Josef Mattes - 2019 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (4):689-699.details
The present paper discusses the claim that value-free science is impossible. After applauding the observation of Colombo et al. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7: 743–763, that this is at least to a considerable extent a psychological question, and should therefore be studied using the methods of psychological science, the studies performed by these authors were examined and unfortunately found seriously wanting in various respects. Beyond the merits or demerits of that particular piece of work, the discussion lead to a conclusion likely relevant to the entire discussion about the alleged impossibility of value-free science: Showing the impossibility of value-free science would entail at least a) defining what the term science is intended to cover, b) providing high level evidence that few if any scientists in the relevant area are immune to non-epistemic influences, c) that these influences meaningfully bias the results of science, d) that there is no way to correct for these influences, and e) explain why – unlike epistemic appraisal in science – the epistemic appraisal of this argument can be trusted.
The essence of essentialism.George E. Newman & Joshua Knobe - 2019 - Mind and Language 34 (5):585-605.details
Over the past several decades, psychological essentialism has been an important topic of study, incorporating research from multiple areas of psychology, philosophy and linguistics. At its most basic level, essentialism is the tendency to represent certain concepts in terms of a deeper, unobservable property that is responsible for category membership. Originally, this concept was used to understand people’s reasoning about natural kind concepts, such as TIGER and WATER, but more recently, researchers have identified the emergence of essentialist-like intuitions in a number of other contexts, including people’s representation of concepts like SCIENTIST or CHRISTIAN. This paper develops an account that aims to capture how essentialism may operate across these varied cases. In short, we argue that while there is diversity in the forms essentialism can take, these varied cases reflect the same underlying cognitive structure.
The Impact of Team Teaching on Student Attitudes and Classroom Performance in Introductory Philosophy Courses.Aaron Kostko - 2019 - Teaching Philosophy 42 (4):329-354.details
Despite the growing interest in collaborative teaching in higher education, there is a paucity of research on its use and effectiveness in philosophy curricula. The research that does exist focuses almost exclusively on interdisciplinary collaboration or student and faculty attitudes regarding the practice. This paper aims to address these gaps by describing a semester long, multi-section study designed to assess the impact of team teaching on student classroom performance and related variables in an Introduction to Philosophy course. The results of the study show that students overwhelmingly prefer team teaching to individual instruction and think that it positively impacts their learning and classroom experience. However, the results also show that there is no statistically significant relationship between delivery method and students’ classroom performance. The paper concludes with a discussion of some limitations with the research design and the potential benefits and challenges of implementing team teaching within introductory philosophy courses.
Experimental Philosophy and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Italy.Alberto Vanzo - 2019 - In Alberto Vanzo & Peter R. Anstey, Experiment, Speculation and Religion in Early Modern Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 204-228.details
According to Amos Funkenstein, Stephen Gaukroger and Andrew Cunningham, seventeenth-century natural philosophy was fused with theology, driven by theology, and pursued primarily to shed light on God. Experimental natural philosophy might seem to provide a case in point. According to its English advocates, like Robert Boyle and Thomas Sprat, experimental philosophy embodies the Christian virtues of humility, innocence, and piety, it helps establish God’s existence, attributes, and providence, and it provides a basis for evangelism. This chapter shows that, unlike their English counterparts, experimental philosophers in seventeenth-century Italy kept natural philosophy sharply distinct from theological and religious matters. This indicates that seventeenth-century experimental philosophy was not, as such, theologically driven or oriented. It also suggests that there was no intrinsic relation between experimental philosophy and religion. Whether experimental philosophy was presented as an ally of religion or as distinct from it was, to a significant extent, a matter of cultural politics. It depended on which rhetorical and argumentative strategies were believed to be most likely to ensure freedom of research and institutional support for the work of experimental philosophers in a specific sociopolitical context.
What comes to mind?Adam Bear, Samantha Bensinger, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Joshua Knobe & Fiery Cushman - 2020 - Cognition 194 (C):104057.details
When solving problems, like making predictions or choices, people often “sample” possibilities into mind. Here, we consider whether there is structure to the kinds of thoughts people sample by default—that is, without an explicit goal. Across three experiments we found that what comes to mind by default are samples from a probability distribution that combines what people think is likely and what they think is good. Experiment 1 found that the first quantities that come to mind for everyday behaviors and events are quantities that combine what is average and ideal. Experiment 2 found, in a manipulated context, that the distribution of numbers that come to mind resemble the mathematical product of the presented statistical distribution and a (softmax-transformed) prescriptive distribution. Experiment 3 replicated these findings in a visual domain. These results provide insight into the process generating people’s conscious thoughts and invite new questions about the value of thinking about things that are both likely and good.
No Problem: Evidence that the Concept of Phenomenal Consciousness is Not Widespread.J. Sytsma & E. Ozdemir - 2019 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (9-10):241-256.details
The meta-problem is 'the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness' (Chalmers, 2018, p. 6). This presupposes that we think there is a problem in the first place. We challenge the breadth of this 'we', arguing that there is already sufficient empirical evidence to cast doubt on the claim. We then add to this body of evidence, presenting the results of a new cross-cultural study extending the work of Sytsma and Machery (2010).
(1 other version)Conceptual engineering via experimental philosophy.Jennifer Nado - forthcoming - Tandf: Inquiry:1-21.details
It would be pretty immoral to choose a random algorithm.Helena Webb, Menisha Patel, Michael Rovatsos, Alan Davoust, Sofia Ceppi, Ansgar Koene, Liz Dowthwaite, Virginia Portillo, Marina Jirotka & Monica Cano - 2019 - Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 17 (2):210-228.details
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on empirical work conducted to open up algorithmic interpretability and transparency. In recent years, significant concerns have arisen regarding the increasing pervasiveness of algorithms and the impact of automated decision-making in our lives. Particularly problematic is the lack of transparency surrounding the development of these algorithmic systems and their use. It is often suggested that to make algorithms more fair, they should be made more transparent, but exactly how this can be achieved remains unclear. Design/methodology/approach An empirical study was conducted to begin unpacking issues around algorithmic interpretability and transparency. The study involved discussion-based experiments centred around a limited resource allocation scenario which required participants to select their most and least preferred algorithms in a particular context. In addition to collecting quantitative data about preferences, qualitative data captured participants’ expressed reasoning behind their selections. Findings Even when provided with the same information about the scenario, participants made different algorithm preference selections and rationalised their selections differently. The study results revealed diversity in participant responses but consistency in the emphasis they placed on normative concerns and the importance of context when accounting for their selections. The issues raised by participants as important to their selections resonate closely with values that have come to the fore in current debates over algorithm prevalence. Originality/value This work developed a novel empirical approach that demonstrates the value in pursuing algorithmic interpretability and transparency while also highlighting the complexities surrounding their accomplishment.
The Scientism Debate: A Battle for the Soul of Philosophy?Moti Mizrahi - 2019 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8 (9):1-13.details
In this paper, I report the results of an empirical study, which was designed to test the following hypotheses: (H1) Many philosophers find scientism threatening because they see it as a threat to the future of philosophy as a major in colleges and universities; (H2) Many philosophers find scientism threatening because they see it as a threat to the soul or essence of philosophy as an a priori discipline. My results provide some empirical evidence in support of H2. These results are also in line with the results of other empirical studies that point to a methodological shift in philosophy from the armchair to the laboratory.
Armchair Philosophy.Timothy Williamson - 2019 - Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 56 (2):19 - 25.details
The article presents an anti-exceptionalist view of philosophical methodology, on which it is much closer to the methodology of other disciplines than many philosophers like to think. Like mathematics, it is a science, but not a natural science. Its methods are not primarily experimental, though it can draw on the results of natural science. Like foundational mathematics, its methods are abductive as well as deductive. As in the natural sciences, much progress in philosophy consists in the construction of better models rather than in the discovery of new laws. We should not worry about whether philosophy is a priori or a posteriori, because the distinction is epistemologically superficial.
Geographical Categories: An Ontological Retrospective.Barry Smith & David M. Mark - 2001 - International Journal of Geographical Information Science 15 (7):507–512.details
Since it is only five years since the publication of our paper, "Geographical categories: An ontological investigation" (Smith and Mark 2001), it seems somewhat strange to be making retrospective comments on the piece. Nevertheless, the field is moving quickly, and much has happened since the article appeared. A large number of papers have already cited the work, which suggests that there is a seam here that people find worthy of being mined. In this short essay, we first review the paper and attempt to assess its significance from the perspective of our current work. We then put the paper in the context of our individual and joint works, which led up to it, and summarize our research trajectories since the paper appeared, pointing out what some of this reveals about spatial ontology in general. We conclude with some remarks on the future of ontological research in geographical information science.
An Evaluation of the ‘Philosophy for Children’ programme: The impact on Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills.Ourania Ventista - 2019 - Dissertation, Durham Universitydetails
Philosophy for Children is a school-based intervention currently implemented in more than 60 countries. This thesis examines the evidence regarding the effectiveness of Philosophy for Children for developing pupils’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Three different approaches were used. A systematic literature review was conducted of the evidence published in the last 40 years. A new comparative evaluation study was conducted with Year 5 pupils in 17 primary schools in England. The intervention lasted for an academic year, and a pre-test and a post-test were given at the beginning and end of the school year to evaluate students’ critical thinking and creativity. Secondary data analysis of the National Pupil Database from the Department of Education was used to examine the long-term effect of P4C implementation on attainment. The results of 34 schools which implemented P4C during Key Stage 2 were compared with 14,791 mainstream schools in England which did not, and the same analysis was repeated based only on these pupils in both groups known to be eligible for Free School Meals during the last six years. The review results suggested that P4C generally has a positive impact on reasoning skills. In most studies, P4C also has a positive impact on literacy and some non-cognitive skills. However, the new comparative evaluation study found no evidence that P4C has a positive impact on Year 5 students’ critical thinking or creativity. This comparative study has some limitations in terms of design and inevitable attrition. The more robust secondary data analysis showed that students eligible for Free School Meals develop their reading and writing more after long-term P4C implementation than in non-P4C schools, during Key Stage 2. By combining all of the evidence from the review, comparative evaluation study and secondary data analysis, this study suggests that the implementation of P4C in primary schools is still worthwhile, both in its own terms and for its added benefits in terms of cognitive and perhaps non-cognitive outcomes. The programme is likely to help improve students’ reasoning skills. P4C can improve the literacy of disadvantaged students in the classrooms, relative to their peers, and so contribute towards closing the attainment gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. However, the new evaluation creates a caution about what can be expected from P4C and, if it used, the programme may need adjusting in order to provide opportunities for practicing a wider range of thinking skills.
Experimental phenomenology: What it is and what it is not.Liliana Albertazzi - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 9):2191-2212.details
Experimental phenomenology is the study of appearances in subjective awareness. Its methods and results challenge quite a few aspects of the current debate on consciousness. A robust theoretical framework for understanding consciousness is pending: current empirical research waves on what a phenomenon of consciousness properly is, not least because the question is still open on the observables to be measured and how to measure them. I shall present the basics of experimental phenomenology and discuss the current development of experimental phenomenology, its main features, and the many misunderstandings that have obstructed a fair understanding and evaluation of its otherwise enlightening outcomes.
Methods and approaches to theories of philosophical intuitions.Joseph Robert Kuntz - 2012 - Dissertation, University of Edinburghdetails
This thesis is about the arguments and the methods that can sustain the epistemic support that comes from intuitions regarding hypothetical cases vis-à-vis theories of intuition. In the past twenty years, philosophical intuitions have received new attention, spurred by fashionable experimental philosophy that empirically tests philosophers’ intuition-engendering hypothetical cases with experimental methods. The results purportedly show that intuitions are unreliable, subject to demographic variation, and error-prone. In response, philosophers have presented various theories of philosophical intuition and explanations of how intuitions are situated in the justificatory apparatus of philosophical methodology. Three types of theories prevail in the literature, each a plausible option for the explanatory sustenance of intuitions’ epistemic efficacy. Selfevidence theories depend on the understanding of the intuited proposition. Intellectual seemings theories depend on the content of the intuited proposition. Judgment theories depend on our normal capacities for making judgments. Judgment theories divide further into disposition-to-believe theories and capacity theories. I argue that, beyond objections and unique epistemic burdens that each theory faces regarding the methodologies underpinning their conception and defense, no one theory of intuition can be reasonably accepted over the others. The centrality of intuitions’ use in philosophical methodology and in philosophers’ ways of thinking and reasoning, giving an argument that supports intuitions as conferrers of epistemic status, which does not itself appeal to intuitions, is a precarious endeavor. I consider various methods to avoid engaging question-begging premises and epistemic circularity. However, none are successful when the theory at hand is characteristically a priori and countenances only intuitions that confer epistemic status. In response to the ill-fated caricature of philosophical intuitions epistemic-statusconferrers, I present my own survey evidence concerning philosophers’ conception of intuition-use in philosophical method. Surprisingly, professional philosophers are more inclined to think that intuitions operate in the context of discovery more so than they are inclined to think that intuitions operate in the context of justification. The upshot of these survey results motivates my preferred account philosophical intuitions wherein philosophical intuitions are bifurcated into epistemic and epistemically-related roles. In the light of the objections I pose regarding the proper grounding of intuitions, revising the standard conception of philosophical intuitions requires two sorts of moves in the debate. First, one must offer a proviso for sources of justification that do not epistemically depend on intuitions for the ability to confer epistemic status. This allows one to justify a theory of intuition without appeal to intuition or epistemic regress. Second, one must give an explan
Varieties of Risk.Philip A. Ebert, Martin Smith & Ian Durbach - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (2):432-455.details
The notion of risk plays a central role in economics, finance, health, psychology, law and elsewhere, and is prevalent in managing challenges and resources in day-to-day life. In recent work, Duncan Pritchard (2015, 2016) has argued against the orthodox probabilistic conception of risk on which the risk of a hypothetical scenario is determined by how probable it is, and in favour of a modal conception on which the risk of a hypothetical scenario is determined by how modally close it is. In this article, we use Pritchard’s discussion as a springboard for a more wide-ranging discussion of the notion of risk. We introduce three different conceptions of risk: the standard probabilistic conception, Pritchard’s modal conception, and a normalcy conception that is new (though it has some precursors in the psychological literature on risk perception). Ultimately, we argue that the modal conception is ill-suited to the roles that a notion of risk is required to play and explore the prospects for a form of pluralism about risk, embracing both the probabilistic and the normalcy conceptions.
History of Philosophy in Ones and Zeros.Arianna Betti, Hein Van Den Berg, Yvette Oortwijn & Caspar Treijtel - 2019 - In Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis, Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Press. pp. 295-332.details
How can we best reconstruct the origin of a notion, its development, and possible spread to multiple fields? We present a pilot study on the spread of the notion of conceptual scheme. Though the notion is philosophically important, its origin, development, and spread are unclear. Several purely qualitative and competing historical hypotheses have been offered, which rely on disconnected disciplinary traditions, and have never been tested all at once in a single comprehensive investigation fitting the scope of its subject matter. As a step toward such an investigation, we trace the use of the bigram “conceptual scheme” in about 42,000 US journal articles in social sciences from 1888-1959 by using a novel method combining a quantitative procedure aided by basic computational techniques with qualitative elements informed by Betti and van den Berg (2014)’s ‘model approach to the history of ideas’.
New Foundations for Fuzzy Set Theory.Igor Douven - 2019 - In Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 173--199.details
Philosophy and the Psychology of Conditional Reasoning.David Over & Nicole Cruz - 2019 - In Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 225-249.details
Does Anyone Really Think That ⸢φ⸣ Is True If and Only If φ?Robert Barnard & Joseph Ulatowski - 2019 - In Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 145-171.details
Can a Picture Prove a Theorem? Using Empirical Methods to Investigate Visual Proofs by Induction.Josephine Relaford-Doyle & Rafael Núñez - 2019 - In Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 95-121.details
An Empirical Study on the Admissibility of Graphical Inferences in Mathematical Proofs.Keith Weber & Juan Pablo Mejía Ramos - 2019 - In Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 123-144.details
The issue of what constitutes a valid logical inference is a difficult question. At a minimum, we believe a permissible step in a proof must provide the reader with rational grounds to believe that the new step is a logically necessary consequence of previous assertions. However, this begs the question of what constitutes these rational grounds. Formalist accounts typically describe valid rules of inferences as those that can be found by applying one of the explicit rules of inference in the formal system in which the proof is couched. However, philosophers of mathematics find such a description unhelpful because many inferences in the proofs that mathematicians actually produce cannot be expressed in a formal language, at least not without seriously distorting the semantic content of the inference (e.g., Larvor, 2012). In this chapter, we investigate mathematicians’ perceptions of a particular kind of inference in a particular setting. Specifically, we shed light on what types of graphical inferences mathematicians find permissible in a real analysis proof. Following Larvor (in press), we examine mathematicians’ reactions to metrical graphical inferences (i.e., inferences whose validity depends on the accuracy of the graph that was drawn and whose validity can be changed by minor deformations) and nonmetrical graphical inferences (i.e., inferences whose validity does not depend on a the accuracy of the graph and whose validity is not vulnerable to local deformations). The goal of this chapter is threefold. First, we demonstrate that most mathematicians reject metrical graphical inferences as impermissible in a real analysis proof. Second, we show that many mathematicians regard nonmetrical graphical inferences as permissible in a real analysis proofs. Third, we illustrate how mathematicians collectively disagree on the permissibility of nonmetrical inferences.
Introduction.Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis - 2019 - In Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 1-13.details
There has been little overt discussion of the experimental philosophy of logic or mathematics. So it may be tempting to assume that application of the methods of experimental philosophy to these areas is impractical or unavailing. This assumption is undercut by three trends in recent research: a renewed interest in historical antecedents of experimental philosophy in philosophical logic; a “practice turn” in the philosophies of mathematics and logic; and philosophical interest in a substantial body of work in adjacent disciplines, such as the psychology of reasoning and mathematics education. This introduction offers a snapshot of each trend and addresses how they intersect with some of the standard criticisms of experimental philosophy. It also briefly summarizes the specific contribution of the other chapters of this book.
Animal Cognition, Species Invariantism, and Mathematical Realism.Helen De Cruz - 2019 - In Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 39-61.details
What can we infer from numerical cognition about mathematical realism? In this paper, I will consider one aspect of numerical cognition that has received little attention in the literature: the remarkable similarities of numerical cognitive capacities across many animal species. This Invariantism in Numerical Cognition (INC) indicates that mathematics and morality are disanalogous in an important respect: proto-moral beliefs differ substantially between animal species, whereas proto-mathematical beliefs (at least in the animals studied) seem to show more similarities. This makes moral beliefs more susceptible to a contingency challenge from evolution compared to mathematical beliefs, and indicates that mathematical beliefs might be less vulnerable to evolutionary debunking arguments. I will then examine to what extent INC can be used to flesh out a positive case for mathematical realism. Finally, I will review two forms of mathematical realism that are promising in the light of the evolutionary evidence about numerical cognition, ante rem structuralism and Millean empiricism.
Methodological Triangulation in Empirical Philosophy.Benedikt Löwe & Bart Van Kerkhove - 2019 - In Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 15-37.details
The moral behavior of ethics professors: A replication-extension in German-speaking countries.Philipp Schönegger & Johannes Wagner - 2019 - Philosophical Psychology 32 (4):532-559.details
ABSTRACTWhat is the relation between ethical reflection and moral behavior? Does professional reflection on ethical issues positively impact moral behaviors? To address these questions, Schwitzgebel and Rust empirically investigated if philosophy professors engaged with ethics on a professional basis behave any morally better or, at least, more consistently with their expressed values than do non-ethicist professors. Findings from their original US-based sample indicated that neither is the case, suggesting that there is no positive influence of ethical reflection on moral action. In the study at hand, we attempted to cross-validate this pattern of results in the German-speaking countries and surveyed 417 professors using a replication-extension research design. Our results indicate a successful replication of the original effect that ethicists do not behave any morally better compared to other academics across the vast majority of normative issues. Yet, unlike the original study, we found mixed results o...
Who am I? The role of moral beliefs in children's and adults' understanding of identity.Larisa Heiphetz, Nina Strohminger, Susan Gelman & Liane L. Young - 2018 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology:210-219.details
Adults report that moral characteristics—particularly widely shared moral beliefs—are central to identity. This perception appears driven by the view that changes to widely shared moral beliefs would alter friendships and that this change in social relationships would, in turn, alter an individual's personal identity. Because reasoning about identity changes substantially during adolescence, the current work tested pre- and post-adolescents to reveal the role that such changes could play in moral cognition. Experiment 1 showed that 8- to 10-year-olds, like adults, judged that people would change more after changes to their widely shared moral beliefs (e.g., whether hitting is wrong) than after changes to controversial moral beliefs (e.g., whether telling prosocial lies is wrong). Following up on this basic effect, a second experiment examined whether participants regard all changes to widely shared moral beliefs as equally impactful. Adults, but not children, reported that individuals would change more if their good moral beliefs (e.g., it is not okay to hit) transformed into bad moral beliefs (e.g., it is okay to hit) than if the opposite change occurred. This difference in adults was mediated by perceptions of how much changes to each type of belief would alter friendships. We discuss implications for moral judgment and social cognitive development.
The Promise of Experimental Philosophy and the Inference to Signal.Jonathan Weinberg - 2014 - In James R. Beebe, Advances in Experimental Epistemology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 193-207.details
Chinese philosophy as experimental philosophy.Ryan Nichols & Hagop Sarkissian - 2016 - In Sor-Hoon Tan, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies. New York: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University. pp. 353-366.details
In this chapter, we outline the methods and aims of experimental philosophy as a methodological movement within philosophy, and suggest ways in which it may be employed in the study of Chinese philosophy.
Diversity in proof appraisal.Matthew Inglis & Andrew Aberdein - 2016 - In Brendan Larvor, Mathematical Cultures: The London Meetings 2012-2014. Springer International Publishing. pp. 163-179.details
We investigated whether mathematicians typically agree about the qualities of mathematical proofs. Between-mathematician consensus in proof appraisals is an implicit assumption of many arguments made by philosophers of mathematics, but to our knowledge the issue has not previously been empirically investigated. We asked a group of mathematicians to assess a specific proof on four dimensions, using the framework identified by Inglis and Aberdein (2015). We found widespread disagreement between our participants about the aesthetics, intricacy, precision and utility of the proof, suggesting that a priori assumptions about the consistency of mathematical proof appraisals are unreasonable.
Does religious belief impact philosophical analysis?Kevin P. Tobia - 2016 - Religion, Brain and Behavior 6 (1):56-66.details
One popular conception of natural theology holds that certain purely rational arguments are insulated from empirical inquiry and independently establish conclusions that provide evidence, justification, or proof of God’s existence. Yet, some raise suspicions that philosophers and theologians’ personal religious beliefs inappropriately affect these kinds of arguments. I present an experimental test of whether philosophers and theologians’ argument analysis is influenced by religious commitments. The empirical findings suggest religious belief affects philosophical analysis and offer a challenge to theists and atheists, alike: reevaluate the scope of natural theology’s conclusions or acknowledge and begin to address the influence of religious belief.
Predictors of Attitudes Toward Autonomous Vehicles: The Roles of Age, Gender, Prior Knowledge, and Personality.Neil Charness, Jong Sung Yoon, Dustin Souders, Cary Stothart & Courtney Yehnert - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9:410319.details
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) hold considerable promise for maintaining aging adults’ mobility as they develop impairments in driving skill. Nonetheless, attitudes can be a significant barrier to adoption as has been shown for other technologies. We investigated how different introductions to AV, video with a driver in the front seat, the rear seat, and a written description, affected attitudes, as well as how individual difference variables such as age, gender, prior knowledge, and personality traits predict attitudes within a middle-aged (Median age = 34, IQR = 20, n = 441) Amazon Mechanical Turk sample. The 16-item attitude survey uncovered three factors: Concern with AV, Eagerness to Adopt AV technology, and Willingness to Relinquish Driving Control. ANOVAs showed that only age (younger less concerned) and gender, (females more concerned) were significant factors in Concern with AV. Only gender affected Willingness to Relinquish Driving Control, with males more willing. Multiple regressions that included previous knowledge level and personality traits showed a different pattern. Female gender and greater conscientiousness were associated with greater Concern about AV. Prior knowledge of AV was associated with less concern. Emotional stability and openness to experience were positive predictors of Eagerness to Adopt AV, whereas conscientiousness was a negative predictor. Prior knowledge and openness to experience, positively, and extraversion, negatively, were associated wi...
How People Judge What Is Reasonable.Kevin P. Tobia - 2018 - Alabama Law Review 70 (2):293-359.details
A classic debate concerns whether reasonableness should be understood statistically (e.g., reasonableness is what is common) or prescriptively (e.g., reasonableness is what is good). This Article elaborates and defends a third possibility. Reasonableness is a partly statistical and partly prescriptive “hybrid,” reflecting both statistical and prescriptive considerations. Experiments reveal that people apply reasonableness as a hybrid concept, and the Article argues that a hybrid account offers the best general theory of reasonableness.
First, the Article investigates how ordinary people judge what is reasonable. Reasonableness sits at the core of countless legal standards, yet little work has investigated how ordinary people (i.e., potential jurors) actually make reasonableness judgments. Experiments reveal that judgments of reasonableness are systematically intermediate between judgments of the relevant average and ideal across numerous legal domains. For example, participants’ mean judgment of the legally reasonable number of weeks’ delay before a criminal trial (ten weeks) falls between the judged average (seventeen weeks) and ideal (seven weeks). So too for the reasonable num- ber of days to accept a contract offer, the reasonable rate of attorneys’ fees, the reasonable loan interest rate, and the reasonable annual number of loud events on a football field in a residential neighborhood. Judgment of reasonableness is better predicted by both statistical and prescriptive factors than by either factor alone.
This Article uses this experimental discovery to develop a normative view of reasonableness. It elaborates an account of reasonableness as a hybrid standard, arguing that this view offers the best general theory of reasonableness, one that applies correctly across multiple legal domains. Moreover, this hybrid feature is the historical essence of legal reasonableness: the original use of the “reasonable person” and the “man on the Clapham omnibus” aimed to reflect both statistical and prescriptive considerations. Empirically, reasonableness is a hybrid judgment. And normatively, reasonableness should be applied as a hybrid standard.
Philosophy for children with learners of English as a foreign language.Shiauping Tian & Pei-Fen Liao - 2016 - Journal of Philosophy in Schools 3 (1):40-58.details
The present study intends to provide empirical evidence on the effect of Philosophy for Children integrated with English picture storybook instruction on adolescent learners of English as a foreign language. Previous studies have documented the instructional benefits of P4C in various fields; very little evidence, however, can be found in ESL or EFL contexts. The present study was therefore carried out to explore the beneficial effects of P4C applied in EFL instruction with picture storybooks as instructional materials. A total of 62 students participated in the study, divided into one P4C group and one non-P4C group. Participants in the P4C group underwent 10 weeks of English storybook instruction with P4C in a school club, and the effects of instruction were measured by questionnaires and reading comprehension tests. Results of the study showed that students in the P4C group experienced a slightly higher level of English learning anxiety, retained higher English learning motivation after the instruction, and improved their English reading comprehension. Finally, pedagogical implications are presented.
Socrates in the schools from Scotland to Texas: Replicating a study on the effects of a Philosophy for Children program.Frank Fair, Lory E. Haas, Carol Gardosik, Daphne D. Johnson, Debra P. Price & Olena Leipnik - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy in Schools 2 (1):18-37.details
In this article we report the findings of a randomised control clinical trial that assessed the impact of a Philosophy for Children program and replicated a previous study conducted in Scotland by Topping and Trickey. A Cognitive Abilities Test was administered as a pretest and a posttest to randomly selected experimental groups and control groups. The students in the experimental group engaged in philosophy lessons in a setting of structured, collaborative inquiry in their language arts classes for one hour per week for a number of weeks. The control group received the standard language arts curriculum in that one hour. The study found that the seventh grade students who had experienced the P4C program showed significant gains relative to those in the seventh grade control group at a high level of statistical significance, but the eighth grade students in the experimental group did not show such gains over the eighth grade control group. It was discovered that the seventh grade teachers started the program early in the school year and continued it for a period of 22 to 26 weeks, while the eighth grade teachers started much later and used the program for only 4 to 10 weeks. Our findings suggest that the P4C program must involve students in activities for a significant period of time before the program shows results, but that a meaningful impact on students’ cognitive abilities can be achieved in about 24 weeks of lessons, less than half the time evidenced by the study by Topping and Trickey.
Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds by Édouard Machery.Jonathan Lewis - 2018 - Metapsychology 22 (48).details
Meeting Galileo: Testing the Effectiveness of an Immersive Video Game to Teach History and Philosophy of Science to Undergraduates.Logan L. Watts & Peter Barker - 2018 - Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science 5:133-145.details
Can video games teach students about the history and philosophy of science? This paper reports the results of a study investigating the effects of playing an educational video game on students’ knowledge of Galileo’s life and times, the nature of scientific evidence, and Aristotle’s and Galileo’s views of the cosmos. In the game, students were immersed in a computer simulation of 16th century Venice where they interacted with an avatar of Galileo and other characters. Over a period of two weeks, 71 undergraduates were exposed to lectures about Galileo and the Copernican revolution in a traditional classroom setting. However, only half of the students also played the game. The other half were only exposed to lectures. The knowledge of both groups was assessed at the beginning and end of the two-week period. The results demonstrated objective improvements in knowledge for the experimental group while the control group showed virtually no change. Implications of these findings for teaching and learning the history and philosophy of science are discussed.
Modelling the history of early modern natural philosophy: the fate of the art-nature distinction in the Dutch universities.Andrea Sangiacomo - 2019 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (1):46-74.details
The ‘model approach’ facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the ‘model approach’ to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate. I test my hypothesis on a selected corpus of 25 works published in the Dutch academic milieu between 1607 and 1748. I analyse the corpus through a procedure based on concordancing of keywords associated with the model. I argue that the results obtained constitute a successful pilot study for the implementation of the model approach on larger scale research.
Self-resolving information markets: an experimental case study.Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij & N. Williams - 2018 - Journal of Prediction Markets 12 (2):47-67.details
On traditional information markets (TIMs), rewards are tied to the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of events external to the market, such as some particular candidate winning an election. For that reason, they can only be used when it is possible to wait for some external event to resolve the market. In cases involving long time-horizons or counterfactual events, this is not an option. Hence, the need for a self-resolving information market (SRIM), resolved with reference to factors internal to the market itself. In the present paper, we first offer some theoretical reasons for thinking that, since the only thing that can be expected to be salient to all participants on a SRIM is the content of the question bet on, a convention will arise of taking that question at face value, and betting accordingly, in which case trading behaviour on SRIMs can be expected to be identical to that on TIMs. This is the ‘face value’ hypothesis. If this hypothesis holds, SRIMs have the potential of incorporating the accuracy of TIMs while shedding their limitations in relation to long-term predictions and the evaluation of counterfactuals. We then report on a laboratory experiment that demonstrates that trading behaviour can indeed come out highly similar across SRIMs and TIMs. As such, the study can be thought of as an experimental case study on SRIMs. Finally, we discuss some limitations of the study, and also points towards fruitful areas of future research in light of our results.
Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3.Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe (eds.) - 2020 - Oxford University Press.details
The new interdisciplinary field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field, by both philosophers and psychologists.
False memories and quasi-memories are memories.Vilius Dranseika - 2020 - In Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe, Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3. Oxford University Press.details
The Long-term Impact of Philosophy for Children: A Longitudinal Study.Roberto Colom, Félix Garcia Moriyón, Carmen Magro & Elena Morilla - 2014 - Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis 35 (1):50-56.details
Twenty years ago, the European School of Madrid began to implement P4C. Félix García Moriyón trained a group of teachers through an intensive workshop and Elena Morilla coordinated the whole process thereafter. P4C was integrated within the regular curriculum and students attended one class per week since primary school to the end of high-school. After obtaining informed consent from both the school staff and the students' families, a longitudinal study began in 2002 for investigating the presumed lasting positive impact of P4C over cognitive and non-cognitive factors, and also over academic achievement. To the best of our knowledge this research is unique because there is only one long-term study and the remaining research was made in the short-term. So far we have been following more than 400 students in the treatment group and more than 300 students in a control group. As required, both groups shared closely similar social and cultural backgrounds: both are private schools in a small village, mainly residential, 18 km and 32 km away from Madrid, same highway A-6, etc. Students came from middle-upper class families, and middle-upper social and cultural status. We recruited six cohorts from the P4C school and five cohorts from the control school across the years. Data were collected at three time points: 2nd grade, 6th grade, and 4th grade of secondary school. The administered measures tapped cognitive abilities, basic personality traits, and academic achievement. This research tests the hypothesis that \"IF P4C improves cognitive and non-cognitive basic psychological traits, THEN the treatment group will show greater scores in the standardized measures of both psychological factors\". Here we present a summary of the evidence accumulated in the past 10 years. These were the main results: P4C promotes an average advantage of half a standard deviation in general cognitive ability, the average advantage is especially noteworthy in the lowest tail of the cognitive distribution across the years, lower percentages of participants in the training group can be found at the risk area, and P4C children are more prone to pro-social behavior, but they are also a bit more emotionally unstable.
Eyes as windows to minds: Psycholinguistics for experimental philosophy.Eugen Fischer & Paul E. Engelhardt - 2019 - In Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis, Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Press. pp. 43-100.details
Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness.
Religious Beliefs and Philosophical Views: A Qualitative Study.Helen De Cruz - 2018 - Res Philosophica 95 (3):477-504.details
Philosophy of religion is often regarded as a philosophical discipline in which irrelevant influences, such as upbringing and education, play a pernicious role. This paper presents results of a qualitative survey among academic philosophers of religion to examine the role of such factors in their work. In light of these findings, I address two questions: an empirical one (whether philosophers of religion are influenced by irrelevant factors in forming their philosophical attitudes) and an epistemological one (whether the influence of irrelevant factors on our philosophical views should worry us). My answer to the first question is a definite yes, my answer to the second, a tentative yes.
Using Focus Groups to Explore the Underrepresentation of Female-Identified Undergraduate Students in Philosophy.Claire A. Lockard, Helen Meskhidze, Sean Wilson, Nim Batchelor, Stephen Bloch-Schulman & Ann J. Cahill - 2017 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 3 (4):1-29.details
This paper is part of a larger project designed to examine and ameliorate the underrepresentation of female-identified students in the philosophy department at Elon University. The larger project involved a variety of research methods, including statistical analysis of extant registration and grade distribution data from our department as well as the administration of multiple surveys. Here, we provide a description and analysis of one aspect of our research: focus groups. We ran three focus groups of female-identified undergraduate students: one group consisted of students who had taken more than one philosophy class, one consisted of students who had taken only one philosophy class, and one consisted of students who had taken no philosophy classes. After analyzing the results of the focus groups, we find evidence that: one philosophy class alone did not cultivate a growth mindset among female-identified students of philosophy, professors have the potential to ameliorate students’ perceptions of philosophy; and students who have not taken philosophy are likely to see their manner of thinking as being at odds with that required by philosophy. We conclude by articulating a series of questions worthy of further study.
(1 other version)Correction to: Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental Philosophy.Florian Cova, Brent Strickland, Angela Abatista, Aurélien Allard, James Andow, Mario Attie, James Beebe, Renatas Berniūnas, Jordane Boudesseul, Matteo Colombo, Fiery Cushman, Rodrigo Diaz, Noah N’Djaye Nikolai van Dongen, Vilius Dranseika, Brian D. Earp, Antonio Gaitán Torres, Ivar Hannikainen, José V. Hernández-Conde, Wenjia Hu, François Jaquet, Kareem Khalifa, Hanna Kim, Markus Kneer, Joshua Knobe, Miklos Kurthy, Anthony Lantian, Shen-yi Liao, Edouard Machery, Tania Moerenhout, Christian Mott, Mark Phelan, Jonathan Phillips, Navin Rambharose, Kevin Reuter, Felipe Romero, Paulo Sousa, Jan Sprenger, Emile Thalabard, Kevin Tobia, Hugo Viciana, Daniel Wilkenfeld & Xiang Zhou - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (1):45-48.details
Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.
An Evaluation of the Websites of Scientific Journals of Philosophy based on Indexing Standards of International Information and Citation Databases.Najmeh Bagherian - 2018 - Journal of Philosophical Theological Research 20 (75):196-215.details
The purpose of this article is to study the level of consideration afforded to indexing standards of reliable international databases by Persian philosophical journals. In this research, forty-one websites of Persian philosophical journals which are published under the supervision of the Committee of Scientific Journals have been reviewed based on the main indexing standards of journals in reliable international databases. The results of this study showed that twenty-six percent of journals have a DOI code, twelve percent possess a Creative Commons permit and only the Journal of Philosophy and Theology published by Ferdowsi University of Mashhad is part of the International Committee on Publication Ethics. Despite the importance of the ethical and legal aspects of the journals, this area was very weak; generalization and presentation of incomplete information are the most important defects of websites of philosophical journals. The topic-wise indexing of philosophical journals in reliable general and specialized international databases was very weak and the limited numbers that are present in international indexing have not been properly presented to the viewers in the journals’ websites. Altogether, the Journal of Philosophical-Theological Research of Qum University – with the exception of the foreign articles section and international members in the Editorial Board – has the required readiness in other areas for being indexed in reliable international databases as compared to other Persian philosophical journals.
Experimental Economics for Philosophers.Hannah Rubin, Cailin O'Connor & Justin Bruner - unknowndetails
Recently, game theory and evolutionary game theory - mathematical frameworks from economics and biology designed to model and explain interactive behavior - have proved fruitful tools for philosophers in areas such as ethics, philosophy of language, social epistemology, and political philosophy. This methodological osmosis is part of a trend where philosophers have blurred disciplinary lines to import the best epistemic tools available. In this vein, experimental philosophers have drawn on practices from the social sciences, and especially from psychology, to expand philosophy's grasp on issues from morality to consciousness. We argue that the recent prevalence of formal work on human interaction in philosophy opens the door for new methods in experimental philosophy. In particular, we discuss methods from experimental economics, focusing on a small literature we have been developing investigating signaling and communication in humans. We describe results from a novel experiment showing how environmental structure can shape signaling behavior.
Determinants of judgments of explanatory power: Credibility, Generality, and Statistical Relevance.Matteo Colombo, Leandra Bucher & Jan Sprenger - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology:doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01430.details
Explanation is a central concept in human psychology. Drawing upon philosophical theories of explanation, psychologists have recently begun to examine the relationship between explanation, probability and causality. Our study advances this growing literature in the intersection of psychology and philosophy of science by systematically investigating how judgments of explanatory power are affected by the prior credibility of a potential explanation, the causal framing used to describe the explanation, the generalizability of the explanation, and its statistical relevance for the evidence. Collectively, the results of our five experiments support the hypothesis that the prior credibility of a causal explanation plays a central role in explanatory reasoning: first, because of the presence of strong main effects on judgments of explanatory power, and second, because of the gate-keeping role it has for other factors. Highly credible explanations were not susceptible to causal framing effects. Instead, highly credible hypotheses were sensitive to the effects of factors which are usually considered relevant from a normative point of view: the generalizability of an explanation, and its statistical relevance for the evidence. These results advance current literature in the philosophy and psychology of explanation in three ways. First, they yield a more nuanced understanding of the determinants of judgments of explanatory power, and the interaction between these factors. Second, they illuminate the close relationship between prior beliefs and explanatory power. Third, they clarify the relationship between abductive and probabilistic reasoning.
Transformative Decisions.Kevin Reuter & Michael Messerli - 2018 - Journal of Philosophy 115 (6):313-335.details
Some decisions we make—such as becoming a parent or moving to a different part of the world—are transformative. According to L. A. Paul, transformative decisions pose a major problem to us because they fall outside the realm of rationality. Her argument for that conclusion rests on the premise that subjective value is central in transformative decisions. This paper challenges that premise and hence the overall conclusion that transformative decisions usually are not rational. In the theoretical part of the paper, we specify conditions under which transformative decisions are possibly rational and likely rational. The data we present in the empirical part of the paper reveal that subjective value often plays only a minor role in people’s decision-making process. Putting both parts together, we argue that people have a great chance of making rational transformative choices.
Guest Editorial.Joshua Knobe, Edouard Machery & Stephen Stich - 2017 - Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3):443-445.details
Fast, Cheap, and Unethical? The Interplay of Morality and Methodology in Crowdsourced Survey Research.Matthew C. Haug - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (2):363-379.details
Crowdsourcing is an increasingly popular method for researchers in the social and behavioral sciences, including experimental philosophy, to recruit survey respondents. Crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), have been seen as a way to produce high quality survey data both quickly and cheaply. However, in the last few years, a number of authors have claimed that the low pay rates on MTurk are morally unacceptable. In this paper, I explore some of the methodological implications for online experimental philosophy research if, in fact, typical pay practices on MTurk are morally impermissible. I argue that the most straightforward solution to this apparent moral problem—paying survey respondents more and relying only on “high reputation” respondents—will likely increase the number of subjects who have previous experience with survey materials and thus are “non-naïve” with respect to those materials. I then discuss some likely effects that this increase in experimental non-naivete will have on some aspects of the “negative” program in experimental philosophy, focusing in particular on recent debates about philosophical expertise.
Is there a Commonsense Semantic Conception of Truth?Joseph Ulatowski - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (2):487-500.details
Alfred Tarski’s refinement of an account of truth into a formal system that turns on the acceptance of Convention-T has had a lasting impact on philosophical logic, especially work concerning truth, meaning, and other semantic notions. In a series of studies completed from the 1930s to the 1960s, Arne Næss collected and analysed intuitive responses from non-philosophers to questions concerning truth, synonymy, certainty, and probability. Among the formulations of truth studied by Næss were practical variants of expressions of the form “p’ is true if and only if p’. This paper calls attention to a series of experimental results Næss overlooked in his original study. These data collectively suggest that acceptance of expressions of the form “p’ is true if and only if p’ varies according to what kind of statement p is.
(1 other version)Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume Two.Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.) - 2018 - Oxford University Press.details
The Effect of Age and Size on Reputation of Business Ethics Journals.Victor Glass & E. Susanna Cahn - 2018 - Business and Society 57 (7):1465-1480.details
Business ethics journals have appeared on a few ranked lists that are specific to this niche discipline. As with more traditional academic disciplines, these rankings are used for academic rewards such as faculty tenure and promotion, along with department and school ratings. Journal ranking has been subject to considerable criticism even as its administrative use persists. Among the criticisms are that journal quality is a poor proxy for article quality, citation rate is an imperfect reflection of article influence, and bias may be introduced into rankings by visibility characteristics such as journal age, size, circulation, and experience of the rater with a journal. This research note studies the effect of journal age and size on the rankings of business ethics journals compiled by Beets, Lewis, and Brower, by Albrecht, Thompson, Hoopes, and Rodrigo, and by Serenko and Bontis. Significant correlation was found for journal age with the administratively derived Beets et al. ranking. No significant correlation was found for size in any ranking study. Results were not significant for the Albrecht et al. and the Serenko and Bontis rankings representing the perspectives from surveys of active researchers or citation analysis. Perhaps sometimes a journal’s reputation precedes it, as perception of journal quality may be biased by journal visibility, either because it has been published and available for a number of years, or because it is well known and likely to be cited.
(1 other version)Socrates in the schools from Scotland to Texas: Replicating a study on the effects of a Philosophy for Children program.Frank Fair, Lory E. Haas, Carol Gardoski, Daphne Johnson, Debra Price & Olena Leipnik - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy in Schools 2 (1).details
In this article we report the findings of a randomised control clinical trial that assessed the impact of a Philosophy for Children program and replicated a previous study conducted in Scotland by Topping and Trickey. A Cognitive Abilities Test was administered as a pretest and a posttest to randomly selected experimental groups and control groups. The students in the experimental group engaged in philosophy lessons in a setting of structured, collaborative inquiry in their language arts classes for one hour per week for a number of weeks. The control group received the standard language arts curriculum in that one hour. The study found that the seventh grade students who had experienced the P4C program showed significant gains relative to those in the seventh grade control group at a high level of statistical significance, but the eighth grade students in the experimental group did not show such gains over the eighth grade control group. It was discovered that the seventh grade teachers started the program early in the school year and continued it for a period of 22 to 26 weeks, while the eighth grade teachers started much later and used the program for only 4 to 10 weeks. Our findings suggest that the P4C program must involve students in activities for a significant period of time before the program shows results, but that a meaningful impact on students’ cognitive abilities can be achieved in about 24 weeks of lessons, less than half the time evidenced by the study by Topping and Trickey.
Targeted Instruction in Critical Thinking Improves Dispositions.John D. Eigenauer - 2016 - Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 31 (2):27-36.details
While much emphasis is placed on the need to improve critical thinking (CT) among college students (Abrami, Bernard, Borokhovski, Wade, Surkes, Tamim, & Zhang, 2008, p. 1102), few studies describe precise methodologies for doing so (Behar-Horenstein & Niu, 2011, p. 36) and even fewer identify improvements in CT dispositions as a desired course outcome (Perkins, Tishman, Ritchhart, Donis, & Andrade, 2000, p. 288). This study attempts to fill a gap in the studies of CT methodologies aimed at improving CT dispositions. In this study, 78 community college students enrolled in a CT course that emphasized targeted CT interventional strategies. The students took the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory (CCTDI) as a pre-test and as a post-test. Results indicate that the targeted instruction significantly influenced overall scores, as well as four of the seven subscale categories.
The Ontology of Musical Works and the Role of Intuitions: An Experimental Study.Christopher Bartel - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1):348-367.details
Philosophers of music often appeal to intuition to defend ontological theories of musical works. This practice is worrisome as it is rather unclear just how widely shared are the intuitions that philosophers appeal to. In this paper, I will first offer a brief overview of the debate over the ontology of musical works. I will argue that this debate is driven by a conflict between two seemingly plausible intuitions—the repeatability intuition and the creatability intuition—both of which may be defended on the grounds that they are reflective of our actual musical practices. The problem facing philosophers within this debate is that there is no clear way to determine which of the two conflicting intuitions is more reflective of our musical practices. Finally, I offer discussion of an experimental study that was designed to test participants' intuitions regarding the repeatability of musical works. The evidence presented there suggests that the participants broadly accept the repeatability of musical works, but in a much narrower way than philosophers would likely accept.
(1 other version)Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 2.Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.) - 2018 - Oxford University Press.details
The new interdisciplinary field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field, by both philosophers and psychologists.
The psychological representation of modality.Jonathan Phillips & Joshua Knobe - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (1):65-94.details
A series of recent studies have explored the impact of people's judgments regarding physical law, morality, and probability. Surprisingly, such studies indicate that these three apparently unrelated types of judgments often have precisely the same impact. We argue that these findings provide evidence for a more general hypothesis about the kind of cognition people use to think about possibilities. Specifically, we suggest that this aspect of people's cognition is best understood using an idea developed within work in the formal semantics tradition, namely the notion of modality. On the view we propose, people may have separate representations for physical, moral and probabilistic considerations, but they also integrate these various considerations into a unified representation of modality.
Virtual Reality Translation of Judith Thomson's Violinist Analogy.Erick Ramirez, Miles Elliott, Scott LaBarge & Carl Maggio - manuscriptdetails
A virtual reality translation of Judith Thomson's Violinist Analogy. These modules are free to download and use in the classroom and for research/x-phi purposes.
*Requires an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive and VR capable computer. To open the files, uncompress the downloaded .zip folder and run the executable (.exe) file.
Virtual Reality Translation of Philippa Foot's Trolley Problem.Erick Ramirez, Scott LaBarge, Miles Elliott & Carl Maggio - manuscriptdetails
A virtual reality translation of Philippa Foot's original "Trolley Problem." These modules are free to download and use in the classroom and for research/x-phi purposes.
*Requires an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive and VR capable computer. To open the files, uncompress the downloaded .zip folder and run the executable (.exe) file.
Virtual Reality Thought Experiments Module Package (includes VR Training Room).Erick Ramirez, Scott LaBarge, Miles Elliott & Carl Maggio - manuscriptdetails
A virtual reality module that incorporates a training room (for subjects to become accommodated to virtual environments) and VR translations of Philippa Foot's Trolley Problem and Judith Thomson's Violinist thought experiment.
These modules are free to use for classroom or research/x-phi purposes. This set of modules is optimized for the HTC Vive. If you have an Oculus Rift, please see our VR modules optimized for the rift.
*Requires an HTC Vive and VR capable computer. To access the simulation, uncompress the .zip folder and run the executable (.exe) file.
Intuitions are Used as Evidence in Philosophy.Nevin Climenhaga - 2018 - Mind 127 (505):69-104.details
In recent years a growing number of philosophers writing about the methodology of philosophy have defended the surprising claim that philosophers do not use intuitions as evidence. In this paper I defend the contrary view that philosophers do use intuitions as evidence. I argue that this thesis is the best explanation of several salient facts about philosophical practice. First, philosophers tend to believe propositions which they find intuitive. Second, philosophers offer error theories for intuitions that conflict with their theories. Finally, philosophers are more confident in rejecting theories to the extent that they have several counter examples involving diverse cases. I argue that these facts are better explained by philosophers' using intuitions as evidence than by any plausible contrary explanations. I further argue that aspects of philosophical practice that my thesis may initially seem ill-suited to explain are in fact unsurprising whether or not my thesis is true.
Does Experimental Philosophy Have a Role to Play in Carnapian Explication?Mark Pinder - 2017 - Ratio 30 (4):443-461.details
Shepherd and Justus argue that experimental philosophy has an important role to play in the method of Carnapian explication, facilitating the preparatory stage during which the concept to be explicated is clarified. I raise concerns about their specific proposal, before sketching an alternative. In particular, I suggest that experimental philosophy can directly aid the construction of fruitful concepts. This provides a clear practical role for experimental philosophy, both within the sciences and theoretical inquiry more generally. In this respect, experimental philosophy may rightly be construed as one aspect of applied philosophy.
How Not to Characterise a Hard Choice.Kevin Reuter & Michael Messerli - 2017 - Ratio 30 (4):494-521.details
People are often faced with so called hard choices – also known as hard cases of comparison. In trying to characterize these hard choices, philosophers have made two central claims. First, failure of transitivity underlies hard cases of comparison. Second, using a random procedure is considered inappropriate in order to arrive at a decision in hard cases. While having some argumentative support, both claims primarily rely on expert intuitions. The results of the experiments we present in this paper challenge both claims, as well as the representativeness of expert intuitions that support these claims, by showing that most people violate transitivity only if a hard choice is important, and find it appropriate to use a random procedure even in hard cases of comparison.
The Underrepresentation of Women in Prestigious Ethics Journals.Meena Krishnamurthy, Shen-yi Liao, Monique Deveaux & Maggie Dalecki - 2017 - Hypatia 32 (4):928-939.details
It has been widely reported that women are underrepresented in academic philosophy as faculty and students. This article investigates whether this representation may also occur in the domain of journal article publishing. Our study looked at whether women authors were underrepresented as authors in elite ethics journals — Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Journal of Moral Philosophy — between 2004-2014, relative to the proportion of women employed in academic ethics (broadly construed). We found that women are indeed underrepresented overall in prestigious ethics journal publishing. Though this is not our focus, we discuss possible causes for this finding, such as top ethics journals’ tendency not to publish much feminist philosophy; the impact of women’s lesser professional status or rank within philosophy on their prospects for, and success in, journal publishing; and the review process itself, which may disadvantage or discourage women authors — perhaps especially when their gender, rank, and affiliation are known to the editor or reviewer, or if their work is explicitly feminist. We discuss possible avenues for future research on the "woman problem" in philosophy, noting how our study relates to existing research on this issue.
Similarity and enjoyment: Predicting continuation for women in philosophy.Heather Demarest, Robertson Seth, Haggard Megan, Martin-Seaver Madeline & Bickel Jewelle - 2017 - Analysis 77 (3):525-541.details
On average, women make up half of introductory-level philosophy courses, but only one-third of upper-division courses. We contribute to the growing literature on this problem by reporting the striking results of our study at the University of Oklahoma. We found that two attitudes are especially strong predictors of whether women are likely to continue in philosophy: feeling similar to the kinds of people who become philosophers, and enjoying philosophical puzzles and issues. In a regression analysis, they account for 63% of variance. Importantly, women are significantly less likely to hold these attitudes than men. Thus, instructors who care about improving the retention of women undergraduates should find ways to improve these attitudes – for instance, by demonstrating the ways in which professional philosophers are like them. We will discuss some tentative but intuitively plausible suggestions for interventions, though further research is required to establish the effectiveness of those interventions.
Experimental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion.Daniel F. Lim - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (3):139-158.details
Experimental Philosophy is a new and controversial movement that challenges some of the central findings within analytic philosophy by marshalling empirical evidence. The purpose of this short paper is twofold: to introduce some of the work done in experimental philosophy concerning issues in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics and to connect this work with several debates within the philosophy of religion. The provisional conclusion is that philosophers of religion must critically engage experimental philosophy.
Hard cases of comparison.Michael Messerli & Kevin Reuter - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (9):2227-2250.details
In hard cases of comparison, people are faced with two options neither of which is conceived of as better, worse, or equally good compared to the other. Most philosophers claim that hard cases can indeed be distinguished from cases in which two options are equally good, and can be characterized by a failure of transitive reasoning. It is a much more controversial matter and at the heart of an ongoing debate, whether the options in hard cases of comparison should be interpreted as incomparable, on par, or roughly equal. So far, however, none of these claims and interpretations have been tested. This paper presents the first empirical investigation on hard cases, intransitive reasoning, and incomparability. Our results reveal that hard cases present real-world dilemmas in which a significant majority of people violate transitivity. After suggesting a way of operationalizing the notion of incomparability, we provide empirical evidence that the options in some hard cases are not considered to be incomparable. Theories of rough equality or parity seem to provide better interpretations of our results.
What is Experimental Philosophy of Mathematics?Kazuhisa Todayama - 2015 - Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 23:53-58.details
If we take \"experimental philosophy\" in a wider sense, it is almost the same as methodological naturalism in philosophy. Experiments of this kind would be available and also fruitful in the philosophy of mathematics. They surely will have a substantial contribution to epistemology of mathematics. At present, however, the phrase \"experimental philosophy\" is used in a much narrower sense. It refers exclusively to a branch of naturalized philosophy that uses the data gathered through questionnaire surveys to investigate the intuitions of ordinary people. We claim that experimental philosophy in this narrower sense will have little relevance to the philosophy of mathematics, since the philosophy of mathematics is not engaged in conceptual analysis despite of its appearance.
Experimental Philosophical Aesthetics as Public Philosophy.Aaron Meskin & Shen-yi Liao - 2018 - In Florian Cova & Sébastien Réhault, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 309-326.details
Experimental philosophy offers an alternative mode of engagement for public philosophy, in which the public can play a participatory role. We organized two public events on the aesthetics of coffee that explored this alternative mode of engagement. The first event focuses on issues surrounding the communication of taste. The second event focuses on issues concerning ethical influences on taste.
In this paper, we report back on these two events which explored the possibility of doing experimental philosophical aesthetics as public philosophy. We set the stage by considering the significance and current state of efforts in public philosophy, and by introducing the emerging sub-discipline of experimental philosophical aesthetics. Then, we discuss the research and outreach aspects of the two events on the aesthetics of coffee. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on the prospects and potential pitfalls of experimental philosophy as public philosophy.
Review of Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy.Yuri Cath - 2015 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201508.details
(Meta-Philosophy) Exercise in Experimental Philosophy (CMT, BT, CMA).Ulrich de Balbian - forthcoming - Oxford: Academic Publishers.details
My new (Experimental) PHILOSOPHY (XPhi) book for FREE download
https://www.academia.edu/31973890/_Meta-Philosophy_Theorizing_about_Philosophy_CMT_CB_and_CM_as_an_e xercise_inXPhi
(Meta-Philosophy) Theorizing about Philosophy (CMT, CB and CMA) as an exercise inXPhi
The processes of theorizing are explored, Weick's Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Conceptual Blending Theory and Conceptual Metaphor tool are described. This Meta-Philosophy investigation of philosophy and philosophizing is an exercise in Experimental Philosophy. The Empirical Generalization or Hypothesis arrived at states that: Philosophy/izing is like or resembles the process/es of Theorizing.
The reality of the intuitive.Elijah Chudnoff - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (4):371-385.details
According to current methodological orthodoxy philosophers rely on intuitions about thought experiments to refute general claims about the nature of knowledge, freedom, thought, reference, justice, beauty, etc. Philosophers working under the banner of ‘negative experimental philosophy’ have criticized more traditional philosophers for relying on this method. They argue that intuitions about thought experiments are influenced by factors that are irrelevant to the truth of their contents. Cappelen and Deutsch defend traditional philosophy against this critique by rejecting the picture of philosophical methodology it presupposes: philosophers do not really rely on intuitions. In this paper, I defend methodological orthodoxy by arguing that philosophers must rely on intuitions somewhere and that they do in fact often rely on intuitions about thought experiments. I also argue in favor of a reply to the negative experimental critique that is similar to at least part of Deutsch’s own.
Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics.Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis (eds.) - 2019 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.details
This book explores the results of applying empirical methods to the philosophy of logic and mathematics. Much of the work that has earned experimental philosophy a prominent place in twenty-first century philosophy is concerned with ethics or epistemology. But, as this book shows, empirical methods are just as much at home in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. Chapters demonstrate and discuss the applicability of a wide range of empirical methods including experiments, surveys, interviews, and data-mining. Distinct themes emerge that reflect recent developments in the field, such as issues concerning the logic of conditionals and the role played by visual elements in some mathematical proofs. Featuring leading figures from experimental philosophy and the fields of philosophy of logic and mathematics, this collection reveals that empirical work in these disciplines has been quietly thriving for some time and stresses the importance of collaboration between philosophers and researchers in mathematics education and mathematical cognition.
Whose Impartiality? An Experimental Study of Veiled Stakeholders, Involved Spectators and Detached Observers.Fernando Aguiar, Alice Becker & Luis Miller - 2013 - Economics and Philosophy 29 (2):155-174.details
We present an experiment designed to investigate three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice. We consider a first-person procedure, inspired by the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, an involved spectator and a detached observer. First-person veiled stakeholders and involved spectators are affected by an initially unfair distribution that, in the stakeholders’ case, is to be redressed. We find substantial differences in the redressing task. Detached observers propose significantly fairer redistributions than veiled stakeholders or involved spectators. Risk preferences partly explain why veiled stakeholders propose less egalitarian redistributions. Surprisingly, involved spectators, who are informed about their position in society, tend to favour stakeholders holding the same position as they do after the initial distribution.
Traditional, Meta- and Experimental Philosophy(subject-matter, methods, theorizing).de Balbian Ulrich - forthcoming - Oxford: Academic Pushers.details
Traditional, Meta- and Experimental Philosophy(subject-matter, methods, theorizing)
Exploring philosophizing or the doing of philosophy from a meta-philosophy point of view: traditional methods, experimental philosophy (its subject-matter and methods), and the nature of the processes of theorizing.
Exploring the relations between categorization and decision making with regard to realistic face stimuli.James T. Townsend, Kam M. Silva, Jesse Spencer-Smith & Michael J. Wenger - 2000 - Pragmatics and Cognition 8 (1):83-105.details
Categorization and decision making are combined in a task with photorealistic faces. Two different types of face stimuli were assigned probabilistically into one of two fictitious groups; based on the category, faces were further probabilistically assigned to be hostile or friendly. In Part I, participants are asked to categorize a face into one of two categories, and to make a decision concerning interaction. A Markov model of categorization followed by decision making provides reasonable fits to Part I data. A Markov model predicting decision making followed by categorization is rejected. In Part II, a no-parameter model predicts decisions using categorization and decision responses collected in separate trials, suggesting that Part 1 results are not an artifact of the presentation of categorization and decision questions within a single trial. Decisions concerning interaction appear to be based on information from the category decision, and not from the face stimuli alone.
Experimental philosophy of biology: notes from the field.Karola Stotz - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (2):233-237.details
I use a recent ‘experimental philosophy’ study of the concept of the gene conducted by myself and collaborators to discuss the broader epistemological framework within which that research was conducted, and to reflect on the relationship between science, history and philosophy of science, and society.Keywords: Experimental philosophy; Biohumanities; Representing Genes Project; Gene concept; Science criticism; Conceptual ecology.
Assessing Critical Thinking about Values.Michael Gillespie - 2011 - Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 26 (1):19-28.details
Critical thinking and values are fundamental topics of interest in higher education. The current study is an empirical validation of a university’s effort to teach students to apply critical thinking to the recognition and articulation of values contained in focal essays. A Critical Thinking about Values Assessment (CTVA) is provided, which evaluates students’ responses regarding (1) key components of critical thinking, and (2) “critical thinking about values,” in response to the essays. These two criteria were assessed at the beginning and end of the semester as part of a naturally-occurring quasiexperiment. Results provide some support for the reliability and validity of the CTVA and suggest that the program has a tenuous relationship with students’ critical thinking, but a moderate to strongrelationship with students’ ability to recognize and articulate values.
In memoriam.Tamler Sommers - 2011 - The Philosophers' Magazine 52 (52):89-93.details
Experimental philosophy has received a great deal of attention in scholarly journals and the popular media. Often the topic of these articles is precisely what I claim is a non-issue – the value of experimental philosophy as a movement. And here I am writing about this same topic yet again. But I am not going to provide another argument for an obvious position. Instead, I’m writing this as an obituary – an obituary for the so-called controversy about experimental philosophy, and an attempt to diagnose how it lived as long as it did.
Pre-Test/Post-Test Results from an Online Ethics Course.Toby Schonfeld, Erin L. Dahlke & John M. Longo - 2011 - Teaching Philosophy 34 (3):273-290.details
Although online education is becoming increasingly commonplace in health professional education, methods to evaluate student progress and knowledge base adequately remain uncertain. This paper describes a project that attempted to assess whether or not an online course was an effective way to teach applied ethics to students preparing for the health professions by qualitatively analyzing responses to a pre-test and post-test administered to students in the course. While previous studies have reported various findings regarding the success of online ethics courses, our study failed to demonstrate that students gained a greater understanding of key concepts in ethics—respect for autonomy, decisional capacity, informed consent, and role of the provider. Our findings demonstrate the need for better subjective methods of evaluation and raise questions regarding the efficacy of current models of online ethics courses for health professional students.
Polling as Pedagogy.Thomas Nadelhoffer & Eddy Nahmias - 2008 - Teaching Philosophy 31 (1):39-58.details
First, we briefly familiarize the reader with the emerging field of “experimental philosophy,” in which philosophers use empirical methods, rather than armchair speculation, to ascertain laypersons’ intuitions about philosophical issues. Second, we discuss how the surveys used by experimental philosophers can serve as valuable pedagogical tools for teaching philosophy—independently of whether one believes surveying laypersons is an illuminating approach to doing philosophy. Giving students surveys that contain questions and thought experiments from philosophical debates gets them to actively engage with the material and paves the way for more fruitful and impassioned classroom discussion. We offer some suggestions for how to use surveys in the classroom and provide an appendix that contains some examples of scenarios teachers could use in their courses.
Philosphy, Meta-, Experimental Philosphy (subject-matter, methods, theorizing).de Balbian Ulrich - forthcoming - Oxford: Academic Publishers.details
It is assumed the other articles I refer to at the beginning written by myself have been read. Then section 2 deals with X-Phi, its subject-matter and methods and compared to the subject-matter and methods of traditional philosophy. Section 3 deals with traditional methods. An appendix on theorizing is attached as it is suggested that philosophizing resembles the features, stages, steps and aims of the process/es of theorizing.
Qualitative tools and experimental philosophy.James Andow - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (8):1128-1141.details
Experimental philosophy brings empirical methods to philosophy. These methods are used to probe how people think about philosophically interesting things such as knowledge, morality, and freedom. This paper explores the contribution that qualitative methods have to make in this enterprise. I argue that qualitative methods have the potential to make a much greater contribution than they have so far. Along the way, I acknowledge a few types of resistance that proponents of qualitative methods in experimental philosophy might encounter, and provide reasons to think they are ill-founded.
Explanatory Judgment, Moral Offense and Value-Free Science.Matteo Colombo, Leandra Bucher & Yoel Inbar - 2016 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (4):743-763.details
A popular view in philosophy of science contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, economic, or social values, but only by the available evidence. A large body of results in the psychology of motivated-reasoning has put pressure on the empirical adequacy of this view. The present study extends this body of results by providing direct evidence that the moral offensiveness of a scientific hypothesis biases explanatory judgment along several dimensions, even when prior credence in the hypothesis is controlled for. Furthermore, it is shown that this bias is insensitive to an economic incentive to be accurate in the evaluation of the evidence. These results contribute to call into question the attainability of the ideal of a value-free science.
Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy.Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.) - 2016 - Malden, MA: Blackwell.details
This is an anthology of experimental papers relevant to philosophical inquiry across many areas of philosophy.
Experimental Philosophy.Ron Mallon - 2016 - In Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.details
Experimental philosophy is an extension of the Naturalists’ Challenge to the use of intuitions in philosophy. This chapter explores this challenge and traditional or “armchair” responses to it, focusing especially on the case of reference. It first considers the role and nature of intuitions, along with two kinds of experimental philosophical challenges to their use: the challenge from irrelevant determination and the challenge from diversity. It then explores using the challenge from diversity to undermine the reliability of intuitions as evidence for the truth of philosophical claims, and examines critical responses to the challenge from diversity. The chapter concludes by evaluating the possibility that diversity in responses to thought experiments occur even within individuals, and the implications of this for the Naturalists’ Challenge.
Intuitive expertise and intuitions about knowledge.Joachim Horvath & Alex Wiegmann - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (10):2701-2726.details
Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert and lay intuitions; second, that expert intuitions are superior to lay intuitions; and third, that expert intuitions accord with the relevant philosophical consensus. At present, there is only little experimental evidence that bears on these issues. To advance the debate, we conducted two new experiments on intuitions about knowledge with experts and lay people. Our results suggest that the intuitions of epistemological experts are superior in some respects, but they also pose an unexpected challenge to the expertise defense. Most strikingly, we found that even epistemological experts tend to ascribe knowledge in fake-barn-style cases. This suggests that philosophy, as a discipline, might fail to adequately map the intuitions of its expert practitioners onto a disciplinary consensus.
Reliable but not home free? What framing effects mean for moral intuitions.James Andow - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (6):904-911.details
Various studies show moral intuitions to be susceptible to framing effects. Many have argued that this susceptibility is a sign of unreliability and that this poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. Recently, doubt has been cast on this idea. It has been argued that extant evidence of framing effects does not show that moral intuitions have an unreliability problem. I argue that, even if the extant evidence suggests that moral intuitions are fairly stable with respect to what intuitions we have, the effect of framing on the strength of those intuitions still needs to be taken into account. I argue that this by itself poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy.
The Methodological Necessity of Experimental Philosophy.Jonathan M. Weinberg - 2015 - Discipline Filosofiche 25 (1):23-42.details
Must philosophers incorporate tools of experimental science into their methodological toolbox? I argue here that they must. Tallying up all the resources that are now part of standard practice in analytic philosophy, we see the problem that they do not include adequate resources for detecting and correcting for their own biases and proclivities towards error. Methodologically sufficient resources for error- detection and error-correction can only come, in part, from the deployment of specific methods from the sciences. However, we need not imagine that the resulting methodological norms will be so empirically demanding as to require that all appeals to intuition must first be precertified by a thorough vetting by teams of scientists. Rather, I sketch a set of more moderate methodological norms for how we might best include these necessary tools of experimental philosophy.
Corpus Analysis in Philosophy.Roland Bluhm - 2016 - In Martin Hinton, Evidence, Experiment, and Argument in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 91-109.details
The experimental philosophy movement advocates the use of empirical methods in philosophy. The methods most often discussed and in fact employed in experimental philosophy are appropriated from the experimental paradigm in psychology. But there is a variety of other (at least partly) empirical methods from various disciplines that are and others that could be used in philosophy. The paper explores the application of corpus analysis to philosophical issues. Although the method is well established in linguistics, there are only a few tentative attempts of philosophers to utilise it. Examples are introduced and the merit of corpus analysis is compared to that of using general internet search engines and questionnaires for similar purposes.
Folk Feminist Theory: An Experimental Approach.Peggy Desautels - 2008 - Hypatia 23 (4):240-244.details
(1 other version)An experimental study of the concept.W. J. Weeden - 1928 - Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy 6 (4):304-308.details
Human Nonmonotonic Reasoning: the Importance of Seeing the Logical Strength of Arguments.Marilyn Ford - 2005 - Synthese 146 (1-2):71-92.details
Three studies of human nonmonotonic reasoning are described. The results show that people find such reasoning quite difficult, although being given problems with known subclass-superclass relationships is helpful. The results also show that recognizing differences in the logical strengths of arguments is important for the nonmonotonic problems studied. For some of these problems, specificity – which is traditionally considered paramount in drawing appropriate conclusions – was irrelevant and so should have lead to a “can’t tell” response; however, people could give rational conclusions based on differences in the logical consequences of arguments. The same strategy also works for problems where specificity is relevant, suggesting that in fact specificity is not paramount. Finally, results showed that subjects’ success at responding appropriately to nonmonotonic problems involving conflict relies heavily on the ability to appreciate differences in the logical strength of simple, non-conflicting, statements.
Coherence and Nonmonotonicity in Human Reasoning.Niki Pfeifer & Gernot D. Kleiter - 2005 - Synthese 146 (1-2):93-109.details
Nonmonotonic reasoning is often claimed to mimic human common sense reasoning. Only a few studies, though, have investigated this claim empirically. We report four experiments which investigate three rules of SYSTEMP, namely the AND, the LEFT LOGICAL EQUIVALENCE, and the OR rule. The actual inferences of the subjects are compared with the coherent normative upper and lower probability bounds derived from a non-infinitesimal probability semantics of SYSTEM P. We found a relatively good agreement of human reasoning and principles of nonmonotonic reasoning. Contrary to the results reported in the ‘heuristics and biases’ tradition, the subjects committed relatively few upper bound violations (conjunction fallacies).
An Overview of Possibilistic Handling of Default Reasoning, with Experimental Studies.Salem Benferhat, Jean F. Bonnefon & Rui da Silva Neves - 2005 - Synthese 146 (1-2):53-70.details
This paper first provides a brief survey of a possibilistic handling of default rules. A set of default rules of the form, \"generally, from α deduce β\", is viewed as the family of possibility distributions satisfying constraints expressing that the situation where α and β is true has a greater plausibility than the one where α and ⇁β is true. When considering only the subset of linear possibility distributions, the well-known System P of postulates proposed by Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor, has been obtained. We also present two rational extensions: one based on the minimum specificity principle and the other is based on the lexicographic ordering. The second part of the paper presents an empirical study of three desirable properties for a consequence relation that capture default reasoning: Rationality, Property Inheritance and Ambiguity Preservation. An experiment is conducted to investigate 13 patterns of inference for the test of these properties. Our experimental apparatus confirms previous results on the relevance of System P, and enforces the psychological relevance of the studied properties.
Folk concepts of person and identity: A response to Nichols and Bruno.Renatas Berniūnas & Vilius Dranseika - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (1):96-122.details
Nichols and Bruno claim that the folk judge that psychological continuity is necessary for personal identity. In this article, we evaluate this claim. First, we argue that it is likely that in thinking about hypothetical cases of transformations, the folk do not use a unitary concept of personal identity, but instead rely on different concepts of ‘person’, ‘identity’, and ‘individual’. Identity can be ascribed even when post-transformation individuals are no longer categorized as persons. Second, we provide new empirical evidence suggesting that the folk do not consider psychological continuity to be necessary for an individual to be categorized as a person or for ascribing identity over time and through transformations. In this, we assume, along with Nichols and Bruno, that folk judgments about identity can be read off the use of proper names. Furthermore, we raise some doubts about the ability of current experimental designs to adequately distinguish between qualitative and numerical identity jud..
Communication Without the Cooperative Principle: A Signaling Experiment.Hannah Rubin, Justin Bruner, Cailin O'Connor & Simon Huttegger - unknowndetails
According to Grice's `Cooperative Principle', human communicators are involved in a cooperative endeavor. The speaker attempts to make herself understood and the listener, in turn, assumes that the speaker is trying to maximize the ease and effectiveness of communication. While pragmatists recognize that people do not always behave in such a way, the Cooperative Principle is generally assumed to hold. However, it is often the case that the interests of speakers and listeners diverge, at least to some degree. Communication can arise in such situations when the cost of signaling is high enough that it aligns the interests of speaker and listener, but what happens when the cost of signaling is not sufficient to align the interests of those communicating? In these cases the theoretical prediction is that they will reach a partially informative system of communication. Using methods from experimental economics, we test whether theoretical predictions are borne out. We find that subjects do learn to communicate without the cooperative principle.
(1 other version)Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics.Florian Cova, Amanda Garcia & Shen-yi Liao - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (12):927-939.details
In the past decade, experimental philosophy---the attempt at making progress on philosophical problems using empirical methods---has thrived in a wide range of domains. However, only in recent years has aesthetics succeeded in drawing the attention of experimental philosophers. The present paper constitutes the first survey of these works and of the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy of aesthetics'. We present both recent experimental works by philosophers on topics such as the ontology of aesthetics, aesthetic epistemology, aesthetic concepts, and imagination, as well as research from other disciplines that not only are relevant to philosophy of aesthetics but also open new avenues of research for experimental philosophy of aesthetics. Overall, we conclude that the birth of an experimental philosophy of aesthetics is good news not only for aesthetics but also for experimental philosophy itself, as it contributes to broaden the scope of experimental philosophy.
The benefits of argumentation are cross-culturally robust: The case of Japan.H. Mercier, M. Deguchi, J.-B. Van der Henst & H. Yama - 2016 - Thinking and Reasoning 22 (1):1-15.details
Thanks to the exchange of arguments, groups outperform individuals on some tasks, such as solving logical problems. However, these results stem from experiments conducted among Westerners and they could be due to cultural particularities such as tolerance of contradiction and approval of public debate. Other cultures, collectivistic cultures in particular, are said to frown on argumentation. Moreover, some influential intellectual movements, such as Confucianism, disapprove of argumentation. In two experiments, the hypothesis that Easterners might not share the benefits of argumentation was tested. In Experiment 1, Japanese participants had to solve a standard logical problem individually and then in groups. They performed significantly better in groups. In Experiment 2, Japanese participants had to estimate the weight of various animals. They did so individually, then after learning of another participant's estimates, then after discussing these estimates with the other participant, and then indi..
How Diagrams Can Support Syllogistic Reasoning: An Experimental Study.Yuri Sato & Koji Mineshima - 2015 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 24 (4):409-455.details
This paper explores the question of what makes diagrammatic representations effective for human logical reasoning, focusing on how Euler diagrams support syllogistic reasoning. It is widely held that diagrammatic representations aid intuitive understanding of logical reasoning. In the psychological literature, however, it is still controversial whether and how Euler diagrams can aid untrained people to successfully conduct logical reasoning such as set-theoretic and syllogistic reasoning. To challenge the negative view, we build on the findings of modern diagrammatic logic and introduce an Euler-style diagrammatic representation system that is designed to avoid problems inherent to a traditional version of Euler diagrams. It is hypothesized that Euler diagrams are effective not only in interpreting sentential premises but also in reasoning about semantic structures implicit in given sentences. To test the hypothesis, we compared Euler diagrams with other types of diagrams having different syntactic or semantic properties. Experiment compared the difference in performance between syllogistic reasoning with Euler diagrams and Venn diagrams. Additional analysis examined the case of a linear variant of Euler diagrams, in which set-relationships are represented by one-dimensional lines. The experimental results provide evidence supporting our hypothesis. It is argued that the efficacy of diagrams in supporting syllogistic reasoning crucially depends on the way they represent the relational information contained in categorical sentences.
Experiments in Economics: Playing Fair with Money.Ananish Chaudhuri - 2009 - Routledge.details
Are humans fair by nature? Why do we often willingly trust strangers or cooperate with them even if those actions leave us vulnerable to exploitation? Does this natural inclination towards fairness or trust have implications in the market-place? Traditional economic theory would perhaps think not, perceiving human interaction as self-interested at heart. There is increasing evidence however that social norms and norm-driven behaviour such as a preference for fairness, generosity or trust have serious implications for economics. This book provides an easily accessible overview of economic experiments, specifically those that explore the role of fairness, generosity, trust and reciprocity in economic transactions. Ananish Chaudhuri approaches a variety of economic issues and problems including: Pricing by firms Writing labour contracts between parties Marking voluntary contributions to charity, Addressing issues of environmental pollution, Providing micro-credit to small entrepreneurs, Resolving problems of coordination failure in organizations. The book discusses how norm-driven behaviour can often lead to significantly different outcomes than those predicted by economic theories and these findings should in turn cause us to re-think how we approach economic analysis and policy. Assuming no prior knowledge of economics and containing a variety of examples, this reader friendly volume will be perfect reading for people from a wide range of backgrounds including students and policy-makers. The book should appeal to economics undergraduates studying experimental economics, microeconomics or game theory as well as students in social psychology, organizational behaviour, management and other business related disciplines.
Explanatory Value and Probabilistic Reasoning: An Empirical Study.Matteo Colombo, Marie Postma & Jan Sprenger - 2016 - Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society.details
The relation between probabilistic and explanatory reasoning is a classical topic in philosophy of science. Most philosophical analyses are concerned with the compatibility of Inference to the Best Explanation with probabilistic, Bayesian inference, and the impact of explanatory considerations on the assignment of subjective probabilities. This paper reverses the question and asks how causal and explanatory considerations are affected by probabilistic information. We investigate how probabilistic information determines the explanatory value of a hypothesis, and in which sense folk explanatory practice can be said to be rational. Our study identifies three main factors in reasoning about a explanatory hypothesis: cognitive salience, rational acceptability and logical entailment. This corresponds well to the variety of philosophical accounts of explanation. Moreover, we show that these factors are highly sensitive to manipulations of probabilistic information. This finding suggests that probabilistic reasoning is a crucial part of explanatory inferences, and it motivates new avenues of research in the debate about Inference to the Best Explanation and probabilistic measures of explanatory power.
Philosophers are doing something different now: Quantitative data.Joshua Knobe - 2015 - Cognition 135 (C):36-38.details
The philosophical study of mind in the twentieth century was dominated by a research program that used a priori methods to address foundational questions. Since that time, however, the philosophical study of mind has undergone a dramatic shift. To provide a more accurate picture of contemporary philosophical work, I compared a sample of highly cited philosophy papers from the past five years with a sample of highly cited philosophy papers from the twentieth century. In the twentieth century sample, the majority of papers used purely a priori methods, while only a minority cited results from empirical studies. In the sample from the past five years, the methodology is radically different. The majority of papers cite results from empirical studies, a sizable proportion report original experimental results, and only a small minority are purely a priori. Overall, the results of the review suggest that the philosophical study of mind has become considerably more integrated into the broader interdisciplinary field of cognitive science.
Empirical Methods of Linguistics in Philosophy.Roland Bluhm - 2014 - The Reasoner 8 (4):41.details
Report on the workshop \"Empirical Methods of Linguistics in Philosophy\", which took place at TU Dortmund University, Germany, on March 13–14, 2014.
(1 other version)Conceptual analysis and x-phi.Mark Balaguer - 2016 - Synthese 193 (8).details
This paper does two things. First, it argues for a metaphilosophical view of conceptual analysis questions; in particular, it argues that the facts that settle conceptual-analysis questions are facts about the linguistic intentions of ordinary folk. The second thing this paper does is argue that if this metaphilosophical view is correct, then experimental philosophy is a legitimate methodology to use in trying to answer conceptual-analysis questions.
Experimental Philosophy: 1935-1965.Taylor Murphy - 2014 - In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols, Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK. pp. vol. 1, pp. 325-368.details
In the heyday of linguistic philosophy an experimental philosophy movement was born, and this chapter tells its story, both in its historical and philosophical context and as it is connected to controversies about experimental philosophy today. From its humble beginnings at the Vienna Circle, the movement matured into a vibrant research program at Oslo, and sought adventure at Berkeley thereafter. The harsh and uncharitable reaction it met is surprising but understandable in light of disciplinary tensions and the legacy of antipsychologism—sentiments and arguments which have reemerged today, albeit in modified form. Yet the research at Oslo remained unperturbed and it flourished in both its theory and its applications, which spanned the philosophical domain. The Berkeley years were short but intense, as exemplified by their engagement with ordinary-language philosophy, J.L. Austin, and the theory of communicative significance.
Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental Readings, ed. Fritz Allhoff, Ron Mallon, and Shaun Nichols.Robert L. Gray - 2015 - Teaching Philosophy 38 (2):240-243.details
On gender and philosophical intuition: Failure of replication and other negative results.Hamid Seyedsayamdost - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (5):642-673.details
In their paper titled “Gender and philosophical intuition,” Buckwalter and Stich argue that the intuitions of women and men differ significantly on various types of philosophical questions. Furthermore, men's intuitions, so the authors claim, are more in line with traditionally accepted solutions of classical problems. This inherent bias, so the argument goes, is one of the factors that leads more men than women to pursue degrees and careers in philosophy. These findings have received a considerable amount of attention and the paper is to appear in the second edition of Experimental Philosophy edited by Knobe and Nichols , which itself is an influential outlet. Given the exposure of these results, we attempted to replicate three of the classes of questions that Buckwalter and Stich review in their paper and for which they report significant differences. We failed to replicate the results using several different sources for data collection (one being identical to the original procedures..
Do men and women have different philosophical intuitions? Further data.Toni Adleberg, Morgan Thompson & Eddy Nahmias - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (5):615-641.details
To address the underrepresentation of women in philosophy effectively, we must understand the causes of the early loss of women. In this paper we challenge one of the few explanations that has focused on why women might leave philosophy at early stages. Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich offer some evidence that women have different intuitions than men about philosophical thought experiments. We present some concerns about their evidence and we discuss our own study, in which we attempted to replicate their results for 23 different responses to 14 scenarios. We also conducted a literature search to see if other philosophers or psychologists have tested for gender differences in philosophical intuitions. Based on our findings, we argue that that it is unlikely that gender differences in intuitions play a significant role in driving women from philosophy.
Filosofía Experimental y Economía Experimental: un enfoque híbrido.Fernando Aguiar, Antonio Gaitán & Blanca Rodríguez López - 2014 - Isegoría 51:623-648.details
En este artículo presentamos las principales corrientes de la Filosofía Experimental y atendemos a una de las críticas más severas a la que se ha sometido este reciente programa de renovación metodológica. Según Antti Kauppinen la Filosofía Experimental está condenada al fracaso porque no puede obtener mediante sus métodos el tipo de intuiciones que interesan a los filósofos –las intuiciones robustas del hablante competente. Aun aceptando parte de las críticas de Kauppinen, en este artículo sostenemos, en primer lugar, que la supuesta incapacidad de la Filosofía Experimental para acceder a las intuiciones robustas de los hablantes tiene que ver en gran medida con los métodos experimentales empleados hasta ahora por los filósofos experimentales. En segundo lugar, defendemos que el proyecto de reforma llevado a cabo desde la Filosofía Experimental resultará viable solo si se adoptan una serie de consejos metodológicos procedentes de la economía experimental. Únicamente entonces podrán los experimentalistas responder con éxito a la objeción de Kauppinen.
General Introduction to \"A Companion to Experimental Philosophy\".Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell.details
This is the general introduction to the edited collection \"A companion to Experimental Philosophy\".
Excuse validation: a study in rule-breaking.John Turri & Peter Blouw - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (3):615-634.details
Can judging that an agent blamelessly broke a rule lead us to claim, paradoxically, that no rule was broken at all? Surprisingly, it can. Across seven experiments, we document and explain the phenomenon of excuse validation. We found when an agent blamelessly breaks a rule, it significantly distorts people’s description of the agent’s conduct. Roughly half of people deny that a rule was broken. The results suggest that people engage in excuse validation in order to avoid indirectly blaming others for blameless transgressions. Excuse validation has implications for recent debates in normative ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of language. These debates have featured thought experiments perfectly designed to trigger excuse validation, inhibiting progress in these areas.
The Logic Game: A Two-Player Game of Propositional Logic.Daniel J. Hicks & John Milanese - 2015 - Teaching Philosophy 38 (1):77-93.details
This paper introduces The Logic Game, a two-player strategy game designed to help students in introductory logic classes learn the truth conditions for the logical operators. The game materials can be printed using an ordinary printer on ordinary paper, takes 10-15 minutes to play, and the rules are fairly easy to learn. This paper includes a complete set of rules, a URL for a website hosting all of the game materials, and the results of a study of the effectiveness of the Logic Game in three introductory logic classes.
Experimental Metaphysics.David Rose (ed.) - 2017 - New York: Bloomsbury Academic.details
This volume brings together a range of views aimed at addressing the question of how cognitive science might be relevant to metaphysics.
Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis: Experimental Philosophy's Place under the Sun.Uriah Kriegel - 2017 - In David Rose, Experimental Metaphysics. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 7-46.details
What is the rationale for the methodological innovations of experimental philosophy? This paper starts from the contention that common answers to this question are implausible. It then develops a framework within which experimental philosophy fulfills a specific function in an otherwise traditionalist picture of philosophical inquiry. The framework rests on two principal ideas. The first is Frank Jackson’s claim that conceptual analysis is unavoidable in ‘serious metaphysics’. The second is that the psychological structure of concepts is extremely intricate, much more so than early practitioners of conceptual analysis had realized. This intricacy has implications for the activity of analyzing concepts: while the central, coarser, more prominent contours of a concept may be identified from the armchair, the finer details of the concept’s structure require experimental methods to detect.
Three Arguments Against the Expertise Defense.Moti Mizrahi - 2015 - Metaphilosophy 46 (1):52-64.details
Experimental philosophers have challenged friends of the expertise defense to show that the intuitive judgments of professional philosophers are different from the intuitive judgments of nonphilosophers, and the intuitive judgments of professional philosophers are better than the intuitive judgments of nonphilosophers, in ways that are relevant to the truth or falsity of such judgments. Friends of the expertise defense have responded by arguing that the burden of proof lies with experimental philosophers. This article sketches three arguments which show that both and are probably false. If its arguments are cogent, then shifting the burden of proof is a futile move, since philosophical training makes no difference so far as making intuitive judgments in response to hypothetical cases is concerned.
Early Modern Experimental Philosophy.Peter R. Anstey & Alberto Vanzo - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 87-102.details
In the mid-seventeenth century a movement of self-styled experimental philosophers emerged in Britain. Originating in the discipline of natural philosophy amongst Fellows of the fledgling Royal Society of London, it soon spread to medicine and by the eighteenth century had impacted moral and political philosophy and even aesthetics. Early modern experimental philosophers gave epistemic priority to observation and experiment over theorising and speculation. They decried the use of hypotheses and system-building without recourse to experiment and, in some quarters, developed a philosophy of experiment. The movement spread to the Netherlands and France in the early eighteenth century and later impacted Germany. Its important role in early modern philosophy was subsequently eclipsed by the widespread adoption of the Kantian historiography of modern philosophy, which emphasised the distinction between rationalism and empiricism and had no place for the historical phenomenon of early modern experimental philosophy. The re-emergence of interest in early modern experimental philosophy roughly coincided with the development of contemporary x-phi and there are some important similarities between the two.
Philosophy for children. Appraising its impact on college level students.Damian Spiteri - 2009 - Childhood and Philosophy 5 (10):425-445.details
This paper is centered on analyzing how a ‘philosophy for children’ lecturing methodology can foster learning amongst foundation-level students at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology, MCAST. This is a college that offers VET in different areas to students aged 16 and over. Foundation level courses are at level 1 of the National Vocational Qualifications framework, this level being the most basic. The students in this study are reading Health and Social Care. The courses on offer at MCAST in Health and Social Care go up to level 6, the level of an undergraduate degree level qualification. It is possible for students to progress from level 1 to level 6 over seven years of study. Alternatively, they may terminate their studies with a lower level of qualification, including after completing the Foundation level course. The methodology that has been adopted is based on engaging these students in continual questioning and philosophical reflection on the subject matter and on their connecting it with learning derived from other sources and from their personal life-experiences. It is based on engaging them in asking their own questions, exploring concepts that they deem as important, learning from each other’s points of view, and thereby understanding themselves and others from a more reflexive perspective. It is both lecturer-centered and student-centered since lecturers model appropriate procedures of inquiry, encouraging students to find a voice so as to challenge what they deem as unacceptable, rather than intervening so as to impose pre-empted conclusions. The analysis is based on an ethnographic approach that is informed by the students’ voices and that involves field observation and focus-groups. It is anticipated that this study will provide an understanding of the student’s own assessment of the benefits of stimulating their philosophical curiosity through the medium of applying a philosophy for children methodology to Health and Social Care studies amongst college students.
Effects of the Philosophy for Children Program through the Community of Inquiry method on the improvement of interpersonal relationship skills in primary school students.Mehrnoosh Hedayti & Yahya Ghaedi - 2009 - Childhood and Philosophy 5 (9):199-217.details
To investigate the effect of community of inquiry method on improvement of interpersonal relationship skills, based on Matthew Lipman’s theory and practice, an experiment was designed and conducted in Tehran among primary school students of third, fourth and fifth grades. 190 student were randomly selected and assigned to experimental and control group . The experimental group was taught based on community of inquiry methodology for twelve ninety minute sessions. Interpersonal relationship skills were measured by Ardly & Asher’s questionnaire. Results show that means of both experimental and control group on the pre-test didn't have any significant difference. But, the results of pre-test and post-test of both experimental and control group indicated that the mean of post-test scores of experimental group in relation to pre-test in interpersonal relationship skills increased, while the mean of the control group remained the same in the post-test, and the mean of the experimental group in the post-test was higher than the mean of the control group. In order to investigate the persistence of the treatment effect, the students were rechecked after 4 months, and the results appeared to be stable. Therefore, this semi-experimental study has shown that the community of inquiry method has positively affected interpersonal relationship skills in experimental group of children, with effects that continued for at least 4 months after the treatment.
Ought, Can, and Presupposition: An Experimental Study.Moti Mizrahi - 2015 - Methode 4 (6):232-243.details
In this paper, I present the results of an experimental study on intuitions about moral obligation (ought) and ability (can). Many philosophers accept as an axiom the principle known as “Ought Implies Can” (OIC). If the truth of OIC is intuitive, such that it is accepted by many philosophers as an axiom, then we would expect people to judge that agents who are unable to perform an action are not morally obligated to perform that action. The results of my experimental study show that participants were more inclined to judge that an agent ought to perform an action than that the agent can perform the action. Overall, participants said that an agent ought to perform an action even when they said that the agent cannot do it. I discuss the implications of these results for the debate over OIC.
The Relationship Between Prototypicality and Preference on Aesthetic Judgment.Alexandra Hoffman-Stachelberg - 2003 - Dissertation, Long Island University, the Brooklyn Centerdetails
This study is concerned with the effects of context on aesthetic judgments. There were 131 participants in this study who responded to four works by Vincent Van Gogh. This study was unlike previous studies done by Shortess, et al. , as there were 4 different conditions in which the images were presented. Each participant was asked to make judgments about the works' familiarity, typicality, realism, and preference. The results confirmed a strong effect for context on aesthetic judgment. There was an overall effect for context on judgments of typicality, realism, and preference. Furthermore, there was a significant, positive relationship between rating images for typicality and ratings of preference. Supplemental analyses also showed indirect evidence for the effects of context on this relationship.
\"Experimental Philosophy and its Critic,\" ed. Joachim Horvath and Thomas Grundmann; \"Experimental Philosophy,\" Volume 2, ed. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols; and \"Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy,\" ed. Edouard Machery and Elizabeth O’Neill. [REVIEW]Joshua Alexander - 2014 - Teaching Philosophy 37 (3):411-414.details
Improving Emotion Comprehension and Social Skills in Early Childhood through Philosophy for Children.Marta Giménez-dasí, Laura Quintanilla & Marie-France Daniel - 2013 - Childhood and Philosophy 9 (17):63-89.details
The relationship between emotion comprehension and social competence from very young ages has been addressed in numerous studies in the field of developmental psychology. Emotion knowledge in childhood seems to have its roots in the conversations and explanations children hear about what emotions are and how to manage them. Given that behavioral interventions often do not achieve medium-term improvements or generalization to other contexts, this study evaluates the results of an intervention using the Thinking Emotions program. This program uses Philosophy for Children as the work format and is based on the idea that reflection and dialogue among peers is one of the most effective ways to interiorize significant knowledge. The program was applied during one school year in two preschool classrooms . Comparisons of the pre- and post-treatment measures of the control and experimental groups show significant improvements in emotion comprehension and social competence in the 5-year-old children and improvements related to social competence in the 4-year-olds.
Where Philosophical Intuitions Come From.Helen De Cruz - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (2):233-249.details
Little is known about the aetiology of philosophical intuitions, in spite of their central role in analytic philosophy. This paper provides a psychological account of the intuitions that underlie philosophical practice, with a focus on intuitions that underlie the method of cases. I argue that many philosophical intuitions originate from spontaneous, early-developing, cognitive processes that also play a role in other cognitive domains. Additionally, they have a skilled, practiced, component. Philosophers are expert elicitors of intuitions in the dialectical context of professional philosophy. If this analysis is correct, this should lead to a reassessment of experimental philosophical studies of expertise.
Experimental Philosophy and the Underrepresentation of Women.Carrie Figdor & Matt L. Drabek - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 590-602.details
This paper summarizes recent and ongoing experimental work regarding the reality, nature, effects, and causes of the underrepresentation of women in academic philosophy. We first present empirical data on several aspects of underrepresentation, and then consider various reasons why this gender imbalance is problematic. We then turn to the published and preliminary results of empirical work aimed at identifying factors that might explain it.
(1 other version)Luck Attributions and Cognitive Bias.Steven D. Hales & Jennifer Adrienne Johnson - 2014 - Metaphilosophy 45 (4-5):509-528.details
Philosophers have developed three theories of luck: the probability theory, the modal theory, and the control theory. To help assess these theories, we conducted an empirical investigation of luck attributions. We created eight putative luck scenarios and framed each in either a positive or a negative light. Furthermore, we placed the critical luck event at the beginning, middle, or end of the scenario to see if the location of the event influenced luck attributions. We found that attributions of luckiness were significantly influenced by the framing of the scenario and by the location of the critical event. Positively framing an event led to significantly higher lucky ratings than negatively framing the same exact event. And the closer a negative event was placed toward the end of a scenario, the more unlucky the event was rated. Overall, our results raise the possibility that there is no such thing as luck and thereby pose serious challenges to the three prominent theories of luck. We instead propose that luck may be a cognitive illusion, a mere narrative device used to frame stories of success or failure.
What is the State of Blacks in Philosophy?Tina F. Botts, Liam K. Bright, Guntur Mallarangeng, Quayshawn Spencer & Myisha Cherry - 2014 - Critical Philosophy of Race 2 (2):224-242.details
This research note is meant to introduce into philosophical discussion the preliminary results of an empirical study on the state of blacks in philosophy, which is a joint effort of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers (APA CSBP) and the Society of Young Black Philosophers (SYBP). The study is intended to settle factual issues in furtherance of contributing to dialogues surrounding at least two philosophical questions: What, if anything, is the philosophical value of demographic diversity in professional philosophy? And what is philosophy? The empirical goals of the study are (1) to identify and enumerate U.S. blacks in philosophy, (2) to determine the distribution of blacks in philosophy across career stages, (3) to determine correlates to the success of blacks in philosophy at different career stages, and (4) to compare and contrast results internally and externally to explain any career stage gaps and determine any other disparities.
Don't Believe the Hype: Why Should Philosophical Theories Yield to Intuitions?Moti Mizrahi - 2015 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 34 (3):141-158.details
In this paper, I argue that, contrary to common opinion, a counterexample against a philosophical theory does not amount to conclusive evidence against that theory. Instead, the method of counterexamples allows for the derivation of a disjunction, i.e., ‘either the theory is false or an auxiliary assumption is false’, not a negation of the target theory. This is so because, whenever the method of counterexamples is used in an attempt to refute a philosophical theory, there is a crucial auxiliary assumption that needs to be taken into account. The auxiliary assumption is that making intuitive judgments in response to hypothetical cases about the subject matter in question (e.g., knowledge or proper names) is a good method for finding out truths about that subject matter. Without good reasons to think that this assumption is warranted, the negation of a philosophical theory whose content is alleged to be in conflict with the content of an intuition cannot be justifiably derived using an argument that employs the method of counterexamples.
The justification of legislation - an introduction to legisprudence, a new theory of legislation.Luc J. Wintgens - unknowndetails
General Introduction The process of the institutionalisation of law that started at the end of the 18th century was followed by a general wave of codification throughout Europe. The French codification of 1804 was exemplary for all the others. The “law in books” was complete, certain, clear, and undisputable. From then on, the law in books had priority over the “law in action”. Law in books was a critique of law in action that preceded the French Revolution. Judicial activism was proscribed, and judges were called to apply the rules issued by the legislator. This ideal of the French Revolution is still framing our pattern of legal thinking. It is dominant throughout the 19th century with the école de l’exégèse in France, Begriffjurisprudenz in Germany, and analytical jurisprudence in Anglo-American legal systems. Legal formalism or the deductive application of rules is the only form of judicial reasoning that is allowed. The science of law, as a consequence, was confined to a theoretical support and elaboration of this judge-centred approach to law. This view on law and legal science persisted throughout the last century. It started being criticized in the late 1960s, a critique that paved the path for a more active role of the judge. New theories of interpretation were proposed so as to supplement the law in books with theoretically justified methodologies to determine its meaning. The findings of legal theory are still, to a large extent, premised on the central role of the judge in the legal system. Although this evolution may be applauded for having contributed to a more dynamic attitude towards the law, the role of the legislator remains largely underexposed. Legal theory takes the law as “just there”, and limits its theoretical undertakings to law as it is. Law, so it is said, is the result of political decision-making. Once it comes into being however, it is separated from politics. Politics, that is, is thought of as impure, at least when compared to the methods of legal reasoning and decision-making. This brings us to the theme of this book. Some of the questions I propose to explore are: Where does the law come from? What are the premises of a theory that considers law separated from politics? What does it mean for a legislator to be bound to the rules of a constitution throughout the process of legislation? Does the constitution consist of rules to be followed by the legislator or is its role merely confined to be a political programme? These and other questions frame the main problem this book proposes to deal with. They are triggered by the fact of the exponential growth of today’s legal systems. Complaints about both the increasing volume of legislation and its decreasing quality in most European countries have raised the question as to whether collaboration between legislators and legal theory can help to articulate and to solve that problem. As a matter of fact, although the complaints are made with an ever-stronger voice, solutio
The Role of Justification in the Ordinary Concept of Scientific Progress.Moti Mizrahi & Wesley Buckwalter - 2014 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 45 (1):151-166.details
Alexander Bird and Darrell Rowbottom have argued for two competing accounts of the concept of scientific progress. For Bird, progress consists in the accumulation of scientific knowledge. For Rowbottom, progress consists in the accumulation of true scientific beliefs. Both appeal to intuitions elicited by thought experiments in support of their views, and it seems fair to say that the debate has reached an impasse. In an attempt to avoid this stalemate, we conduct a systematic study of the factors that underlie judgments about scientific progress. Our results suggest that (internal) justification plays an important role in intuitive judgments about progress, questioning the intuitive support for the claim that the concept of scientific progress is best explained in terms of the accumulation of only true scientific belief.
Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, eds., Experimental Philosophy.Julie E. Kirsch - 2009 - Philosophy in Review 29 (5):350.details
Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction. [REVIEW]Oisín Deery - 2013 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 (5):787-791.details
The Varieties of Liberty Ideals: Do Progressives, Conservatives and Libertarians Understand Freedom Differently?Vlad Tarko - manuscriptdetails
A long standing assumption in political philosophy is that the way in which one understands freedom has important consequences for the kind of political system that one favors. The paper tests this assumption by means of a comprehensive survey that explores trade-offs between seven different concepts of freedom. The results show that, beyond a certain common background (defined by psychological autonomy, freedom of choice and freedom under law), important differences are indeed present. It seems that these differences are explained by differences in personal preferences and in the beliefs about what best serves the common good. Moderates turn out to have a distinct profile.
Distinguishing the said from the implicated using a novel experimental paradigm.Meredith Larson, Ryan Doran, Yaron McNabb, Rachel Baker, Matthew Berends, Alex Djalali & Gregory Ward - 2009 - In Uli Sauerland & Kazuko Yatsushiro, Semantics and pragmatics: from experiment to theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.details
Experimental Ethics: Toward an Empirical Moral Philosophy.Christoph Lütge, Hannes Rusch & Matthias Uhl (eds.) - 2014 - London, England: Palgrave-Macmillan.details
This volume gives an overview of the rising field of Experimental Ethics. It is organized into five main parts: PART I – Introduction: An Experimental Philosophy of Ethics? // PART II – Applied Experimental Ethics: Case studies // PART III – On Methodology // PART IV – Critical Reflections // PART V – Future Perspectives. Among the contributors: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Eric Schwitzgebel, Ezio di Nucci, Jacob Rosenthal, and Fernando Aguiar.
Philosophy and the Experimental Sciences.Robert J. Mccall - 1952 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 26:194-198.details
It’s a Miracle: Separating the Miraculous from the Mundane.Michael R. Ransom & Mark D. Alicke - 2012 - Archive for the Psychology of Religion 34 (2):243-275.details
What aspects and features of events impel people to label them as miraculous? Three studies examined people's miracle conceptions and the factors that lead them to designate an event as a miracle. Study 1 identified the basic elements of laypersons’ miracle beliefs by instructing participants to define a miracle, to list five events that they considered miraculous, and to state what they believed to be the purpose of miracles. Results showed that individuals tend to view miracles as highly improbable and beneficial occurrences that instill hope and faith in people. Studies 2 and 3 investigated people's intuitive miracle theories. Findings demonstrated that people tend to label events as miracles when the events in question were of high magnitude, were obtained in an unusual manner, resulted in a beneficial health outcome, personally affected the participant, involved a person of worthy character, and depicted a low-probability event.
Intuitions in the test-tube.Joshua Knobe - 2004 - The Philosophers' Magazine 28:37-39.details
Since the earliest days of analytic philosophy, it has been a common practice to appeal to intuitions about particular cases. Typically, the philosopher presents a hypothetical situation and then makes a claim of the form: ‘In this case, we would surely say....’ This claim about people’s intuitions then forms a part of an argument for some more general theory about the nature of our concepts or our use of language. One puzzling aspect of this practice is that it so rarely makes use of standard empirical methods. Although philosophers quite frequently make claims about ‘what people would ordinarily say,’ they rarely back up those claims by actually asking people and looking for patterns in their responses. In recent years, however, a number of philosophers have tried to put claims about intuitions to the test, using experimental methods to figure out what people really think about particular hypothetical cases. At times, the results have been extremely surprising. Here I discuss applications of this new methodology to three areas of philosophy — the philosophy of language, the theory of action, and the free will debate.
Learner Outcome Attainment in Teaching Applied Ethics versus Case Methodology.Brian J. Huschle - 2012 - Teaching Philosophy 35 (3):243-262.details
The primary purpose of this study is to identify differences in attainment of learning outcomes for ethics courses delivered using two distinct teaching approaches. The first approach uses a case based method in the context of applied moral issues within medical practice. The second approach surveys moral theories in the context of applied moral issues. Significant differences are found in the attainment of learner outcomes between the two groups. In particular, attainment of outcomes related to moral decision-making is higher in those students who take the course with a case based method. In contrast, attainment of outcomes related to personal beliefs about applied moral issues is higher in those students who take an introductory ethics course surveying moral theories in the context of applied issues. Neither of these results is especially surprising. What may be surprising, however, is that students in the case-based course do not appear attain learner outcomes with regard to applied moral issues despite studying those issues in detail. Finally, the assessment tool developed and refined through this study may be of use for assessment in a variety of ethics courses.
Do Personality Effects Mean Philosophy is Intrinsically Subjective?Geoffrey Holtzman - 2013 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 20 (5-6):5-6.details
This paper identifies several ways in which personality informs philosophical belief. In the present study, individuals holding doctorates in philosophy were given a personality inventory and asked to respond to nine philosophical questions, seven of which produced significant sample sizes. Personality predicted response to three of these seven questions, suggesting that philosophers' beliefs are determined in part by their personalities. This is taken as evidence that philosophy is intrinsically subjective, a claim which is herein developed more completely and defended against several objections.
Inward, Outward, Upward Prayer and Big Five Personality Traits.Kevin L. Ladd, Meleah L. Ladd, Julie Harner, Ted Swanson, Tricia Metz, Kate St Pierre & Danielle Trnka - 2007 - Archive for the Psychology of Religion 29 (1):151-175.details
Personality and prayer are both conceptualized as focusing on issues of connectivity with the self and beyond. Individual participants each recruited a peer to join the study . Participants rated themselves according to multi-item scales that detail five personality factors . They also responded to an instrument specifying eight foci of the inward, outward, and upward cognitive content of prayer ; these eight foci were reduced to three prayer themes: internal concerns, embracing paradox, and bold assertion. Finally, respondents reported the strength of six \"basic\" emotions that may be experienced during their typical prayer. Using the same instruments, each peer rated her or his matched participant. Results reveal discrete patterns between self and peer ratings, with respect to links among prayer and personality variables. Both self and peer ratings emphasize a relation between prayer and the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness . Several concluding points highlight the value of the present conceptualization of personality and prayer with relation to connectivity, potential differences between personal and corporate prayers, and the potential role of sex differences in the disclosure of prayer's content and emotional influence.
Glasgow's Race Antirealism: Experimental Philosophy and Thought Experiments.Jeremy Pierce - 2013 - Journal of Social Philosophy 44 (2):146-168.details
Joshua Glasgow argues against the existence of races. His experimental philosophy asks subjects questions involving racial categorization to discover the ordinary concept of race at work in their judgments. The results show conflicting information about the concept of race, and Glasgow concludes that the ordinary concept of race is inconsistent. I conclude, rather, that Glasgow’s results fit perfectly fine with a social-kind view of races as real social entities. He also presents thought experiments to show that social-kind views give the wrong results, but intuitions might differ on which results are the wrong ones, and social-kind views can resist the implications he derives from these cases. Widespread false beliefs about a concept or category need not undermine anything’s existence, and a sufficiently context-sensitive approach to races will allow for competing criteria for race-membership in different contexts without contradictory criteria in any one context. Glasgow’s arguments are therefore unsuccessful.
Experimental Attacks on Intuitions and Answers.John Bengson - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (3):495-532.details
This paper poses a constructive, evenhanded challenge to the idea that recent experimental work shows intuitions to be epistemically problematic. It is a challenge because it suggests that these experimental attacks neglect a considerable gap between intuitions and answers, and this neglect implies that we are at the present time unwarranted in drawing any negative conclusions about intuition’s epistemic status from the relevant empirical studies. The challenge is evenhanded because it does not load the dice by invoking an overly narrow conception of intuition. Finally, the challenge is constructive: it is not an exercise in idle skepticism, but rather explores concrete implications and applications. These include (i) a practical lesson that may help experimentalists in their efforts to study intuitions empirically, (ii) methodological counsel that may help rationalists in their efforts to intuit responsibly, and (iii) a novel explanation of the relevant empirical studies that may actually support rather than undermine intuition’s epistemic status—perhaps, however, to the detriment of the epistemic status of answers.
(1 other version)Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Disputes.Justin Sytsma - 2011 - Essays in Philosophy (1):9.details
One view of philosophy that is sometimes expressed, especially by scientists, is that while philosophers are good at asking questions, they are poor at producing convincing answers. And the perceived divide between philosophical and scientific methods is often pointed to as the major culprit behind this lack of progress. Looking back at the history of philosophy, however, we find that this methodological divide is a relatively recent invention. Further, it is one that has been challenged over the past decade by the modern incarnation of experimental philosophy. How might the reincorporation of empirical methods into philosophy aid the process of making philosophical progress? Building off of the work of Sytsma (2010), we argue that one way it does so is by offering a means of resolving some disputes that arise in philosophy. We illustrate how philosophical disputes may sometimes be resolved empirically by looking at the recent experimental literature on intuitions about reference.
Experimental Philosophy of Economics.Michiru Nagatsu - 2013 - Economics and Philosophy 29 (2):263-76.details
This article is a prelude to an experimental study of the preference concept in economics. I argue that a new empirical approach called experimental philosophy of science is a promising approach to advance the philosophy of economics. In particular, I discuss two debates in the field, the neuroeconomics controversy and the commonsensible realism debate, and suggest how experimental and survey techniques can generate data that will inform these debates. Some of the likely objections from philosophers and economists are addressed, and possible ways of operationalizing different preference concepts are illustrated.
Reasoning About Truth in First-Order Logic.Claes Strannegård, Fredrik Engström, Abdul Rahim Nizamani & Lance Rips - 2013 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 22 (1):115-137.details
First, we describe a psychological experiment in which the participants were asked to determine whether sentences of first-order logic were true or false in finite graphs. Second, we define two proof systems for reasoning about truth and falsity in first-order logic. These proof systems feature explicit models of cognitive resources such as declarative memory, procedural memory, working memory, and sensory memory. Third, we describe a computer program that is used to find the smallest proofs in the aforementioned proof systems when capacity limits are put on the cognitive resources. Finally, we investigate the correlation between a number of mathematical complexity measures defined on graphs and sentences and some psychological complexity measures that were recorded in the experiment.
Intelligibility is Necessary for Scientific Explanation, but Accuracy May Not Be.Mike Braverman, John Clevenger, Ian Harmon, Andrew Higgins, Zachary Horne, Joseph Spino & Jonathan Waskan - 2012 - In Naomi Miyake, David Peebles & Richard Cooper, Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society.details
Many philosophers of science believe that empirical psychology can contribute little to the philosophical investigation of explanations. They take this to be shown by the fact that certain explanations fail to elicit any relevant psychological events (e.g., familiarity, insight, intelligibility, etc.). We report results from a study suggesting that, at least among those with extensive science training, a capacity to render an event intelligible is considered a requirement for explanation. We also investigate for whom explanations must be capable of rendering events intelligible and whether or not accuracy is also viewed as a requirement.
(1 other version)Variations in ethical intuitions.Shaun Nichols & Jennifer L. Zamzow - 2009 - In Ernest Sosa & Enrique Villanueva, Metaethics. Boston: Wiley Periodicals. pp. 368-388.details
Philosophical theorizing is often, either tacitly or explicitly, guided by intuitions about cases. Theories that accord with our intuitions are generally considered to be prima facie better than those that do not. However, recent empirical work has suggested that philosophically significant intuitions are variable and unstable in a number of ways. This variability of intuitions has led naturalistically inclined philosophers to disparage the practice of relying on intuitions for doing philosophy in general (e.g. Stich & Weinberg 2001) and for doing moral philosophy in particular (Appiah 2008; Doris & Stich 2005; Horowitz 1998; Nadelhoffer & Feltz 2008; Sinnott Armstrong 2008). In this paper, we will draw on naturalistic considerations to offer some solace to philosophers who rely on intuitions. We wouldn’t call this a defense of intuitions, exactly, since we are sympathetic with much of the naturalists’ critique. But we want to introduce into the debate some neglected naturalistic reasons to be optimistic about intuitions, focusing especially on ethical intuitions.
Thinking like a scientist: Innateness as a case study.Joshua Knobe & Richard Samuels - 2013 - Cognition 126 (1):72-86.details
The concept of innateness appears in systematic research within cognitive science, but it also appears in less systematic modes of thought that long predate the scientific study of the mind. The present studies therefore explore the relationship between the properly scientific uses of this concept and its role in ordinary folk understanding. Studies 1-4 examined the judgments of people with no specific training in cognitive science. Results showed (a) that judgments about whether a trait was innate were not affected by whether or not the trait was learned, but (b) such judgments were impacted by moral considerations. Study 5 looked at the judgments of both non-scientists and scientists, in conditions that encouraged either thinking about individual cases or thinking about certain general principles. In the case-based condition, both non-scientists and scientists showed an impact of moral considerations but little impact of learning. In the principled condition, both non-scientists and scientists showed an impact of learning but little impact of moral considerations. These results suggest that both non-scientists and scientists are drawn to a conception of innateness that differs from the one at work in contemporary scientific research but that they are also both capable of 'filtering out' their initial intuitions and using a more scientific approach.
Empirical Evidence Regarding the Folk Psychological Concept of Belief.Claire Hewson - 1994 - Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 16:403-408.details
This paper presents empirical evidence regarding the nature of our commonsense concept of belief. The findings have significant bearing upon claims made by authors concerned with the Folk Psychology Debate - in particular, they challenge Stephen Stich's (1983) claims that folk psychology is committed to a broad account of belief states. In contrast it is found that folk psychology favours a narrow account of belief. This result is important in refuting Stich's claim that the folk psychological concept of belief has no role to play in a developed cognitive science. The paper also presents evidence regarding the influence of several factors on folk psychological judgements of belief individuation (emphasised similarities/differences between the referents of beliefs, nature of past beliefs, goal of classification), and introduces a methodology by which to investigate further factors. It is argued that the observed conflict between individual speculations about likely folk psychological intuitions within the philosophical literature and actual empirical data regarding subjects' responses highlights the important contribution of experimental psychology in exploring such philosophical issues.
Features, Objects, and other Things: Ontological Distinctions in the Geographic Domain.David M. Mark, Andre Skupin & Barry Smith - 2001 - In Daniel R. Montello, Spatial Information Theory: Foundations of Geographic Information Science. New York: Springer. pp. 489-502.details
Two hundred and sixty-three subjects each gave examples for one of five geographic categories: geographic features, geographic objects, geographic concepts, something geographic, and something that could be portrayed on a map. The frequencies of various responses were significantly different, indicating that the basic ontological terms feature, object, etc., are not interchangeable but carry different meanings when combined with adjectives indicating geographic or mappable. For all of the test phrases involving geographic, responses were predominantly natural features such as mountain, river, lake, ocean, hill. Artificial geographic features such as town and city were listed hardly at all for geographic categories, an outcome that contrasts sharply with the disciplinary self-understanding of academic geography. However, geographic artifacts and fiat objects, such as roads, cities, boundaries, countries, and states, were frequently listed by the subjects responding to the phrase something that could be portrayed on a map. In this paper, we present the results of these experiments in visual form, and provide interpretations and implications for further research.
The Ordinary Conception of Race in the United States and Its Relation to Racial Attitudes: A New Approach.Joshua Glasgow, Julie Shulman & Enrique Covarrubias - 2009 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 9 (1-2):15-38.details
Many hold that ordinary race-thinking in the USA is committed to the 'one-drop rule', that race is ordinarily represented in terms of essences, and that race is ordinarily represented as a biological (phenotype- and/or ancestry-based, non-social) kind. This study investigated the extent to which ordinary race-thinking subscribes to these commitments. It also investigated the relationship between different conceptions of race and racial attitudes. Participants included 449 USA adults who completed an Internet survey. Unlike previous research, conceptions of race were assessed using concrete vignettes. Results indicate widespread rejection of the one-drop rule, as well as the use of a complex combination of ancestral, phenotypic, and social (and, therefore, non-essentialist) criteria for racial classification. No relationship was found between racial attitudes and essentialism, the one-drop rule, or social race-thinking; however, ancestry-based and phenotype-based classification criteria were associated with racial attitudes. These results suggest a complicated relationship between conceptions of race and racial attitudes.
Pragmatist Resources for Experimental Philosophy: Inquiry in Place of Intuition.Colin Koopman - 2012 - Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (1):1-24.details
Recent attention given to the upstart movement of experimental philosophy is much deserved. But now that experimental philosophy is beginning to enter a stage of maturity, it is time to consider its relation to other philosophical traditions that have issued similar assaults against ingrained and potentially misguided philosophical habits. Experimental philosophy is widely known for rejecting a philosophical reliance on intuitions as evidence in philosophical argument. In this it shares much with another branch of empiricist philosophy, namely, pragmatism. Taking Kwame Anthony Appiah's forthright and cautious endorsement of experimental philosophy as my model, I show that experimental philosophy and pragmatist philosophy share more than adherents of either philosophical method have yet to allow. I then use this comparison to show how the new experimentalisms could benefit from a rereading of century-old pragmatist insights about philosophical methodology.
A New Hope for Philosophers' Appeal to Intuition.Damián Enrique Szmuc - 2012 - Essays in Philosophy 13 (1):336-353.details
Some recent researches in experimental philosophy have posed a problem for philosophers’ appeal to intuition (hereinafter referred to as PAI); the aim of this paper is to offer an answer to this challenge. The thesis against PAI implies that, given some experimental results, intuition does not seem to be a reliable epistemic source, and —more importantly— given the actual state of knowledge about its operation, we do not have sufficient resources to mitigate its errors and thus establish its reliability. That is why PAI is hopeless. Throughout this paper I will defend my own conception of PAI, which I have called the Deliberative Conception, and consequently, I will defend intersubjective agreement as a means to mitigate PAI errors, offering empirical evidence from recent studies on the Argumentative Theory of Reason that favor the conception I defend here. Finally, I will reply to some objections that might arise against the Deliberative Conception, which will lead me to discuss some metaphilosophical issues that are significantly relevant for the future of the dispute about the appeal to intuition.
Did the Chinese Have a Change of Heart?Esther Klein & Colin Klein - 2012 - Cognitive Science 36 (2):179-182.details
In their “The Prevalence of Mind-Body Dualism in Early China,” Slingerland and Chudek use a statistical analysis of the early Chinese corpus to argue for Weak Folk Dualism (WFD). We raise three methodological objections to their analysis. First, the change over time that they find is largely driven by genre. Second, the operationalization of WFD is potentially misleading. And, third, dating the texts they use is extremely controversial. We conclude with some positive remarks.
Metaphilosophy.Yuri Cath - 2011 - Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy.details
Often philosophers have reason to ask fundamental questions about the aims, methods, nature, or value of their own discipline. When philosophers systematically examine such questions, the resulting work is sometimes referred to as “metaphilosophy.” Metaphilosophy, it should be said, is not a well-established, or clearly demarcated, field of philosophical inquiry like epistemology or the philosophy of art. However, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries there has been a great deal of metaphilosophical work on issues concerning the methodology of philosophy in the analytic tradition. This article focuses on that work.
Experimental Philosophy.Samuel Guttenplan - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (4):452-452.details
Experimental Philosophy of Art.Richard Kamber - 2011 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2):197-208.details
Although experimental philosophers have been busy kindling fires under well-worn armchairs in areas of philosophy as varied as epistemology, normative ethics, theories of reference, and the free will controversy, the philosophy of art has remained largely untouched. As Denis Dutton observes: “There is precious little reference to empirical psychology in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, almost as if philosophers of art have wanted to protect their patch from incursions by psychologists.” I intend to show how techniques borrowed from experimental psychology can bring light as well as warmth to the old debate over “What is art?”.
(1 other version)The Philosophical Personality Argument.Adam Feltz & Edward T. Cokely - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 161 (2):227-246.details
Perhaps personality traits substantially influence one’s philosophically relevant intuitions. This suggestion is not only possible, it is consistent with a growing body of empirical research: Personality traits have been shown to be systematically related to diverse intuitions concerning some fundamental philosophical debates. We argue that this fact, in conjunction with the plausible principle that almost all adequate philosophical views should take into account all available and relevant evidence, calls into question some prominent approaches to traditional philosophical projects. To this end, we present the Philosophical Personality Argument (PPA). We explain how it supports the growing body of evidence challenging some of the uses of intuitions in philosophy, and we defend it from some criticisms of empirically based worries about intuitions in philosophy. We conclude that the current evidence indicates that the PPA is sound, and thus many traditional philosophical projects that use intuitions must become substantially more empirically oriented.
How people interpret conditionals: Shifts towards the conditional event.A. J. B. Fugard, Niki Pfeifer, B. Mayerhofer & Gernot D. Kleiter - 2011 - Journal of Experimental Psychology 37 (3):635-648.details
We investigated how people interpret conditionals and how stable their interpretation is over a long series of trials. Participants were shown the colored patterns on each side of a six-sided die, and were asked how sure they were that a conditional holds of the side landing upwards when the die is randomly thrown. Participants were presented with 71 trials consisting of all combinations of binary dimensions of shape (e.g., circles and squares) and color (e.g., blue and red) painted onto the sides of each die. In two experiments (N1 = 66, N2 = 65), the conditional event was the dominant interpretation, followed by conjunction, and material conditional responses were negligible. In both experiments, the percentage of participants giving a conditional event response increased from around 40% at the beginning of the task to nearly 80% at the end, with most participants shifting from a conjunction interpretation. The shift was moderated by the order of shape and color in each conditional’s antecedent and consequent: participants were more likely to shift if the antecedent referred to a color. In Experiment 2 we collected response times: conditional event interpretations took longer to process than conjunction interpretations (mean diﬀerence 500 ms). We discuss implications of our results for mental models theory and probabilistic theories of reasoning.
Experiments on nonmonotonic reasoning. The coherence of human probability judgments.Niki Pfeifer & G. D. Kleiter - 2002 - In H. Leitgeb & G. Schurz, Pre-Proceedings of the 1 s T Salzburg Workshop on Paradigms of Cognition.details
Nonmonotonic reasoning is often claimed to mimic human common sense reasoning. Only a few studies, though, investigated this claim empirically. In the present paper four psychological experiments are reported, that investigate three rules of system p, namely the and, the left logical equivalence, and the or rule. The actual inferences of the subjects are compared with the coherent normative upper and lower probability bounds derived from a non-infinitesimal probability semantics of system p. We found a relatively good agreement of human reasoning and principles of nonmonotonic reasoning according to the coherence interpretation of system p. Contrary to the results reported in the “heuristics and biases” tradition, the subjects committed relatively few upper bound violations (conjunction fallacies). More lower than upper bound violations were observed. When the premises were presented in terms of intervals higher mean lower bounds were observed as when the premises were presented in terms of point percentages.
Human reasoning with imprecise probabilities: Modus ponens and Denying the antecedent.Niki Pfeifer & G. D. Kleiter - 2007 - In Niki Pfeifer & G. D. Kleiter, Proceedings of the 5 T H International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications. pp. 347--356.details
The modus ponens (A -> B, A :. B) is, along with modus tollens and the two logically not valid counterparts denying the antecedent (A -> B, ¬A :. ¬B) and affirming the consequent, the argument form that was most often investigated in the psychology of human reasoning. The present contribution reports the results of three experiments on the probabilistic versions of modus ponens and denying the antecedent. In probability logic these arguments lead to conclusions with imprecise probabilities. In the modus ponens tasks the participants inferred probabilities that agreed much better with the coherent normative values than in the denying the antecedent tasks, a result that mirrors results found with the classical argument versions. For modus ponens a surprisingly high number of lower and upper probabilities agreed perfectly with the conjugacy property (upper probabilities equal one complements of the lower probabilities). When the probabilities of the premises are imprecise the participants do not ignore irrelevant (“silent”) boundary probabilities. The results show that human mental probability logic is close to predictions derived from probability logic for the most elementary argument form, but has considerable difficulties with the more complex forms involving negations.
Is human reasoning about nonmonotonic conditionals probabilistically coherent?Niki Pfeifer & G. D. Kleiter - 2006 - In Niki Pfeifer & G. D. Kleiter, Proceedings of the 7 T H Workshop on Uncertainty Processing. pp. 138--150.details
Nonmonotonic conditionals (A |∼ B) are formalizations of common sense expressions of the form “if A, normally B”. The nonmonotonic conditional is interpreted by a “high” coherent conditional probability, P(B|A) > .5. Two important properties are closely related to the nonmonotonic conditional: First, A |∼ B allows for exceptions. Second, the rules of the nonmonotonic system p guiding A |∼ B allow for withdrawing conclusions in the light of new premises. This study reports a series of three experiments on reasoning with inference rules about nonmonotonic conditionals in the framework of coherence. We investigated the cut, and the right weakening rule of system p. As a critical condition, we investigated basic monotonic properties of classical (monotone) logic, namely monotonicity, transitivity, and contraposition. The results suggest that people reason nonmonotonically rather than monotonically. We propose nonmonotonic reasoning as a competence model of human reasoning.
Nonmonotonicity and human probabilistic reasoning.Niki Pfeifer & G. D. Kleiter - 2003 - In Niki Pfeifer & G. D. Kleiter, Proceedings of the 6 T H Workshop on Uncertainty Processing. pp. 221--234.details
Nonmonotonic logics allow—contrary to classical (monotone) logics— for withdrawing conclusions in the light of new evidence. Nonmonotonic reasoning is often claimed to mimic human common sense reasoning. Only a few studies, though, have investigated this claim empirically. system p is a central, broadly accepted nonmonotonic reasoning system that proposes basic rationality postulates. We previously investigated empirically a probabilistic interpretation of three selected rules of system p. We found a relatively good agreement of human reasoning and principles of nonmonotonic reasoning according to the coherence interpretation of system p. This study reports an experiment on the cautious monotonicity Rule and its “incautious” counterpart that is not contained in system p, namely the monotonicity Rule. In accordance with our previous results, the data suggest that people reason nonmonotonically: the subjects in the cautious monotonicity condition infer significantly tighter intervals close to the coherence interpretation of system p compared with the subjects in the incautious monotonicity condition where rather wide (and hence non-informative) intervals are inferred.
Framing human inference by coherence based probability logic.Niki Pfeifer & Gernot D. Kleiter - 2009 - Journal of Applied Logic 7 (2):206--217.details
We take coherence based probability logic as the basic reference theory to model human deductive reasoning. The conditional and probabilistic argument forms are explored. We give a brief overview of recent developments of combining logic and probability in psychology. A study on conditional inferences illustrates our approach. First steps towards a process model of conditional inferences conclude the paper.
On Mental Probability Logic.Niki Pfeifer - 2006 - Dissertation, Department of Psychology, University of Salzburgdetails
Mental probability logic is a psychological competence theory about how humans interpret and reason about common-sense conditionals. Probability logic is proposed as an appropriate standard of reference for evaluating the rationality of human inferences. Common-sense conditionals are interpreted as “high” conditional probabilities, P(B|A) > .5. Probability logical accounts of nonmonotonic reasoning and inference rules like the modus ponens are explored. Categorical syllogisms with comparative and quantitative quantifiers are investigated. A series of eight experiments on human probabilistic reasoning in the framework of the basic nonmonotonic system p corroborate the psychological plausibility of the proposed approach.
Surveying Philosophers About Philosophical Intuition.J. R. C. Kuntz & J. R. Kuntz - 2011 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (4):643-665.details
This paper addresses the definition and the operational use of intuitions in philosophical methods in the form of a research study encompassing several regions of the globe, involving 282 philosophers from a wide array of academic backgrounds and areas of specialisation. The authors tested whether philosophers agree on the conceptual definition and the operational use of intuitions, and investigated whether specific demographic variables and philosophical specialisation influence how philosophers define and use intuitions. The results obtained point to a number of significant findings, including that philosophers distinguish between intuitions used to formulate (discovery) and to test (justification) philosophical theory. The survey results suggest that strategies implemented to characterise philosophical intuition are not well motivated since, even though philosophers do not agree on a single account of intuition, they fail to capture a preferred usage of intuitions as aspects of discovery. The quantitative summary of survey findings informs the debate on this topic, and advances more defined routes for subsequent approaches to the study of intuitions.
(2 other versions)Experimental Philosophy.Adam Feltz - 2009 - Analyze and Kritik 31 (1):201-219.details
Experimental philosophy is a new approach to philosophy that incorporates the experimental methodologies of psychology, behavioral economics, and sociology. Experimental philosophers generally maintain that, in addition to traditional philosophical practices, these ways of gathering evidence can be instrumental in shedding light on philosophically important issues. Rather than relying on their own intuitions about specific cases, experimental philosophers perform systematic experiments to determine what intuitions people have about those cases. These intuitions are then used as evidence. In this context, four main approaches to experimental philosophy are introduced, a sample of experimental philosophy’s results is offered, and some of the philosophical importance of those results is explained.
Philosophy in the Flesh. [REVIEW]Henry Jackman - 2000 - Teaching Philosophy 23 (4):398-401.details
Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Intuitive Disapproval of Gays.Yoel Inbar, David A. Pizarro, Joshua Knobe & Paul Bloom - 2009 - Emotion 9 (3): 435– 43.details
Two studies demonstrate that a dispositional proneness to disgust (“disgust sensitivity”) is associated with intuitive disapproval of gay people. Study 1 was based on previous research showing that people are more likely to describe a behavior as intentional when they see it as morally wrong (see Knobe, 2006, for a review). As predicted, the more disgust sensitive participants were, the more likely they were to describe an agent whose behavior had the side effect of causing gay men to kiss in public as having intentionally encouraged gay men to kiss publicly— even though most participants did not explicitly think it wrong to encourage gay men to kiss in public. No such effect occurred when subjects were asked about heterosexual kissing. Study 2 used the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2006) as a dependent measure. The more disgust sensitive participants were, the more they showed..
(1 other version)Gender and Philosophical Intuition.Wesley Buckwalter & Stephen Stich - 2013 - In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols, Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2. New York, US: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 307-346.details
In recent years, there has been much concern expressed about the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. Our goal in this paper is to call attention to a cluster of phenomena that may be contributing to this gender gap. The findings we review indicate that when women and men with little or no philosophical training are presented with standard philosophical thought experiments, in many cases their intuitions about these cases are significantly different. In section 1 we review some of the data on the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. In section 2 we explain how we use the term 'intuition,' and offer a brief account of how intuitions are invoked in philosophical argument and philosophical theory building. In the third section we set out the evidence for gender differences in philosophical intuition and mention some evidence about gender differences in decisions and behaviors that are (or should be) of considerable interest to philosophers. In the fourth section, our focus changes from facts to hypotheses. In that section we explain how differences in philosophical intuition might be an important part of the explanation for the gender gap in philosophy. The fifth section is a brief conclusion.
The pedagogical implications of teacher personal philosophies of science in the school science classroom : an interpretive study.Catherine E. Milne - unknowndetails
This thesis addresses the problematic relationship between teacher personal philosophies of science and teacher pedagogy. The research literature on philosophy of science and its impact on science education identifies the persistence and pervasiveness of traditional philosophies of science, such as inductive-empiricism and positivism, that misrepresent the practice of science. Although researchers have expressed concern about the influence of teacher beliefs in inductive-empiricism and positivism on teacher practice in the science classroom, the results of research in this field are inconclusive.This thesis reports an interpretive research study of three high school science teachers. An interpretive framework was developed in order to assist in the identification of teachers personal philosophies of science. The framework comprises philosophical theories of ontology, epistemology, and theory building, and the key assumptions of major philosophers of science.Interpretive analyses were conducted on classroom discourse in order to examine the influence of the three teachers personal philosophies of science on their teaching practice. Data were collected by means of participant-observation, audio-tape recordings, and teacher and student interviews. The validity of the research was optimised by using triangulation methods.The results of the thesis in the form of general assertions, indicate that experienced teachers personal philosophies of science comprise well-established and strongly integrated networks of ontological, epistemological, and theory building beliefs based on the traditional philosophies of science of inductive-empiricism and positivism. The results indicate also that a strong relationship exists between teachers traditional personal philosophies of science and teacher-centred classroom roles and teaching practices, and that this relationship is reinforced ++.
Is Race-Thinking Biological or Social, and Does It Matter for Racism? An Exploratory Study.Julie L. Shulman & Joshua Glasgow - 2010 - Journal of Social Philosophy 41 (3):244-259.details
An empirical study of whether the ordinary conception of race in the United States is biological or social, and how different conceptions connect to racism.
Philosophy in the trenches: from naturalized to experimental philosophy (of science).Karola Stotz - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (2):225-226.details
Recent years have seen the development of an approach both to general philosophy and philosophy of science often referred to as ‘experimental philosophy’ or just ‘X-Phi’. Philosophers often make or presuppose empirical claims about how people would react to hypothetical cases, but their evidence for claims about what ‘we’ would say is usually very limited indeed. Philosophers of science have largely relied on their more or less intimate knowledge of their field of study to draw hypothetical conclusions about the state of scientific concepts and the nature of conceptual change in science. What they are lacking is some more objective quantitative data supporting their hypotheses. A growing number of philosophers , along with a few psychologists and anthropologists, have tried to remedy this situation by designing experiments aimed at systematically exploring people’s reactions to philosophically important thought experiments or scientists’ use of their scientific concepts. Many of the results have been surprising and some of the conclusions drawn from them have been more than a bit provocative. This symposium attempts to provide a window into this new field of philosophical inquiry and to show how experimental philosophy provides crucial tools for the philosopher and encourages two-way interactions between scientists and philosophers.Keywords: Experimental philosophy; Naturalism; Continuity thesis; Philosophy of science; Quantitative data.
Philosophical temperament.Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma, Adam Feltz, Richard Scheines & Edouard Machery - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (3):313-330.details
Many philosophers have worried about what philosophy is. Often they have looked for answers by considering what it is that philosophers do. Given the diversity of topics and methods found in philosophy, however, we propose a different approach. In this article we consider the philosophical temperament, asking an alternative question: what are philosophers like? Our answer is that one important aspect of the philosophical temperament is that philosophers are especially reflective: they are less likely than their peers to embrace what seems obvious without questioning it. This claim is supported by a study of more than 4,000 philosophers and non-philosophers, the results of which indicate that even when we control for overall education level, philosophers tend to be significantly more reflective than their peers. We then illustrate this tendency by considering what we know about the philosophizing of a few prominent philosophers. Recognizing this aspect of the philosophical temperament, it is natural to wonder how philosophers came to be this way: does philosophical training teach reflectivity or do more reflective people tend to gravitate to philosophy? We consider the limitations of our data with respect to this question and suggest that a longitudinal study be conducted.
“Empiricism contra Experiment: Harvey, Locke and the Revisionist View of Experimental Philosophy”.Alan Salter & Charles T. Wolfe - 2009 - Bulletin d'histoire et d'épistémologie des sciences de la vie 16 (2):113-140.details
In this paper we suggest a revisionist perspective on two significant figures in early modern life science and philosophy: William Harvey and John Locke. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is often named as one of the rare representatives of the ‘life sciences’ who was a major figure in the Scientific Revolution. While this status itself is problematic, we would like to call attention to a different kind of problem: Harvey dislikes abstraction and controlled experiments (aside from the ligature experiment in De Motu Cordis), tends to dismiss the value of instruments such as the microscope, and emphasizes instead the privileged status of ‘observed experience’. To use a contemporary term, Harvey appears to rely on, and chiefly value, ‘tacit knowledge’. Secondly, Locke’s project is often explained with reference to the image he uses in the Epistle to the Reader of his Essay, that he was an “underlabourer” of the sciences. In fact, despite the significant medical phase of his career, Locke’s ‘empiricism’ turns out to be above all a practical (i.e. ‘moral’) project, which focuses on the delimitation of our powers in order to achieve happiness, and rejects the possibility of naturalizing knowledge. When combined, these two cases suggest a different view of some canonical moments in early modern natural philosophy.
Imagining crawling home: A case study in cognitive science and aesthetics.William P. Seeley - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3):407-426.details
Philosophical accounts of narrative fiction can be loosely divided into two types. Participant accounts argue that some sort of simulation, or 1st person perspective taking plays a critical role in our engagement with narratives. Observer accounts argue to the contrary that we primarily engage narrative fictions from a 3rd person point of view, as either side participants or outside observers. Recent psychological research suggests a means to evaluate this debate. The perception of distance and slope is influenced by the energetic (e.g., task difficulty) and emotional (e.g., anxiety) costs of actions. These effects are limited to increases in the costs of actions agents intend to perform themselves, generalize to cases where participants imagine acting, and demonstrate a role for tacit motor simulation in action planning. If participant accounts are sound, one should, therefore, find similar effects across changes in the interpretation of the costs of actions depicted in static images. We asked people to copy the rough spatial layout of two paintings across different interpretations of the costs of the actions they depicted. We predicted that increasing costs would cause participants to draw distances as longer and hills as steeper. Our results confirm this prediction for the energetic, but not the emotional, costs of actions.
Reasoning, Normativity, and Experimental Philosophy.Susana Nuccetelli & Gary Seay - 2012 - American Philosophical Quarterly 49 (2):151 - 163.details
The development of modern science, as everybody knows, has come largely through naturalizing domains of inquiry that were historically parts of philosophy. Theories based on mere speculation about matters empirical, such as Aristotle‟s view about teleology in nature, were replaced with law-based, predictive explanatory theories that invoked empirical data as supporting evidence. Although philosophers have, by and large, applauded such developments, inquiry into normative domains presents a different set of problems, and there is no consensus about whether such an inquiry can be naturalized. Since the early twentieth century, attempts at naturalizing ethics have been at the center of heated debates, and later attempts at naturalizing epistemology triggered similarly contentious disputes. In ethics, of course, it was not only the Humean and Moorean arguments of early nonnaturalists and noncognitivists that raised doubts about naturalism, but also the arguments of nihilists, who later joined the chorus of criticism, rejecting any ontology that would countenance moral properties and facts. In epistemology, Quinean eliminativism brought reactions that questioned the consistency of naturalism and asked whether it could accommodate the normativity of fundamental epistemic notions such as belief and knowledge. There have so far been no similarly substantial reactions to attempts at naturalizing inquiry into another normative domain, that of reasoning. We hope to remedy that by offering 1 here a response to some recent efforts by experimental philosophers. Experimentalism about reasoning is a radical naturalistic program that rejects reflective-equilibrium accounts of the epistemic grounds for the rules of inference. If we ignore other attempts at justifying those rules a priori by, for instance, appeal to self-evidence, then those invoking Goodmanian reflective equilibrium can be considered the standard analytic accounts (hereafter, „SAA‟). Of concern here is an objection to SAA, the cognitive-diversity argument,1 that is part of a broader experimentalist critique of analytic epistemology..
Reasoning processes in propositional logic.Claes Strannegård, Simon Ulfsbäcker, David Hedqvist & Tommy Gärling - 2010 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 19 (3):283-314.details
We conducted a computer-based psychological experiment in which a random mix of 40 tautologies and 40 non-tautologies were presented to the participants, who were asked to determine which ones of the formulas were tautologies. The participants were eight university students in computer science who had received tuition in propositional logic. The formulas appeared one by one, a time-limit of 45 s applied to each formula and no aids were allowed. For each formula we recorded the proportion of the participants who classified the formula correctly before timeout and the mean response time among those participants. We propose a new proof formalism for modeling propositional reasoning with bounded cognitive resources. It models declarative memory, visual memory, working memory, and procedural memory according to the memory model of Atkinson and Shiffrin and reasoning processes according to the model of Newell and Simon. We also define two particular proof systems, T and NT, for showing propositional formulas to be tautologies and non-tautologies, respectively. The accuracy was found to be higher for non-tautologies than for tautologies ( p T was.89 and for non-tautologies the correlation between latency and minimum proof length in NT was.87.
Thought experiments in Newton and Galileo's experimental philosophy.Paul Mainwood - 2004details
Marcus Giaquinto. Visual thinking in mathematics: An epistemological study. [REVIEW]Jeremy Avigad - 2009 - Philosophia Mathematica 17 (1):95-108.details
Published in 1891, Edmund Husserl's first book, Philosophie der Arithmetik, aimed to ‘prepare the scientific foundations for a future construction of that discipline’. His goals should seem reasonable to contemporary philosophers of mathematics: \"…through patient investigation of details, to seek foundations, and to test noteworthy theories through painstaking criticism, separating the correct from the erroneous, in order, thus informed, to set in their place new ones which are, if possible, more adequately secured. 1\"But the ensuing strategy for grounding mathematical knowledge sounds strange to the modern ear. For Husserl cast his work as a sequence of ‘psychological and logical investigations’, providing a psychological analysis \"…of the concepts multiplicity, unity, and number, insofar as they are given to use authentically and not through indirect symbolizations. \"This emphasis on psychology is a reflection of Husserl's training. As a teenager studying in Leipzig, he attended the lectures of Wilhelm Wundt, a seminal figure in the field of experimental psychology. Wundt held that, via introspection, we can study and classify our inner experiences, in much the same way that scientists study the natural world. 2 People working in his laboratory were therefore trained in procedures for observing and reporting on their own thought processes, as a means of gathering scientific data regarding our cognitive faculties. Bridging the gap between psychology and epistemology, Wundt felt that the results of such inquiry could have normative consequences, since the principles of reasoning employed in the sciences not only have their origins in psychological processes, but, moreover, are justified by the fundamental role they play in thought. His two-volume work, Logik, thus combined empirical considerations with a Kantian emphasis on the way that knowledge depends on our cognitive faculties. 3In The Philosophy of ….
Verbal counting and spatial strategies in numerical tasks: Evidence from indigenous australia.Brian Butterworth & Robert Reeve - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (4):443 – 457.details
In this study, we test whether children whose culture lacks CWs and counting practices use a spatial strategy to support enumeration tasks. Children from two indigenous communities in Australia whose native and only language (Warlpiri or Anindilyakwa) lacked CWs and were tested on classical number development tasks, and the results were compared with those of children reared in an English-speaking environment. We found that Warlpiri- and Anindilyakwa-speaking children performed equivalently to their English-speaking counterparts. However, in tasks in which they were required to match the number of objects in a display, they were more likely to reconstruct part or all of the spatial arrangement of the target than were their English-speaking counterparts. Following John Locke's interpretation of users of similar American languages and in contrast with later Whorfian interpretations, we suggest that CWs may be strategically useful, but that in their absence, other task-specific strategies will be deployed.
But are they right? The prospects for empirical conceptology.Adam Morton - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):193-197.details
This is exciting stuﬀ. Philosophers have long explored the structure of human concepts from the inside, by manipulating their skills as users of those concepts. And since Quine most reasonable philosophers have accepted that the structure is a contingent matter – we or not too diﬀerent creatures could have thought diﬀerently – which in principle can be..
College students implicitly judge interracial sex and gay sex to be morally wrong.Joshua Knobe, Paul Bloom & David Pizarro - manuscriptdetails
College students implicitly judge interracial sex and gay sex to be morally wrong Some moral intuitions arise from psychological processes that are not fully accessible to consciousness. For instance, most people disapprove of consensual adult incest between siblings, but are unable to articulate why—they just feel that it is wrong (Haidt, 2001). More generally, there is evidence for at least two sources of moral judgment: explicit conscious reasoning and tacit intuitions, which are motivated by emotional responses (Greene et al., 2001) and learned associations (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995).
On Implicit Testability and Philosophical Explanations.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2004 - In Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann & Mary Beth Mader, Philosophical Writings. University of Illinois Press. pp. 27--3.details
The role of the ethnomethodological experiment in the empirical investigation of social norms and its application to conceptual analysis.Ullin T. Place - 1992 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 22 (4):461-474.details
It is argued that conceptual analysis as practiced by the philosophers of ordinary language, is an empirical procedure that relies on a version of Garfinkel's ethnomethodological experiment. The ethnomethodological experiment is presented as a procedure in which the existence and nature of a social norm is demonstrated by flouting the putative convention and observing what reaction that produces in the social group within which the convention is assumed to operate. Examples are given of the use of ethnomethodological experiments, both in vivo and as a thought experiment, in order to demonstrate the existence of otherwise invisible conventions governing human social behavior. Comparable examples are cited from the writings of ordinary language philosophers of ethnomethodological thought experiments designed to demonstrate the existence of linguistic conventions.
Newton's \"Experimental Philosophy\".Alan Shapiro - 2002 - Early Science and Medicine 9 (3):185-217.details
My talk today will be about Newton’s avowed methodology, and specifically the place of experiment in his conception of science, and how his ideas changed significantly over the course of his career. I also want to look at his actual scientific practice and see how this influenced his views on the nature of the experimental sciences.
(1 other version)A defense of the use of intuitions in philosophy.Ernest Sosa - 2009 - In Dominic Murphy & Michael Bishop, Stich and His Critics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 101--112.details
This chapter contains sections titled: Notes and References.
(2 other versions)Jackson’s Empirical Assumptions.Stephen Stich & Jonathan M. Weinberg - 2001 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):637-643.details
Frank Jackson has given us an elegant and important book. It is, by a long shot, the most sophisticated defense of the use of conceptual analysis in philosophy that has ever been offered. But we also we find it a rather perplexing book, for we can’t quite figure out what Jackson thinks a conceptual analysis is. And until we get clearer on that, we’re not at all sure that conceptual analysis, as Jackson envisions it, is possible. The main reason for our perplexity is that Jackson seems to be making some empirical assumptions about people’s intuitions and the psychological mechanisms that give rise to them, though it is far from clear exactly what these empirical assumptions are. Moreover, on what is perhaps the most natural reading, he is making at least one assumption about which many cognitive scientists who study concepts have serious doubts. In the first of our two sections, we will elaborate this theme. Our goal, in that section, is not so much to criticize as to seek clarification. It is a great virtue of this journal’s multiple review format that critics can pose questions to authors, and the authors get to reply. So we hope that in his reply Jackson will help us understand his defense of conceptual analysis by explaining more clearly what his empirical assumptions are; and if he is indeed making an assumption that many cognitive scientists would challenge, we hope he will tell us why he thinks that challenge is misguided. In the second section, our stance will be more critical. There is one empirical assumption about which Jackson is admirably clear and explicit. However, we think there is now good reason to think that this assumption is false.
Experimental philosophy and the mbi.Dr John Yates - 2008 - Cogprints.details
Various facets of the MBI are discussed, and how it can be used in connection with experimental philosophy, experimental psychology and neuroscience. Brief historical references are given. The large implications of the MBI with regards to McTaggart's paradox and the resolution of the difficulties with quantum mechanics is mentioned. Later sections deal with the mereological fallacy, multiple universes, teletransportation, mind cloning and mind splitting. Dreamwork is chosen as a prime example of the use of the MBI and recent work by Tononi and Baars is referred to.

Experimental Philosophy: Corpus Analysis

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Conspiracy theories are not theories: Time to rename conspiracy theories.Kevin Reuter & Lucien Baumgartner - 2025 - In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Steffen Koch & Kevin Scharp, New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering - Volume 3: Applied Conceptual Engineering. Cham: Springer. pp. 137-161.details
This paper presents the results of two corpus studies investigating the discourse surrounding conspiracy theories and genuine theories. The results of these studies show that conspiracy theories lack the epistemic and scientific standing characteristic of theories more generally. Instead, our findings indicate that conspiracy theories are spread in a manner that resembles the dissemination of rumors and falsehoods. Based on these empirical results, we argue that it is time for both re-engineering conspiracy theory and for relabeling "conspiracy theory". We propose relabelling conspiracy theories as either "conspiracy stories" or "conspiracy narratives" to more accurately convey their true nature.
Personal memory and distant reading can complement each other: a reply to Gillon.Vilius Dranseika, Piotr Bystranowski & Tomasz Żuradzki - forthcoming - Journal of Medical Ethics.details
We respond to Gillon’s critique of our data-driven analysis of the history of Journal of Medical Ethics (JME), in which we used a topic model to trace intellectual trends in the journal’s first 50 years. Gillon, drawing on his personal memories as JME’s second (and longest serving) editor, challenges several of our findings, particularly those concerning the prominence and classification of topics such as Ethics education. In this reply, we clarify misunderstandings that led to part of his criticisms of our method. At the same time, we also briefly discuss some nuances of topic modelling, in particular, its reliance on simplified representations of text, sensitivity to modeling choices and topic interpretations. Rather than viewing computational models and editorial memory as competing sources of insight, we propose that they are complementary: each illuminates different dimensions of the journal’s evolution. Gillon’s engagement with our work ultimately highlights the importance of methodological transparency and the value of combining digital humanities tools with lived experience in the historiography of academic disciplines.
Emotional Attitudes vs. Emotional Feelings: A Separatist Framework of Emotional States.Rodrigo Díaz & Kevin Reuter - forthcoming - Ergo.details
Most researchers agree that emotions have two core features. First, emotions have intentionality. That is, emotions are about something. Second, emotions have phenomenology. In other words, emotions are felt. It is commonly assumed that emotional intentionality and phenomenology cannot be separated into two distinct emotional states. Against this, we propose to divide emotions into (non-phenomenal) emotional attitudes and (non-intentional) emotional feelings. We argue that this proposal is theoretically fruitful and descriptively adequate. Its theoretical fruitfulness includes explaining away the challenge of merging emotional intentionality and phenomenology, and providing a straightforward account of emotional states that lack intentionality (such as moods) or phenomenology (such as unconscious and standing emotions). Its descriptive adequacy is supported by three new empirical studies, which suggest that people distinguish to some extent emotional intentionality and phenomenology by using different verbs: to be afraid/angry/etc. vs. to feel afraid/angry/etc.
Toward a Methodology for the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice.William D'Alessandro - 2025 - Philosophy of Science:1-16.details
Practice-based approaches to philosophy of mathematics have gone mainstream over the past several decades. As the paradigm has grown in popularity, however, there’s been little sustained meditation—and still less any explicit consensus—on what precisely it means for philosophy to take practice seriously. The field’s lack of a clear common methodology has begun to make itself felt in slowed and uncertain progress on core problems. Here I review the methodological situation and propose five canons to guide future research. I focus throughout on the study of explanation in mathematics as a guiding example.
Using Large Language Models to Study Mathematical Practice.William D'Alessandro - manuscriptdetails
The philosophy of mathematical practice (PMP) looks to evidence from working mathematics to help settle philosophical questions. One prominent program under the PMP banner is the study of explanation in mathematics, which aims to understand what sorts of proofs mathematicians consider explanatory and what role the pursuit of explanation plays in mathematical practice. In an effort to address worries about cherry-picked examples and file-drawer problems in PMP, a handful of authors have recently turned to corpus analysis methods as a promising alternative to small-scale case studies. But this research has itself been criticized for attempting to draw philosophical conclusions from counts of ambiguous terms like ‘explain’.
What’s needed to propel such methods to greater success, it seems, is a language-processing tool capable of taking in large amounts of text and reasoning insightfully about the meanings it contains. The current generation of frontier language models is already adept at sophisticated text analysis. The main bottleneck, now on the verge of being overcome, has been the capability for researchers to feed such systems big-data-sized text corpora (and to receive reliably correct outputs in return).
This paper reports the results from such a corpus study facilitated by Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, a model whose reasoning capabilities, advances in hallucination control and large context window allow for the accurate analysis of hundreds of pages of text per query. Based on a sample of 5000 arXiv mathematics papers, the experiments yielded a dataset of hundreds of useful annotated examples. Its aim was to gain insight on questions like the following: How often do mathematicians make claims about explanation in the relevant sense? Do mathematicians’ explanatory practices vary in any noticeable way by subject matter? Which philosophical theories of explanation are most consistent with a large body of non-cherry-picked examples? How might philosophers make further use of AI tools to gain insights from large datasets of this kind? As the first PMP study making extensive use of LLM methods, it also seeks to begin a conversation about these methods as research tools in practice-oriented philosophy and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of current models for such work.
The contemporary scientific progress debate in philosophy of science and empirical evidence on Knowledge That versus Knowledge How in scientific practice.Moti Mizrahi - 2025 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 4 (68):1-17.details
In his comprehensive survey of the contemporary debate over scientific progress in philosophy of science, Rowbottom observes that philosophers of science have mostly relied on interpretations of historical cases from the history of science and intuitions elicited by hypothetical cases as evidence for or against philosophical accounts of scientific progress. Only a few have tried to introduce empirical evidence into this debate, whereas most others have resisted the introduction of empirical evidence by claiming that doing so would reduce the debate to empirical studies of science. In this paper, I set out to show how empirical evidence can be introduced into the scientific progress debate. I conduct a corpus-based, quantitative study whose results suggest that there is a positive linear relationship between _knowledge that_ talk and _knowledge how_ talk in scientific articles. These results are contrary to Niiniluoto’s view according to which there is a clear distinction between scientific progress and technological progress such that _knowledge that_ belongs to the former, whereas _knowledge how_ belongs to the latter.
The contemporary scientific progress debate in philosophy of science and empirical evidence on Knowledge That versus Knowledge How in scientific practice.Moti Mizrahi - 2025 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 4 (68):1-17.details
In his comprehensive survey of the contemporary debate over scientific progress in philosophy of science, Rowbottom observes that philosophers of science have mostly relied on interpretations of historical cases from the history of science and intuitions elicited by hypothetical cases as evidence for or against philosophical accounts of scientific progress. Only a few have tried to introduce empirical evidence into this debate, whereas most others have resisted the introduction of empirical evidence by claiming that doing so would reduce the debate to empirical studies of science. In this paper, I set out to show how empirical evidence can be introduced into the scientific progress debate. I conduct a corpus-based, quantitative study whose results suggest that there is a positive linear relationship between knowledge that talk and knowledge how talk in scientific articles. These results are contrary to Niiniluoto’s view according to which there is a clear distinction between scientific progress and technological progress such that knowledge that belongs to the former, whereas knowledge how belongs to the latter.
On Being Ignorant.Anne Meylan & Kevin Reuter - 2025 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1):1-18.details
A traditional view holds that ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge. This view has recently been challenged by the Normative Account, which sees ignorance as involving a normative failure. In this paper, we argue that both perspectives capture important insights. Drawing on three empirical studies, we propose a two-senses account of ignorance, according to which there exist two notions of ignorance: one normative, the other non-normative. We also offer a new explanation of the normative aspect. Our findings suggest that what is negative in being ignorant lies in the expectation that one ought to know the relevant fact.
A Common Language? Analyzing the Use of Health-Related Vocabulary Between Laypeople and Medical Professionals.Lucien Baumgartner, Kevin Reuter & Somogy Varga - forthcoming - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45.details
The meaning of being healthy is widely debated, with many suggesting it is a multidimensional concept encompassing key dimensions such as the absence of disease, the presence of well-being, and a healthy lifestyle. While recent studies indicate that lifestyle may be a dominant dimension, it remains unclear whether this holds true across populations or if significant differences exist, particularly between laypeople and healthcare professionals. Our studies reveal a difference, but surprisingly, in the opposite direction of what the literature would predict: medical professionals are substantially more likely than laypeople to frame discussions of “healthy” and “unhealthy” in lifestyle contexts. This result challenges prevailing assumptions about the biomedical focus of healthcare professionals and has implications for improving health communication.
Conceptual Inflation.Shen-yi Liao & Nat Hansen - forthcoming - EurAmerica.details
Theorists have raised worries about conceptual inflation for more than three decades. These worries have been frequently expressed about ‘racism’ and ‘racist’, as well as other politically contested terms. However, these theorists have not always been clear about what conceptual inflation is or why it is worrisome. By disentangling different threads of these conceptual inflation critiques, we construct a taxonomy of different types of conceptual inflation. We start with a brief history of conceptual inflation critiques, with a focus on the terms ‘racism’ and ‘racist’. We then separate out descriptive and normative components of conceptual inflation critiques. Focusing on the descriptive component, we emphasize that it is about meaning and not frequency of use, and we clarify different aspects about variation in the meaning of these terms that has concerned these theorists. We distinguish between two aspects of meaning, extension and intensity, and two kinds of variation, synchronic and diachronic. Our taxonomy reveals what kind of evidence would support or challenge different types of conceptual inflation critiques.
Kuhnian History of Science and the "Great Man" of Science Model.Moti Mizrahi - 2025 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 14 (2):46-60.details
I argue that forays into history of science in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962/1996) are by and large instances of “Great Man” history of science. “Great Man” history is the idea that history is the biography of great men. The “Great Man” of science model not only excludes women and people of color from science but also suggests that only special, exceptional people can succeed in science. If this is correct, then Kuhn (1962/1996) fails to usher in a “historiographic revolution in the study of science” or a “new historiography” (Kuhn 1962/1996, 3), as the book purports to do. Instead, it merely perpetuates the defunct historiography of the “Great Man” of science.
A Corpus Study on the Normativity of Rationality.Kevin Reuter, Lucien Baumgartner & Michael Messerli - forthcoming - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy.details
In this paper, we address a key question that has been central to discussions on rationality: is the concept of rationality normative or merely descriptive? We present the findings of a corpus-linguistic study revealing that people commonly perceive the concept of rationality as normative.
In Defence of Linguistics as an Empirical Science in Light of Mario Bunge’s Defence of the Scientific Treatment of Biology.Dorota Zielińska - 2024 - Mεtascience: Scientific General Discourse 3:205-251.details
Although few linguists currently embrace the empirical paradigm, there are increasing calls for the development of tools for studying language that resemble those in exact sciences. This trend can be observed even in top mainstream linguistic journals, such as the Journal of Pragmatics, as exemplified by Xiang (2017). Today, however, linguists who adapt the methodologies from more advanced sciences face isolation from the mainstream linguistic community. This is because the majority of linguists in philological and philosophical departments remain convinced that the object of their studies is fundamentally different from those studied by physicists. Therefore, they argue that linguistic methodology cannot resemble that used in empirical sciences. As a result, linguistics is often seen as requiring interpretation rather than an explanation, and evaluation of linguistic research is based on acceptance within the scholarly community rather than empirical testing.
Are generics and negativity about social groups common on social media? A comparative analysis of Twitter (X) data.Uwe Peters & Ignacio Ojea Quintana - 2024 - Synthese 203 (6):1-22.details
Many philosophers hold that generics (i.e., unquantified generalizations) are pervasive in communication and that when they are about social groups, this may offend and polarize people because generics gloss over variations between individuals. Generics about social groups might be particularly common on Twitter (X). This remains unexplored, however. Using machine learning (ML) techniques, we therefore developed an automatic classifier for social generics, applied it to 1.1 million tweets about people, and analyzed the tweets. While it is often suggested that generics are ubiquitous in everyday communication, we found that most tweets (78%) about people contained no generics. However, tweets with generics received more “likes” and retweets. Furthermore, while recent psychological research may lead to the prediction that tweets with generics about political groups are more common than tweets with generics about ethnic groups, we found the opposite. However, consistent with recent claims that political animosity is less constrained by social norms than animosity against gender and ethnic groups, negative tweets with generics about political groups were significantly more prevalent and retweeted than negative tweets about ethnic groups. Our study provides the first ML-based insights into the use and impact of social generics on Twitter.
"Wrongful discrimination" - a tautological claim?Pascale Willemsen, Simone Sommer Degn, Jan Alejandro Garcia Olier & Kevin Reuter - forthcoming - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.details
Is it tautological to call an action "wrongful discrimination?" Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term "discrimination" is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that "discrimination" usually conveys the action’s moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of "discriminatory" is a thing of the past.
Human and Machine: Analyzing Language Trends in Descriptions of Academic Philosophy.Sherri Lynn Conklin, Alex Dayer, Michael Nekrasov & Carolyn Dicey Jennings - manuscriptdetails
Advances in machine learning hold promise for corpus analysis: they have the potential to allow for more efficient and less biased analyses of text. This would be a boon for qualitative research, such as the survey research conducted by Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis. In this paper we examine the utility of automated machine learning for select survey questions, with a focus on LDA and VADER. We thus compare human and machine coding on the question of whether underrepresented philosophers are more likely to respond negatively to questions concerning diversity and inclusivity in academic philosophy. Our study has mixed results, revealing instances where automated machine learning can be used to fruitfully support and interrogate more traditional hand-coding techniques, but also instances where we were unable to glean much insight. (Contact authors for draft.).
Experimental Philosophy and Corpus Methods.Joseph Ulatowski, Dan Weijers & Justin Sytsma (eds.) - forthcoming - Bloomsbury Academic.details
(1 other version)Normativity and Concepts of Bodily Sensations.Kevin Reuter - forthcoming - Studia Philosophica: Jahrbuch Der Schweizerischen Philosoph Ischen Gesellschaft, Annuaire de la Société Suisse de Philosphie .details
This paper challenges the philosophical assumption that bodily sensations are free from normative constraints. It examines the normative status of bodily sensations through two studies: a corpus-linguistic analysis and an experimental investigation. The corpus analysis shows that while emotions are frequently subject to normative judgments concerning their appropriateness, similar attitudes are less evident towards bodily sensations like feelings of pain, hunger and cold. In contrast, however, the experimental study reveals notable differences in conceptions of bodily sensations. It finds that sensations of hunger and cold are occasionally subject to normative assessment, with about half of the participants considering it reasonable to assess these sensations normatively.
True Beauty.Ryan P. Doran - forthcoming - British Journal of Aesthetics.details
What is the nature of the concept BEAUTY? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as PRETTINESS? It is argued that BEAUTY, but not PRETTINESS, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that BEAUTY has a descriptive sense that is characterised by, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances; and a normative sense associated with deeply-held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500), and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is suggested that this can help to explain why beauty, unlike prettiness, is thought to be deep in both the sense of being important, and in the sense of being less closely tied to sensory surfaces.
Tracing thick and thin concepts through corpora.Kevin Reuter, Lucien Baumgartner & Pascale Willemsen - 2024 - Language and Cognition 16 (2):263-282.details
Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick and thin adjectives like ‘courageous’ and ‘awful’ from descriptive adjectives like ‘narrow,’ and from value-associated adjectives like ‘sunny.’ Our study suggests that the modifiers ‘truly’ and ‘really’ frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe our operationalization may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts.
The categories of causation.John Schwenkler - 2024 - Synthese 203 (9):1-35.details
This paper is an essay in what Austin (_Proc Aristotel Soc_ 57: 1–30, 1956–1957) called "linguistic phenomenology". Its focus is on showing how the grammatical features of ordinary causal verbs, as revealed in the kinds of linguistic constructions they can figure in, can shed light on the nature of the processes that these verbs are used to describe. Specifically, drawing on the comprehensive classification of English verbs founds in Levin (_English verb classes and alternations: a preliminary investigation_, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993), I divide the forms of productive causal processes into five classes, corresponding to Aristotle's ontological categories: there are processes that cause change in location, in state, and in quantity; and that lead to the creation and destruction of substances. These broader categories are then subdivided into other ones, corresponding to different Levin classes, according to further differences in the causal processes they involve. I conclude by discussing the relevance of this argument to research in metaphysics and experimental philosophy.
Is Philosophy Exceptional? A Corpus-Based, Quantitative Study.Moti Mizrahi & Michael Adam Dickinson - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (5):666-683.details
Drawing on the epistemology of logic literature on anti-exceptionalism about logic, we set out to investigate the following metaphilosophical questions empirically: Is philosophy special? Are its methods (dis)continuous with science? More specifically, we test the following metaphilosophical hypotheses empirically: philosophical deductivism, philosophical inductivism, and philosophical abductivism. Using indicator words to classify arguments by type (namely, deductive, inductive, and abductive arguments), we searched through a large corpus of philosophical texts mined from the JSTOR database (N = 435,703) to find patterns of argumentation. The results of our quantitative, corpus-based study suggest that deductive arguments are significantly more common than abductive arguments and inductive arguments in philosophical texts overall, but they are gradually and steadily giving way to non-deductive (i.e. inductive and abductive) arguments in academic philosophy.
Exploring intellectual humility through the lens of artificial intelligence: Top terms, features and a predictive model.Ehsan Abedin, Marinus Ferreira, Ritsaart Reimann, Marc Cheong, Igor Grossmann & Mark Alfano - 2023 - Acta Psychologica 238 (103979).details
Intellectual humility (IH) is often conceived as the recognition of, and appropriate response to, your own intellectual limitations. As far as we are aware, only a handful of studies look at interventions to increase IH – e.g. through journalling – and no study so far explores the extent to which having high or low IH can be predicted. This paper uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques to develop a predictive model for IH and identify top terms and features that indicate degrees of IH. We trained our classifier on the dataset from an existing psychological study on IH, where participants were asked to journal their experiences with handling social conflicts over 30 days. We used Logistic Regression (LR) to train a classifier and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionaries for feature selection, picking out a range of word categories relevant to interpersonal relationships. Our results show that people who differ on IH do in fact systematically express themselves in different ways, including through expression of emotions (i.e., positive, negative, and specifically anger, anxiety, sadness, as well as the use of swear words), use of pronouns (i.e., first person, second person, and third person) and time orientation (i.e., past, present, and future tenses). We discuss the importance of these findings for IH and the value of using such techniques for similar psychological studies, as well as some ethical concerns and limitations with the use of such semi-automated classifications.
Corpus Methods: A New Horizon for the Experimental Philosophy of Language.David Bordonaba Plou - 2023 - Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 21:107-128.details
El objetivo de este trabajo es doble. Primero, investigar y evaluar la situación en la que se encuentra actualmente la filosofía experimental del lenguaje. Para ello, expondré las dos metodologías predominantes en el campo: los cuestionarios y los métodos de corpus, mostrando los problemas comunes y los específicos. Segundo, defender que los métodos de corpus suponen un nuevo horizonte metodológico para la investigación en filosofía experimental del lenguaje por dos razones. Por un lado, porque cuentan con menos problemas que los cuestionarios. Por otro lado, porque tienen ciertas ventajas adicionales: i) consideran una cantidad mayor de evidencia; ii) al emplearlos tenemos la posibilidad de contar con información adicional que puede iluminar otros aspectos de la investigación; iii) cuentan con una mayor replicabilidad.
Algorithmic Opinion Mining and the History of Philosophy: A Response to Mizrahi’s For and Against Scientism.Andreas Vrahimis - 2023 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 12 (5):33-41.details
At the heart of Mizrahi’s project lies a sociological narrative concerning the recent history of philosophers’ negative attitudes towards scientism. Critics (e.g. de Ridder (2019), Wilson (2019) and Bryant (2020)), have detected various empirical inadequacies in Mizrahi’s methodology for discussing these attitudes. Bryant (2020) points out one of the main pertinent methodological deficiencies here, namely that the mere appearance of the word ‘scientism’ in a text does not suffice in determining whether the author feels threatened by it. Not all philosophers use the term in ‘inherently negative’ (29) or pejorative ways. In this paper, I not only corroborate Bryant’s critical claim, but argue that Mizrahi’s response to this part of Bryant’s objection is inadequate.
Creating specialized corpora from digitized historical newspaper archives: An iterative bootstrapping approach.Joshua Wilson Black - 2022 - Digital Scholarship in the Humanities:1-19.details
The availability of large digital archives of historical newspaper content has transformed the historical sciences. However, the scale of these archives can limit the direct application of advanced text processing methods. Even if it is computationally feasible to apply sophisticated language processing to an entire digital archive, if the material of interest is a small fraction of the archive, the results are unlikely to be useful. Methods for generating smaller specialized corpora from large archives are required to solve this problem. This article presents such a method for historical newspaper archives digitized using the METS/ALTO XML standard (Veridian Software, n.d.). The method is an ‘iterative bootstrapping’ approach in which candidate corpora are evaluated using text mining techniques, items are manually labelled, and Naïve Bayes text classifiers are trained and applied in order to produce new candidate corpora. The method is illustrated by a case study that investigates philosophical content, broadly construed, in pre-1900 English-language New Zealand newspapers. Extensive code is provided in Supplementary Materials.
Can we tell whether philosophy is special?Chad Gonnerman & Stephen Crowley - 2022 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.details
In “Is Philosophy Exceptional? A Corpus-Based, Quantitative Study” (2022), Moti Mizrahi and Michael Adam Dickinson use corpus methods to determine the kinds of arguments that turn up in philosophical writing. They use the results to contribute to debates on philosophy’s “specialness” or “exceptionality”. To what extent is philosophy interestingly unlike other knowledge-making disciplines? Specifically, does it deploy different forms of argument than the sciences or other disciplines?
These questions are interesting, and Mizrahi and Dickinson’s methodological approach is impressive. Nonetheless, we have concerns about the approach. In this short reply, we argue there are reasons to worry about the accuracy of the results that the authors report and reasons to wonder how their results, even if accurate, shed light on questions about philosophy’s specialness. We end with some thoughts about the strengths and weaknesses of the project and some suggestions for next steps for those interested in moving this project (and others of its ilk) forward.
The Disconnection That Wasn’t: Philosophy in Modern Bioethics from a Quantitative Perspective.Piotr Bystranowski, Vilius Dranseika & Tomasz Żuradzki - 2022 - American Journal of Bioethics 22 (12):36-40.details
Blumenthal-Barby and her colleagues (2022) situate their discussion of philosophy and bioethics in the context of (reportedly) widely held assumption that, when compared to the early days of bioethics, the role of philosophy is now diminished across the field – the assumption we call the Disconnection Thesis. This assumption can be summarized, to use the authors’ own words, by the phrase “philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over“. While in no place of the article they explicitly endorse the Disconnection Thesis, at least some of the authors had previously endorsed it in print (Savulescu 2015). Such expressions of collective expert wisdom might be a valuable source of information on the discipline's history, but they should not be accepted uncritically. Given the explosion in the size and scope of bioethical research in recent decades, any scholar’s familiarity with the area is necessarily based on selective reading and might be biased. Hence, in this commentary, we examine what kind of more rigorous evidence could corroborate the Disconnection Thesis. In other words, if the role of philosophy in bioethics has been indeed diminishing, what kind of observable patterns should we expect to see? Drawing on our previous research (Bystranowski, Dranseika, Żuradzki 2022), here we focus on two useful perspectives: citation analysis and topic modeling. While the first approach allows us to indirectly measure the level of engagement of bioethicists with philosophical literature (by measuring the proportion of references from articles published in journals in bioethics that cite philosophy journals), the latter provides a window into the content and argumentative style of bioethical texts.
Twenty years of experimental philosophy research.Jincai Li & Xiaozhen Zhu - 2023 - Metaphilosophy 54 (1):29-53.details
This paper reports the first study in the literature that adopts a bibliometric approach to systematically explore the scholarship in the young and fast‐growing research field of experimental philosophy. Based on a corpus of 1,248 publications in experimental philosophy from the past two decades retrieved from the PhilPapers website, the study examined the publication trend, the influential experimental philosophers, the impactful works, the popular publication venues, and the major research themes in this subarea of philosophy. It found, first, an overall growing trend in publications in experimental philosophy, encompassing four developmental stages. Second, it found that significant changes in topics of interest have taken place, with some gaining increasing attention, others seemingly going out of fashion, and still others remaining popular constantly. Third, the study identified lists of leading philosophers, frequently cited publications, and popular journals helpful for researchers and newcomers to get a quick start in learning about the field.
Philosophical producers, philosophical consumers, and the metaphilosophical value of original texts.Ethan Landes - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):207-225.details
In recent years, two competing methodological frameworks have developed in the study of the epistemology of philosophy. The traditional camp, led by experimental philosophy and its allies, has made inferences about the epistemology of philosophy based on the reactions, or intuitions, people have to works of philosophy. In contrast, multiple authors have followed the lead of Deutsch and Cappelen by setting aside experimental data in favor of inferences based on careful examination of the text of notable works of philosophy. In other words, the debate is split between authors focusing on philosophy’sconsumptionand those focusing on philosophy’sproduction. This paper examines the motivation for focusing on original texts and other evidence of philosophy’s production and finds it lacking. Drawing upon Hills’ distinction between propagation and transmission, I argue that the social epistemology of philosophy does not justify the recent focus on original texts of philosophy. Because the philosophical knowledge of consumers of philosophy is likelyinspiredby producers of philosophy, as opposed to epistemically grounded in the producers’ epistemic states, experimental philosophy had it right all along—if we want to know the epistemic standing of philosophy, we need to look to philosophy’s consumers.
Half a century of bioethics and philosophy of medicine: A topic‐modeling study.Piotr Bystranowski, Vilius Dranseika & Tomasz Żuradzki - 2022 - Bioethics 36 (9):902-925.details
Topic modeling—a text‐mining technique often used to uncover thematic structures in large collections of texts—has been increasingly frequently used in the context of the analysis of scholarly output. In this study, we construct a corpus of 19,488 texts published since 1971 in seven leading journals in the field of bioethics and philosophy of medicine, and we use a machine learning algorithm to identify almost 100 topics representing distinct themes of interest in the field. On the basis of intertopic correlations, we group the content‐based topics into eight clusters, thus providing a novel, fine‐grained intellectual map of bioethics and philosophy of medicine. Moreover, we conduct a number of diachronic analyses, examining how the “prominence” of different topics has changed across time. In this way, we are able to observe the distinct patterns in which bioethics and philosophy of medicine have evolved and changed their focus over the past half a century.
Modeling and corpus methods in experimental philosophy.Louis Chartrand - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (6).details
Research in experimental philosophy has increasingly been turning to corpus methods to produce evidence for empirical claims, as they open up new possibilities for testing linguistic claims or studying concepts across time and cultures. The present article reviews the quasi-experimental studies that have been done using textual data from corpora in philosophy, with an eye for the modeling and experimental design that enable statistical inference. I find that most studies forego comparisons that could control for confounds, and that only a little less than half employ statistical testing methods to control for chance results. Furthermore, at least some researchers make modeling decisions that either do not take into account the nature of corpora and of the word-concept relationship, or undermine the experiment's capacity to answer research questions. I suggest that corpus methods could both provide more powerful evidence and gain more mainstream acceptance by improving their modeling practices.
Digital Literature Analysis for Empirical Philosophy of Science.Oliver M. Lean, Luca Rivelli & Charles H. Pence - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (4):875-898.details
Empirical philosophers of science aim to base their philosophical theories on observations of scientific practice. But since there is far too much science to observe it all, how can we form and test hypotheses about science that are sufficiently rigorous and broad in scope, while avoiding the pitfalls of bias and subjectivity in our methods? Part of the answer, we claim, lies in the computational tools of the digital humanities, which allow us to analyze large volumes of scientific literature. Here we advocate for the use of these methods by addressing a number of large-scale, justificatory concerns—specifically, about the epistemic value of journal articles as evidence for what happens elsewhere in science, and about the ability of DH tools to extract this evidence. Far from ignoring the gap between scientific literature and the rest of scientific practice, effective use of DH tools requires critical reflection about these relationships.
Korpusy w filozofii eksperymentalnej.Bartosz Maćkiewicz - 2021 - In Efekt Knobe’a w świetle rozważań językoznawczych i metodologicznych. Studium teoretyczne i eksperymentalne efektu Knobe’a i problemu Butlera,. Warszawa, Polska: pp. 123-136.details
The chapter discusses potential benefits of corpus analysis in philosophical investigations, in particular in experimental philosophy. Philosophers often assume that what happens in language is crucial for the analysis of concepts of philosophical interest. In doing so, they commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions, which has been claimed to be methodologically dubious (Bluhm 2013, 2016). Bluhm’s own model of philosophical research has a place for corpus analysis. However, the model has some limitations. I present an alternative model for the use of corpus analysis in philosophical research that can be especially useful for experimental philosophy. As an example, I examine Shepard and Wolf (2013) study on the causal structure of Knobe scenarios. Corpus analysis can be used to show that the verb “cause” used in their scenarios has a negative aura. I discuss the implications of this fact for the design of further studies.
Philosophers' linguistic expertise: A psycholinguistic approach to the expertise objection against experimental philosophy.Eugen Fischer, Paul E. Engelhardt & Aurélie Herbelot - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-33.details
Philosophers are often credited with particularly well-developed conceptual skills. The ‘expertise objection’ to experimental philosophy builds on this assumption to challenge inferences from findings about laypeople to conclusions about philosophers. We draw on psycholinguistics to develop and assess this objection. We examine whether philosophers are less or differently susceptible than laypersons to cognitive biases that affect how people understand verbal case descriptions and judge the cases described. We examine two possible sources of difference: Philosophers could be better at deploying concepts, and this could make them less susceptible to comprehension biases (‘linguistic expertise objection’). Alternatively, exposure to different patterns of linguistic usage could render philosophers vulnerable to a fundamental comprehension bias, the linguistic salience bias, at different points (‘linguistic usage objection’). Together, these objections mount a novel ‘master argument’ against experimental philosophy. To develop and empirically assess this argument, we employ corpus analysis and distributional semantic analysis and elicit plausibility ratings from academic philosophers and psychology undergraduates. Our findings suggest philosophers are better at deploying concepts than laypeople but are susceptible to the linguistic salience bias to a similar extent and at similar points. We identify methodological consequences for experimental philosophy and for philosophical thought experiments.
'Extremely Racist' and 'Incredibly Sexist': An Empirical Response to the Charge of Conceptual Inflation.Shen-yi Liao & Nat Hansen - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (1):72-94.details
Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation, as well as responses to it, are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive.
The analytic-continental divide in philosophical practice: An empirical study.Moti Mizrahi & Mike Dickinson - 2021 - Metaphilosophy 52 (5):668-680.details
Philosophy is often divided into two traditions: analytic and continental philosophy. Characterizing the analytic-continental divide, however, is no easy task. Some philosophers explain the divide in terms of the place of argument in these traditions. This raises the following questions: Is analytic philosophy rife with arguments while continental philosophy is devoid of arguments? Or can different types of arguments be found in analytic and continental philosophy? This paper presents the results of an empirical study of a large corpus of philosophical texts mined from the JSTOR database (n = 53,260) designed to find patterns of argumentation by type. Overall, the results suggest that there are no significant differences between the types of arguments advanced in analytic and continental philosophy journal articles. The findings, therefore, provide no empirical support to the hypothesis that the divide between analytic and continental philosophy has to do with the place of argument in these traditions.
For and Against Scientism: Science, Methodology, and the Future of Philosophy.Moti Mizrahi (ed.) - 2022 - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.details
The term scientism is used in several ways. It is used to denote an epistemological thesis according to which science is the source of our knowledge about the world and ourselves. Relatedly, it is used to denote a methodological thesis according to which the methods of science are superior to the methods of non-scientific fields or areas of inquiry, or even used to put forward a metaphysical thesis that what exists is what science says exists. In recent decades, the term scientism has acquired a derogatory meaning when it is used in defense of non-scientific ways of knowing. In particular, some philosophers level the charge of “scientism” against those (mostly scientists) who are dismissive of philosophy. Other philosophers, however, embrace scientism, or some variant thereof, and object to the pejorative use of the term scientism. This book critically examines the arguments for and against scientism of various kinds to answer the central question: does scientism pose an existential threat to philosophy, or should philosophy become more scientific?
Corpus Linguistics Methods in the Study of (Meta)Argumentation.Martin Hinton - 2020 - Argumentation 35 (3):435-455.details
As more and more sophisticated software is created to allow the mining of arguments from natural language texts, this paper sets out to examine the suitability of the well-established and readily available methods of corpus linguistics to the study of argumentation. After brief introductions to corpus linguistics and the concept of meta-argument, I describe three pilot-studies into the use of the terms Straw man, Ad hominem, and Slippery slope, made using the open access News on the Web corpus. The presence of each of these phrases on internet news sites was investigated and assessed for correspondence to the norms of use by argumentation theorists. All three pilot-studies revealed interesting facts about the usage of the terms by non-specialists, and led to numerous examples of the types of arguments mentioned. This suggests such corpora may be of use in two different ways: firstly, the wider project of improving public debate and educating the populace in the skills of critical thinking can only be helped by a better understanding of the current state of knowledge of the technical terms and concepts of argumentation. Secondly, theorists could obtain a more accurate picture of how arguments are used, by whom, and to what reception, allowing claims on such matters to be evidence, rather than intuition, based.
Modeling the structure of recent philosophy.Maximilian Noichl - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5089-5100.details
This paper presents an approach of unsupervised learning of clusters from a citation database, and applies it to a large corpus of articles in philosophy to give an account of the structure of the discipline. Following a list of journals from the PhilPapers-archive, 68,152 records were downloaded from the Reuters Web of Science-Database. Their citation data was processed using dimensionality reduction and clustering. The resulting clusters were identified, and the results are graphically represented. They suggest that the division of analytic and Continental philosophy in the considered timespan is overstated; that analytical, in contrast to Continental philosophy does not form a coherent group in recent philosophy; and that metaphors about the disciplinary structure should focus on the coherence and interconnectedness of a multitude of smaller and larger subfields.
Knowing How and Two Knowledge Verbs in Japanese.Masaharu Mizumoto, Yu Izumi & Shun Tsugita - 2020 - In Masaharu Mizumoto & Jonardon Ganeri, Ethno-Epistemology: New Directions for Global Epistemology. New York: Routledge.details
Automated Argument Analysis – Comment on: Mizrahi & Dickinson: "Argumentation in Philosophical Practice: An Empirical Study".Christoph Lumer - 2020 - Evidence, Persuasion and Diversity. Proceedings of Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation Conference, Vol. 12 (2020).details
The paper critically discusses an empirical study by Mizrahi & Dickinson 2020, which analyzes in a huge data base (JSTORE) the incidence of three types of philosophical arguments. Their results are: 1. Deductive arguments were the most commeon type of argument in philosophy until the end of the 20th century. 2. Around 2008 a shift in methodology occurred, such that the indcutive arguments outweigh other types of argument. The paper, first, criticizes the empirical study as grossly false and considers the - very limited - possibilities of recognition of argument types by present computer programs.
Proof, Explanation, and Justification in Mathematical Practice.Moti Mizrahi - 2020 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 51 (4):551-568.details
In this paper, I propose that applying the methods of data science to “the problem of whether mathematical explanations occur within mathematics itself” (Mancosu 2018) might be a fruitful way to shed new light on the problem. By carefully selecting indicator words for explanation and justification, and then systematically searching for these indicators in databases of scholarly works in mathematics, we can get an idea of how mathematicians use these terms in mathematical practice and with what frequency. The results of this empirical study suggest that mathematical explanations do occur in research articles published in mathematics journals, as indicated by the occurrence of explanation indicators. When compared with the use of justification indicators, however, the data suggest that justifications occur much more frequently than explanations in scholarly mathematical practice. The results also suggest that justificatory proofs occur much more frequently than explanatory proofs, thus suggesting that proof may be playing a larger justificatory role than an explanatory role in scholarly mathematical practice.
Method Development for Multimodal Data Corpus Analysis of Expressive Instrumental Music Performance.Federico Ghelli Visi, Stefan Östersjö, Robert Ek & Ulrik Röijezon - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11.details
Musical performance is a multimodal experience, for performers and listeners alike. This paper reports on a pilot study which constitutes the first step toward a comprehensive approach to the experience of music as performed. We aim at bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches, by combining methods for data collection. The purpose is to build a data corpus containing multimodal measures linked to high-level subjective observations. This will allow for a systematic inclusion of the knowledge of music professionals in an analytic framework, which synthesizes methods across established research disciplines. We outline the methods we are currently developing for the creation of a multimodal data corpus dedicated to the analysis and exploration of instrumental music performance from the perspective of embodied music cognition. This will enable the study of the multiple facets of instrumental music performance in great detail, as well as lead to the development of music creation techniques that take advantage of the cross-modal relationships and higher-level qualities emerging from the analysis of this multi-layered, multimodal corpus. The results of the pilot project suggest that qualitative analysis through stimulated recall is an efficient method for generating higher-level understandings of musical performance. Furthermore, the results indicate several directions for further development, regarding observational movement analysis, and computational analysis of coarticulation, chunking, and movement qualities in musical performance. We argue that the development of methods for combining qualitative and quantitative data are required to fully understand expressive musical performance, especially in a broader scenario in which arts, humanities, and science are increasingly entangled. The future work in the project will therefore entail an increasingly multimodal analysis, aiming to become as holistic as is music in performance.
Eight journals over eight decades: a computational topic-modeling approach to contemporary philosophy of science.Christophe Malaterre, Francis Lareau, Davide Pulizzotto & Jonathan St-Onge - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2883-2923.details
As a discipline of its own, the philosophy of science can be traced back to the founding of its academic journals, some of which go back to the first half of the twentieth century. While the discipline has been the object of many historical studies, notably focusing on specific schools or major figures of the field, little work has focused on the journals themselves. Here, we investigate contemporary philosophy of science by means of computational text-mining approaches: we apply topic-modeling algorithms to eight major philosophy of science journals, from the 1930s up until 2017. Based on the full-text content of some 15,897 articles, we identified 25 research themes and 8 thematic clusters that show how the research agenda of the philosophy of science has changed in its content over the course of the last eight decades, up to the philosophy of science we now know. We also show how each one of the journals contributed in its own way to this thematic evolution.
Hypothesis Testing in Scientific Practice: An Empirical Study.Moti Mizrahi - 2020 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 33 (1):1-21.details
It is generally accepted among philosophers of science that hypothesis testing is a key methodological feature of science. As far as philosophical theories of confirmation are con...
Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study.Moti Mizrahi - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2375-2394.details
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate over the nature of scientific progress in philosophy of science by taking a quantitative, corpus-based approach. By employing the methods of data science and corpus linguistics, the following philosophical accounts of scientific progress are tested empirically: the semantic account of scientific progress, the epistemic account of scientific progress, and the noetic account of scientific progress. Overall, the results of this quantitative, corpus-based study lend some empirical support to the epistemic and the noetic accounts over the semantic account of scientific progress, for they suggest that practicing scientists use the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’ significantly more often than the term ‘truth’ when they talk about the aims or goals of scientific research in their published works. But the results do not favor the epistemic account over the noetic account, or vice versa, for they reveal no significant differences between the frequency with which practicing scientists use the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’ when they talk about the aims or goals of scientific research in their published works.
Using corpus linguistics to investigate mathematical explanation.Juan Pablo Mejía Ramos, Lara Alcock, Kristen Lew, Paolo Rago, Chris Sangwin & Matthew Inglis - 2019 - In Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis, Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Press. pp. 239–263.details
In this chapter we use methods of corpus linguistics to investigate the ways in which mathematicians describe their work as explanatory in their research papers. We analyse use of the words explain/explanation (and various related words and expressions) in a large corpus of texts containing research papers in mathematics and in physical sciences, comparing this with their use in corpora of general, day-to-day English. We find that although mathematicians do use this family of words, such use is considerably less prevalent in mathematics papers than in physics papers or in general English. Furthermore, we find that the proportion with which mathematicians use expressions related to ‘explaining why’ and ‘explaining how’ is significantly different to the equivalent proportion in physics and in general English. We discuss possible accounts for these differences.
Logic in analytic philosophy: a quantitative analysis.Guido Bonino, Paolo Maffezioli & Paolo Tripodi - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):10991-11028.details
Using quantitative methods, we investigate the role of logic in analytic philosophy from 1941 to 2010. In particular, a corpus of five journals publishing analytic philosophy is assessed and evaluated against three main criteria: the presence of logic, its role and level of technical sophistication. The analysis reveals that logic is not present at all in nearly three-quarters of the corpus, the instrumental role of logic prevails over the non-instrumental ones, and the level of technical sophistication increases in time, although it remains relatively low. These results are used to challenge the view, widespread among analytic philosophers and labeled here “prevailing view”, that logic is a widely used and highly sophisticated method to analyze philosophical problems.
Inappropriate stereotypical inferences? An adversarial collaboration in experimental ordinary language philosophy.Eugen Fischer, Paul E. Engelhardt & Justin Sytsma - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):10127-10168.details
This paper trials new experimental methods for the analysis of natural language reasoning and the development of critical ordinary language philosophy in the wake of J.L. Austin. Philosophical arguments and thought experiments are strongly shaped by default pragmatic inferences, including stereotypical inferences. Austin suggested that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are at the root of some philosophical paradoxes and problems, and that these can be resolved by exposing those verbal fallacies. This paper builds on recent efforts to empirically document inappropriate stereotypical inferences that may drive philosophical arguments. We demonstrate that previously employed questionnaire-based output measures do not suffice to exclude relevant confounds. We then report an experiment that combines reading time measurements with plausibility ratings. The study seeks to provide evidence of inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance verbs that have been suggested to lie at the root of the influential ‘argument from illusion’. Our findings support a diagnostic reconstruction of this argument. They provide the missing component for proof of concept for an experimental implementation of critical ordinary language philosophy that is in line with the ambitions of current ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy.
Why Can Computers Understand Natural Language?Juan Luis Gastaldi - 2020 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (1):149-214.details
The present paper intends to draw the conception of language implied in the technique of word embeddings that supported the recent development of deep neural network models in computational linguistics. After a preliminary presentation of the basic functioning of elementary artificial neural networks, we introduce the motivations and capabilities of word embeddings through one of its pioneering models, word2vec. To assess the remarkable results of the latter, we inspect the nature of its underlying mechanisms, which have been characterized as the implicit factorization of a word-context matrix. We then discuss the ordinary association of the “distributional hypothesis” with a “use theory of meaning,” often justifying the theoretical basis of word embeddings, and contrast them to the theory of meaning stemming from those mechanisms through the lens of matrix models (such as vector space models and distributional semantic models). Finally, we trace back the principles of their possible consistency through Harris’s original distributionalism up to the structuralist conception of language of Saussure and Hjelmslev. Other than giving access to the technical literature and state of the art in the field of natural language processing to non-specialist readers, the paper seeks to reveal the conceptual and philosophical stakes involved in the recent application of new neural network techniques to the computational treatment of language.
Theoretical Virtues in Scientific Practice: An Empirical Study.Moti Mizrahi - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (4):879-902.details
It is a common view among philosophers of science that theoretical virtues (also known as epistemic or cognitive values), such as simplicity and consistency, play an important role in scientific practice. In this article, I set out to study the role that theoretical virtues play in scientific practice empirically. I apply the methods of data science, such as text mining and corpus analysis, to study large corpora of scientific texts in order to uncover patterns of usage. These patterns of usage, in turn, might shed some light on the role that theoretical virtues play in scientific practice. Overall, the results of this empirical study suggest that scientists invoke theoretical virtues explicitly, albeit rather infrequently, when they talk about models (less than 30%), theories (less than 20%), and hypotheses (less than 15%) in their published works. To the extent that they are mentioned in scientific publications, the results of this study suggest that accuracy, consistency, and simplicity are the theoretical virtues that scientists invoke more frequently than the other theoretical virtues tested in this study. Interestingly, however, depending on whether they talk about hypotheses, theories, or models, scientists may invoke one of those theoretical virtues more than the others.
The Case Study Method in Philosophy of Science: An Empirical Study.Moti Mizrahi - 2020 - Perspectives on Science 28 (1):63-88.details
There is an ongoing methodological debate in philosophy of science concerning the use of case studies as evidence for and/or against theories about science. In this paper, I aim to make a contribution to this debate by taking an empirical approach. I present the results of a systematic survey of the PhilSci-Archive, which suggest that a sizeable proportion of papers in philosophy of science contain appeals to case studies, as indicated by the occurrence of the indicator words “case study” and/or “case studies.” These results are confirmed by data mined from the JSTOR database on research articles published in leading journals in the field: Philosophy of Science, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (BJPS), and the Journal for General Philosophy of Science (JGPS), as well as the Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association (PSA). The data also show upward trends in appeals to case studies in articles published in Philosophy of Science, the BJPS, and the JGPS. The empirical work I have done for this paper provides philosophers of science who are wary of the use of case studies as evidence for and/or against theories about science with a way to do philosophy of science that is informed by data rather than case studies.
Citation concept analysis (CCA): a new form of citation analysis revealing the usefulness of concepts for other researchers illustrated by exemplary case studies including classic books by Thomas S. Kuhn and Karl R. Popper.Lutz Bornmann, K. Brad Wray & Robin Haunschild - 2020 - Scientometrics 122 (2):1051-1074.details
In recent years, the full text of papers are increasingly available electronically which opens up the possibility of quantitatively investigating citation contexts in more detail. In this study, we introduce a new form of citation analysis, which we call citation concept analysis (CCA). CCA is intended to reveal the cognitive impact certain concepts—published in a highly-cited landmark publication—have on the citing authors. It counts the number of times the concepts are mentioned (cited) in the citation context of citing publications. We demonstrate the method using three classical highly cited books: (1) The structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, (2) The logic of scientific discovery—Logik der Forschung: Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft in German—, and (3) Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge by Karl R. Popper. It is not surprising—as our results show—that Kuhn’s “paradigm” concept seems to have had a significant impact. What is surprising is that our results indicate a much larger impact of the concept “paradigm” than Kuhn’s other concepts, e.g., “scientific revolution”. The paradigm concept accounts for about 40% of the concept-related citations to Kuhn’s work, and its impact is resilient across all disciplines and over time. With respect to Popper, “falsification” is the most used concept derived from his books. Falsification is the cornerstone of Popper’s critical rationalism.
Using Linguistic Corpora as a Philosophical Tool.Jacob N. Caton - 2020 - Metaphilosophy 51 (1):51-70.details
The central aims of this paper are to show how linguistic corpora have been used and can be used in philosophy and to argue that linguistic corpora and corpus analysis should be added to the philosopher’s toolkit of ways to address philosophical questions. A linguistic corpus is a curated collection of texts representing language use that can be queried to answer research questions. Among many other uses, linguistic corpora can help answer questions about the meaning of words and the structure of discourse. Through a discussion of examples, the paper shows that there are many philosophical questions that can be addressed by using a linguistic corpus. However, linguistic corpora need not (and often cannot) replace traditional philosophical methods. Lastly, it argues that the special properties of linguistic corpora, including their independence and the current ease and cheapness of access, make them an indispensable resource for philosophers.
Revisiting three decades of Biology and Philosophy: a computational topic-modeling perspective.Christophe Malaterre, Davide Pulizzotto & Francis Lareau - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (1):5.details
Though only established as a discipline since the 1970s, philosophy of biology has already triggered investigations about its own history The Oxford handbook of philosophy of biology, Oxford University Press, New York, pp 11–33, 2008). When it comes to assessing the road since travelled—the research questions that have been pursued—manuals and ontologies also offer specific viewpoints, highlighting dedicated domains of inquiry and select work. In this article, we propose to approach the history of the philosophy of biology with a complementary data-driven perspective that makes use of statistical algorithms applied to the complete full-text corpus of one major journal of the field—Biology and Philosophy—from its launch in 1986 up until 2017. By running text-mining and topic-modeling algorithms, we identified 67 key research topics that span across these 32 years. We also investigated the evolution of these topics over time and their fluctuating significance in the journal articles. Our results concur with known episodes or traits of the discipline—for instance, the significance of evolution-related topics or the decrease of articles with a marked historical dimension—but also highlight a diversity of topics that is much richer than what is usually acknowledged.
What is this thing called Philosophy of Science? A computational topic-modeling perspective, 1934–2015.Christophe Malaterre, Jean-François Chartier & Davide Pulizzotto - 2019 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9 (2):215-249.details
What is philosophy of science? Numerous manuals, anthologies or essays provide carefully reconstructed vantage points on the discipline that have been gained through expert and piecemeal historical analyses. In this paper, we address the question from a complementary perspective: we target the content of one major journal of the field—Philosophy of Science—and apply unsupervised text-mining methods to its complete corpus, from its start in 1934 until 2015. By running topic-modeling algorithms over the full-text corpus, we identified 126 key research topics that span across 82 years. We also tracked their evolution and fluctuating significance over time in the journal articles. Our results concur with and document known and lesser-known episodes of the philosophy of science, including the rise and fall of logic and language-related topics, the relative stability of a metaphysical and ontological questioning (space and time, causation, natural kinds, realism), the significance of epistemological issues about the nature of scientific knowledge as well as the rise of a recent philosophy of biology and other trends. These analyses exemplify how computational text-mining methods can be used to provide an empirical large-scale and data-driven perspective on the history of philosophy of science that is complementary to other current historical approaches.
Beyond categorical definitions of life: a data-driven approach to assessing lifeness.Christophe Malaterre & Jean-François Chartier - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4543-4572.details
The concept of “life” certainly is of some use to distinguish birds and beavers from water and stones. This pragmatic usefulness has led to its construal as a categorical predicate that can sift out living entities from non-living ones depending on their possessing specific properties—reproduction, metabolism, evolvability etc. In this paper, we argue against this binary construal of life. Using text-mining methods across over 30,000 scientific articles, we defend instead a degrees-of-life view and show how these methods can contribute to experimental philosophy of science and concept explication. We apply topic-modeling algorithms to identify which specific properties are attributed to a target set of entities (bacteria, archaea, viruses, prions, plasmids, phages and the molecule of adenine). Eight major clusters of properties were identified together with their relative relevance for each target entity (two that relate to metabolism and catalysis, one to genetics, one to evolvability, one to structure, and—rather unexpectedly—three that concern interactions with the environment broadly construed). While aligning with intuitions—for instance about viruses being less alive than bacteria—these quantitative results also reveal differential degrees of performance that have so far remained elusive or overlooked. Taken together, these analyses provide a conceptual “lifeness space” that makes it possible to move away from a categorical construal of life by empirically assessing the relative lifeness of more-or-less alive entities.
New Data on the Linguistic Diversity of Authorship in Philosophy Journals.Chun-Ping Yen & Tzu-Wei Hung - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (4):953-974.details
This paper investigates the representation of authors with different linguistic backgrounds in academic publishing. We first review some common rebuttals of concerns about linguistic injustice. We then analyze 1039 authors of philosophy journals, primarily selected from the 2015 Leiter Report. While our data show that Anglophones dominate the output of philosophy papers, this unequal distribution cannot be solely attributed to language capacities. We also discover that ethics journals have more Anglophone authors than logic journals and that most authors are affiliated with English-speaking universities, suggesting other factors may also play significant roles. Moreover, some interesting results are revealed when we combine the factor of sex with place of affiliation and linguistic background. It indicates that while certain linguistic injustice is inevitable in academic publishing, it may be more complex than thought. We next introduce Broadbent’s :457–476, 2012, Philosophy of epidemiology, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2013, Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 48:250–257, 2014) contrastive account of causation to give a causal explanation of our findings. Broadbent’s account not only well characterizes the multifaceted causality in academic publishing but also provides a methodological guideline for further investigation.
Why We Need Corpus Linguistics in Intuition-Based Semantics.Leonid Tarasov - 2018 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 95 (4):421-435.details
The following method is popular in some areas of philosophy and linguistics when trying to describe the semantics of a given sentence Φ. Present ordinary speakers with scenarios that involve an utterance of Φ, ask them whether these utterances are felicitous or infelicitous and then construct a semantics that assigns the truth-value True to felicitous utterances of Φ and the truth-value False to infelicitous utterances of Φ. The author makes five observations about this intuition-based approach to semantics; their upshot is that it should be revised in favour of a more nuanced method. The author suggests that this method should be based on corpus linguistics and makes some tentative remarks about what it might look like and which questions we need to address in order to develop it.
(1 other version)A Corpus Study of "Know": On the Verification of Philosophers' Frequency Claims about Language.Nat Hansen, J. D. Porter & Kathryn Francis - 2019 - Episteme 18 (2):242-268.details
We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing.
Guest Editors' Introduction: Examining Moral Emotions in Nietzsche with the Semantic Web Exploration Tool: Nietzsche.Mark Alfano & Marc Cheong - 2019 - Journal of Nietzsche Studies 50 (1):1-10.details
Five years ago, the Journal of Nietzsche Studies published a special issue on Nietzsche and the affects. In it, Aurelia Armstrong wrote generically about the passions, Michael Ure discussed Schadenfreude, Joanne Faulkner addressed disgust, and Joseph Kuzma focused on eroticism.1 In subsequent issues, authors have discussed love,2 emotion in general,3 resentment,4 compassion,5 honor and empathy,6 and affect in general.7 This special section on emotions and reactive attitudes is a chance to take stock of the progress we have made as a field, draw connections among the affects and emotions addressed in the secondary literature, and introduce new ideas and tools for future research.If the articles here are any...
History of Philosophy in Ones and Zeros.Arianna Betti, Hein Van Den Berg, Yvette Oortwijn & Caspar Treijtel - 2019 - In Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis, Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Press. pp. 295-332.details
How can we best reconstruct the origin of a notion, its development, and possible spread to multiple fields? We present a pilot study on the spread of the notion of conceptual scheme. Though the notion is philosophically important, its origin, development, and spread are unclear. Several purely qualitative and competing historical hypotheses have been offered, which rely on disconnected disciplinary traditions, and have never been tested all at once in a single comprehensive investigation fitting the scope of its subject matter. As a step toward such an investigation, we trace the use of the bigram “conceptual scheme” in about 42,000 US journal articles in social sciences from 1888-1959 by using a novel method combining a quantitative procedure aided by basic computational techniques with qualitative elements informed by Betti and van den Berg (2014)’s ‘model approach to the history of ideas’.
Explanation in mathematical conversations: An empirical investigation.Alison Pease, Andrew Aberdein & Ursula Martin - 2019 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 377.details
Analysis of online mathematics forums can help reveal how explanation is used by mathematicians; we contend that this use of explanation may help to provide an informal conceptualization of simplicity. We extracted six conjectures from recent philosophical work on the occurrence and characteristics of explanation in mathematics. We then tested these conjectures against a corpus derived from online mathematical discussions. To this end, we employed two techniques, one based on indicator terms, the other on a random sample of comments lacking such indicators. Our findings suggest that explanation is widespread in mathematical practice and that it occurs not only in proofs but also in other mathematical contexts. Our work also provides further evidence for the utility of empirical methods in addressing philosophical problems.
@PhilosTEI: Building Corpora for Philosophers.Arianna Betti, Martin Reynaert & Hein Van Den Berg - 2017 - In J. Odijk & A. Van Hessen, Clarin in the Low Countries. pp. 379-392.details
The step to e-research in philosophy depends on the availability of high quality, easily and freely accessible corpora in a sustainable format composed from multi-language, multi-script books from different historical periods. Corpora matching these needs are at the moment virtually non-existing. Within @PhilosTei, we have addressed this corpus building problem by developing an open source, web-based, user-friendly workflow from textual images to TEI, based on state-of-the-art open source OCR software, to wit Tesseract, and a multi-language version of TICCL, a powerful OCR post-correction tool. We have demonstrated the utility of the tool by applying it to a multilingual, multi-script corpus of important eighteenth to twentieth-century European philosophical texts.
Skepticism and the acquisition of “knowledge”.Shaun Nichols & N. Ángel Pinillos - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (4):397-414.details
Do you know you are not being massively deceived by an evil demon? That is a familiar skeptical challenge. Less familiar is this question: How do you have a conception of knowledge on which the evil demon constitutes a prima facie challenge? Recently several philosophers have suggested that our responses to skeptical scenarios can be explained in terms of heuristics and biases. We offer an alternative explanation, based in learning theory. We argue that, given the evidence available to the learner, it would be rational for the learner to infer an infallibilist conception of knowledge.
Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy.Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis (eds.) - 2019 - London: Bloomsbury Press.details
Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas of experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy.
Causal Attributions and Corpus Analysis.Sytsma Justin, Bluhm Roland, Willemsen Pascale & Reuter Kevin - 2019 - In Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis, Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Press. pp. 209-238.details
Although philosophers have often held that causation is a purely descriptive notion, a growing body of experimental work on ordinary causal attributions using questionnaire methods indicates that it is heavily influenced by normative information. These results have been the subject of sceptical challenges. Additionally, those who find the results compelling have disagreed about how best to explain them. In this chapter, we help resolve these debates by using a new set of tools to investigate ordinary causal attributions—the methods of corpus linguistics. We apply both more qualitative corpus analysis techniques and the more purely quantitative methods of distributional semantics to four target questions: Can corpus analysis provide independent support for the thesis that ordinary causal attributions are sensitive to normative information? Does the evidence coming from corpus analysis support the contention that outcome valence matters for ordinary causal attributions? Are ordinary causal attributions similar to responsibility attributions? Are causal attributions of philosophers different from causal attributions we find in corpora of more ordinary language? We argue that the results of our analyses support a positive answer to each of these questions.
How to Do Digital Philosophy of Science.Charles H. Pence & Grant Ramsey - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (5):930-941.details
Philosophy of science is expanding via the introduction of new digital data and tools for their analysis. The data comprise digitized published books and journal articles, as well as heretofore unpublished material such as images, archival text, notebooks, meeting notes, and programs. The growth in available data is matched by the extensive development of automated analysis tools. The variety of data sources and tools can be overwhelming. In this article, we survey the state of digital work in the philosophy of science, showing what kinds of questions can be answered and how one can go about answering them.
Experimental Philosophy of Pain.Justin Sytsma & Kevin Reuter - 2017 - Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3):611-628.details
The standard view of pains among philosophers today holds that their existence consists in being experienced, such that there can be no unfelt pains or pain hallucinations. The typical line of support offered for this view is that it corresponds with the ordinary or commonsense conception of pain. Despite this, a growing body of evidence from experimental philosophers indicates that the ordinary understanding of pain stands in contrast to the standard view among philosophers. In this paper, we will survey this literature and add to it, detailing the results of seven new studies on the ordinary understanding of pain using both corpus analysis and questionnaire methods.
Intuition Talk is Not Methodologically Cheap: Empirically Testing the “Received Wisdom” About Armchair Philosophy.Zoe Ashton & Moti Mizrahi - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (3):595-612.details
The “received wisdom” in contemporary analytic philosophy is that intuition talk is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating back to the 1960s. In this paper, we set out to test two interpretations of this “received wisdom.” The first is that intuition talk is just talk, without any methodological significance. The second is that intuition talk is methodologically significant; it shows that analytic philosophers appeal to intuition. We present empirical and contextual evidence, systematically mined from the JSTOR corpus and HathiTrust’s Digital Library, which provide some empirical support for the second rather than the first hypothesis. Our data also suggest that appealing to intuition is a much older philosophical methodology than the “received wisdom” alleges. We then discuss the implications of our findings for the contemporary debate over philosophical methodology.
Women in Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses of Specialization, Prevalence, Visibility, and Generational Change.Eric Schwitzgebel & Carolyn Dicey Jennings - 2017 - Public Affairs Quarterly 31:83-105.details
We present several quantitative analyses of the prevalence and visibility of women in moral, political, and social philosophy, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation has changed over time. Measures include faculty lists from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, PhD job placement data from the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project, the National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates, conference programs of the American Philosophical Association, authorship in elite philosophy journals, citation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and extended discussion in abstracts from the Philosopher's Index. Our data strongly support three conclusions: (1) Gender disparity remains large in mainstream Anglophone philosophy; (2) ethics, construed broadly to include social and political philosophy, is closer to gender parity than are other fields in philosophy; and (3) women's involvement in philosophy has increased since the 1970s. However, by most measures, women's involvement and visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy has increased only slowly; and by some measures there has been virtually no gain since the 1990s. We find mixed evidence on the question of whether gender disparity is even more pronounced at the highest level of visibility or prestige than at more moderate levels of visibility or prestige.
The Underrepresentation of Women in Prestigious Ethics Journals.Meena Krishnamurthy, Shen-yi Liao, Monique Deveaux & Maggie Dalecki - 2017 - Hypatia 32 (4):928-939.details
It has been widely reported that women are underrepresented in academic philosophy as faculty and students. This article investigates whether this representation may also occur in the domain of journal article publishing. Our study looked at whether women authors were underrepresented as authors in elite ethics journals — Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Journal of Moral Philosophy — between 2004-2014, relative to the proportion of women employed in academic ethics (broadly construed). We found that women are indeed underrepresented overall in prestigious ethics journal publishing. Though this is not our focus, we discuss possible causes for this finding, such as top ethics journals’ tendency not to publish much feminist philosophy; the impact of women’s lesser professional status or rank within philosophy on their prospects for, and success in, journal publishing; and the review process itself, which may disadvantage or discourage women authors — perhaps especially when their gender, rank, and affiliation are known to the editor or reviewer, or if their work is explicitly feminist. We discuss possible avenues for future research on the "woman problem" in philosophy, noting how our study relates to existing research on this issue.
The History of Science as a Graveyard of Theories: A Philosophers’ Myth?Moti Mizrahi - 2016 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 30 (3):263-278.details
According to the antirealist argument known as the pessimistic induction, the history of science is a graveyard of dead scientific theories and abandoned theoretical posits. Support for this pessimistic picture of the history of science usually comes from a few case histories, such as the demise of the phlogiston theory and the abandonment of caloric as the substance of heat. In this article, I wish to take a new approach to examining the ‘history of science as a graveyard of theories’ picture. Using JSTOR Data for Research and Springer Exemplar, I present new lines of evidence that are at odds with this pessimistic picture of the history of science. When rigorously tested against the historical record of science, I submit, the pessimistic picture of the history of science as a graveyard of dead theories and abandoned posits may turn out to be no more than a philosophers’ myth.
Digital humanities for history of philosophy: A case study on Nietzsche.Mark Alfano - forthcoming - In T. Neilson L. Levenberg D. Rheems & M. Thomas, Handbook of Methods in the Digital Humanities. Rowman & Littlefield.details
Nietzsche promises to “translate man back into nature,” but it remains unclear what he meant by this and to what extent he succeeded at it. To help come to grips with Nietzsche’s conceptions of drive (Trieb), instinct (Instinkt) and virtue (Tugend and/or Keuschheit), I develop novel digital humanities methods to systematically track his use of these terms, constructing a near-comprehensive catalogue of what he takes these dispositions to be and how he thinks they are related. Nietzsche individuate drives and instincts by the type of actions they motivate. One way in which the “translation” of man back into nature might succeed is through naturalistic explanation and reduction of moral notions such as virtue in terms of amoral, naturalistic notions, such as drives and instincts. I go on to show that this is indeed Nietzsche’s project: for him, a virtue is a well-calibrated drive. Such calibration relates both to the rest of the agent’s psychic economy (her other drives) and to her social context (what’s considered praiseworthy and blameworthy in her community).
Exploration and exploitation of Victorian science in Darwin’s reading notebooks.Jaimie Murdock, Colin Allen & Simon DeDeo - 2017 - Cognition 159 (C):117-126.details
Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin’s behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin’s own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin’s consumption more exploratory than the culture’s production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior.
evoText: A new tool for analyzing the biological sciences.Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57:83-87.details
We introduce here evoText, a new tool for automated analysis of the literature in the biological sciences. evoText contains a database of hundreds of thousands of journal articles and an array of analysis tools for generating quantitative data on the nature and history of life science, especially ecology and evolutionary biology. This article describes the features of evoText, presents a variety of examples of the kinds of analyses that evoText can run, and offers a brief tutorial describing how to use it.
Rational Learners and Moral Rules.Shaun Nichols, Shikhar Kumar, Theresa Lopez, Alisabeth Ayars & Hoi-Yee Chan - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (5):530-554.details
People draw subtle distinctions in the normative domain. But it remains unclear exactly what gives rise to such distinctions. On one prominent approach, emotion systems trigger non-utilitarian judgments. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. In this article, we draw on Bayesian learning theory to develop a rational learning account. We argue that the ‘size principle’, which is implicated in word learning, can also explain how children would use scant and equivocal evidence to interpret candidate rules as applying more narrowly than utilitarian rules.
Spatial Subsystem of Moral Metaphors: A Cognitive Semantic Study.Ning Yu, Tianfang Wang & Yingliang He - 2016 - Metaphor and Symbol 31 (4):195-211.details
Cognitive semantic studies have shown that our conceptualization of morality is at least partially metaphorical and that our moral cognition is grounded in some fundamental contrastive categories of our embodied experience in the physical environment. It is argued that our moral cognition is built on a moral metaphor system. Within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory, this study aims to examine the spatial subsystem of moral metaphors in English. We set out with five pairs of moral metaphors that involve the following spatial source concepts: HIGH and LOW, UPRIGHT and TILTED, LEVEL and UNLEVEL, STRAIGHT and CROOKED, and BIG and SMALL. These metaphors were found to constitute the spatial subsystem of moral metaphors in Chinese. Our primary goal is to find out if the five pairs of moral–spatial metaphors are manifested in English as well. To that end we collected linguistic data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and searched Google Images for multimodal evidence. Our finding is that the five pairs of moral–spatial metaphors are applicable in English as they are in Chinese. We also discuss issues related to conceptual metaphor theory.
Aesthetic Adjectives Lack Uniform Behavior.Shen-yi Liao, Louise McNally & Aaron Meskin - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (6):618-631.details
The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s applicability is context-dependent.
Intuitions in the Face of Diversity.James Andow - 2013 - Dissertation, University of Nottinghamdetails
In recent decades, intuitions' role in philosophy has been hotly debated. Many claim intuitions play an important role. Others, some armed with data, challenge the use of intuitions. This thesis reflects on this debate and advances the debate in two main ways. Having a clear understanding of the challenge which intuition-use in philosophy faces is important. Part I focuses on this. Chapters 1-2 introduce the topic of intuitions, motivate the methodological study of intuitions, and present the historical background to recent empirical challenges to intuition-use. Chapters 3-5 concern the contemporary challenge. I present the empirical evidence the challenge uses, present what I argue to be the strongest version of the challenge, and defend that challenge against some objections. How one characterises intuitions is incredibly important in philosophical methodology. If we are to properly evaluate philosophical methods vis-a-vis their use of something called intuitions { if we are to assess the empirical challenge { it is important to be clear exactly what we mean by `intuitions'. Part II focuses on this. Chapter 6 argues there is little consensus among philosophers as to what intuitions are and their role in philosophy. Chapter 7 questions whether philosophers have developed an idiolect in which `intuition' has distinctive meaning | as frequently supposed. Chapter 8 points out a common misunderstanding about intuitions in philosophy; using quantitative tools to challenge the idea that an increased use of `intuition' in philosophy is the result of an increased use of intuition. So, the developing picture is one of confusion, without a clear idea of what sense of `intuition' is important. Fortunately, Chapter 9 sets us back on the right track. It sets out a positive programme for evaluative methodology: methodologists should adopt a permissive conception of intuitions and make fine distinctions between different intuitions, so long as we can track those distinctions while philosophising.
(1 other version)Mapping Human Values: Enhancing Social Marketing through Obituary Data-Mining.Mark Alfano, Andrew Higgins & Jacob Levernier - forthcoming - In Eda Gurel-Atay & Lynn Kahle, Social and Cultural Values in a Global and Digital Age. Routledge.details
Obituaries are an especially rich resource for identifying people’s values. Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author(s) find most salient, not only for themselves as relatives or friends of the deceased, but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We report three approaches to the scientific study of virtue and value through obituaries. We begin by reviewing studies 1 and 2, in which obituaries were carefully read and labeled. We then report study 3, which further develops these results with a semi-automated, large-scale semantic analysis of several thousand obituaries. Finally, we present the results of study 4 in which individuals were asked to write prospective obituaries. Geography, gender, and elite status all turn out to influence the virtues and values associated with the deceased.
Causal Argument.Ulrike Hahn, Frank Zenker & Roland Bluhm - 2017 - In Michael Waldmann, The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 475-494.details
In this chapter, we outline the range of argument forms involving causation that can be found in everyday discourse. We also survey empirical work concerned with the generation and evaluation of such arguments. This survey makes clear that there is presently no unified body of research concerned with causal argument. We highlight the benefits of a unified treatment both for those interested in causal cognition and those interested in argumentation, and identify the key challenges that must be met for a full understanding of causal argumentation.
Corpus Analysis in Philosophy.Roland Bluhm - 2016 - In Martin Hinton, Evidence, Experiment, and Argument in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 91-109.details
The experimental philosophy movement advocates the use of empirical methods in philosophy. The methods most often discussed and in fact employed in experimental philosophy are appropriated from the experimental paradigm in psychology. But there is a variety of other (at least partly) empirical methods from various disciplines that are and others that could be used in philosophy. The paper explores the application of corpus analysis to philosophical issues. Although the method is well established in linguistics, there are only a few tentative attempts of philosophers to utilise it. Examples are introduced and the merit of corpus analysis is compared to that of using general internet search engines and questionnaires for similar purposes.
How Distinctive Is Philosophers’ Intuition Talk?James Andow - 2015 - Metaphilosophy 46 (4-5):515-538.details
The word “intuition” is one frequently used in philosophy. It is often assumed that the way in which philosophers use the word, and others like it, is very distinctive. This claim has been subjected to little empirical scrutiny, however. This article presents the first steps in a qualitative analysis of the use of intuition talk in the academy. It presents the findings of two preliminary empirical studies. The first study examines the use of intuition talk in spoken academic English. The second examines the use of intuition talk in written academic English. It considers what these studies tell us about the distinctiveness of philosophical language and methods and considers some implications for evaluative and ameliorative methodology.
How “Intuition” Exploded.James Andow - 2015 - Metaphilosophy 46 (2):189-212.details
Recent decades have seen a surge in interest in metaphilosophy. In particular there has been an interest in philosophical methodology. Various questions have been asked about philosophical methods. Are our methods any good? Can we improve upon them? Prior to such evaluative and ameliorative concerns, however, is the matter of what methods philosophers actually use. Worryingly, our understanding of philosophical methodology is impoverished in various respects. This article considers one particular respect in which we seem to be missing an important part of the picture. While it is a received wisdom that the word “ intuition ” has exploded across analytic philosophy in recent decades, the article presents evidence that the explosion is apparent across a broad swathe of academia. It notes various implications for current methodological debates about the role of intuitions in philosophy.
Intuitions and illusions: From explanation and experiment to assessment.Eugen Fischer, Paul E. Engelhardt & Aurelie Herbelot - 2015 - In Eugen Fischer & John Collins, Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism: Rethinking Philosophical Method. London: Routledge. pp. 259-292.details
This paper pioneers the use of methods and findings from psycholinguistics in experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’. On this basis, it clarifies the epistemological relevance of empirical findings about intuitions – a key methodological challenge to experimental philosophy. The sources project (aka ‘cognitive epistemology of intuitions’) seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions, which help us assess their evidentiary value. One approach seeks explanations which trace relevant intuitions back to automatic cognitive processes that are generally reliable but predictably generate cognitive illusions under specific vitiating circumstances. The paper develops and experimentally tests such an explanation for intuitions at the root of a historically influential paradox about perception (‘argument from illusion’). The explanation traces these intuitions to stereotype-driven amplification, an automatic process routinely involved in language comprehension (e.g., understanding philosophical case-descriptions). Distributional semantics analysis and a forced-choice plausibility ranking task are employed to establish the relevant verb-associated stereotypes. The paper argues that the inferences facilitated by these stereotypes are generally reliable, but shows that vitiating circumstances obtain in the formulation of the targeted paradox. On this basis, the paper explores two complementary strategies for assessing the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments.
Dispositions without Conditionals.Barbara Vetter - 2014 - Mind 123 (489):129-156.details
Dispositions are modal properties. The standard conception of dispositions holds that each disposition is individuated by its stimulus condition(s) and its manifestation(s), and that their modality is best captured by some conditional construction that relates stimulus to manifestation as antecedent to consequent. I propose an alternative conception of dispositions: each disposition is individuated by its manifestation alone, and its modality is closest to that of possibility — a fragile vase, for instance, is one that can break easily. The view is expounded in some detail and defended against the major objections.
Don't Ask, Look! Linguistic Corpora as a Tool for Conceptual Analysis.Roland Bluhm - 2013 - In Miguel Hoeltje, Thomas Spitzley & Wolfgang Spohn, Was dürfen wir glauben? Was sollen wir tun? Sektionsbeiträge des achten internationalen Kongresses der Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie e.V. DuEPublico. pp. 7-15.details
Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, Internet search engine queries for expressions of interest have become quite popular. Apparently, philosophers attempt to surpass the limits of their own linguistic intuitions by appealing to experts or to factual uses of language. I argue that this attempt is commendable but that its execution is wanting. Instead of appealing to dictionaries or Internet queries, philosophers should employ computer-based linguistic corpora in order to confirm or falsify hypotheses about the factual use of language. This approach also has some advantages over methods employed by experimental philosophers. If the importance of ordinary language is stressed, the use of linguistic corpora is hardly avoidable.
Dissociation and Presupposition in Discourse: A Corpus Study. [REVIEW]Chiara Degano - 2007 - Argumentation 21 (4):361-378.details
This paper aims at combining different theoretical and methodological approaches for the analysis of discourse, focusing in particular on argumentative structures. At a first level an attempt is made to include argumentation in critical discourse analysis in order to extend the analysis of interaction between “structures of discourse” and “structures of ideologies” (T. A. van Dijk, R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Sage, London, 1995) to higher levels of language description. At a second level the study will integrate the qualitative approaches of critical discourse analysis and argumentation theory with the quantitative tools of corpus linguistics, so that the analysis can be carried out on a representative amount of texts and in a more systematic way. Even though corpus linguistics tends to be focused on meanings localized at the level of words, while argumentative structures stretch out through longer units of text, an integration can be attempted by circumscribing the enquiry to those aspects of argumentation which are signalled by indicators, and are therefore electronically retrievable. In particular, this paper investigates the use of dissociation and presupposition in a corpus of newspaper articles published in the run up to the war on Iraq. Both structures respond to retrievability criteria while being powerful instruments to convey ideologically oriented messages.
“Explain” in scientific discourse.James A. Overton - 2013 - Synthese 190 (8):1383-1405.details
The philosophical literature on scientific explanation contains a striking diversity of accounts. I use novel empirical methods to address this fragmentation and assess the importance and generality of explanation in science. My evidence base is a set of 781 articles from one year of the journal Science, and I begin by applying text mining techniques to discover patterns in the usage of “explain” and other words of philosophical interest. I then use random sampling from the data set to develop and test a classification scheme for scientific explanation. My results show that explanation and inference to the best explanation are ubiquitous in science, that they occur across a wide range of scientific disciplines, and that they are a goal of scientific practise. These explanations and inferences to the best explanation come in a diversity forms, which at least partially justifies the fragmentation of philosophical accounts. I draw two methodological lessons: first that text mining can enhance traditional conceptual analysis by establishing facts about word usage; and second that random sampling of cases can increase our confidence that a philosophical account applies in general. These empirical techniques supplement traditional philosophical methods.
Distinguishing the Appearance from the Reality of Pain.Kevin Reuter - 2011 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (9-10):94-109.details
It is often held that it is conceptually impossible to distinguish between a pain and a pain experience. In this article I present an argument which concludes that people make this distinction. I have done a web-based statistical analysis which is at the core of this argument. It shows that the intensity of pain has a decisive effect on whether people say that they 'feel a pain'(lower intensities) or 'have a pain' (greater intensities). This 'intensity effect'can be best explained by people's varying confidence about their pain, and indicates that 'feeling pain' can be identified as introspective report and 'having pain' as an objective statement — analogous to the traditional sense modalities. However, if people have the ability to make both introspective and objective statements about pain, then it seems indeed the case that they distinguish the appearance from the reality of pain.
Knowledge as a Mental State.Jennifer Nagel - 2013 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4:275-310.details
In the philosophical literature on mental states, the paradigmatic examples of mental states are beliefs, desires, intentions, and phenomenal states such as being in pain. The corresponding list in the psychological literature on mental state attribution includes one further member: the state of knowledge. This article examines the reasons why developmental, comparative and social psychologists have classified knowledge as a mental state, while most recent philosophers--with the notable exception of Timothy Williamson-- have not. The disagreement is traced back to a difference in how each side understands the relationship between the concepts of knowledge and belief, concepts which are understood in both disciplines to be closely linked. Psychologists and philosophers other than Williamson have generally have disagreed about which of the pair is prior and which is derivative. The rival claims of priority are examined both in the light of philosophical arguments by Williamson and others, and in the light of empirical work on mental state attribution.
The Prevalence of Mind–Body Dualism in Early China.Edward Slingerland & Maciej Chudek - 2011 - Cognitive Science 35 (5):997-1007.details
We present the first large-scale, quantitative examination of mind and body concepts in a set of historical sources by measuring the predictions of folk mind–body dualism against the surviving textual corpus of pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) China. Our textual analysis found clear patterns in the historically evolving reference of the word xin (heart/heart–mind): It alone of the organs was regularly contrasted with the physical body, and during the Warring States period it became less associated with emotions and increasingly portrayed as the unique locus of “higher” cognitive abilities. We interpret this as a semantic shift toward a shared cognitive bias in response to a vast and rapid expansion of literacy. Our study helps test the proposed universality of folk dualism, adds a new quantitative approach to the methods used in the humanities, and opens up a new and valuable data source for cognitive scientists: the record of dead minds.
(1 other version)Pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder: A case study in philosophy and the empirical.Jessica de Villiers, Robert J. Stainton & And Peter Szatmari - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):292–317.details
This article has two aims. The ﬁrst is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind. In pursuing the ﬁrst aim, we expect our main audience to be clinicians and linguists interested in pragmatics. It is when we turn to methodological issues that we hope to pique the interest of philosophers. Still, the methodological issue becomes pressing precisely because of the empirical ﬁnding—thus the ﬁrst part is important for the philosophical readers as well. The game plan is as follows. Given our intended dual audience, we begin with background on autism and pragmatics. Some of this material will be familiar to some of our readership, but few will know all of it. (Those who do are invited to skip these sections.) We then present some results from our pilot study on a corpus of speech by people with ASD. The heart of our ﬁnding is that certain speakers with ASD, who have severe trouble with familiar pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor and conversational implicature, exhibit surprising abilities with respect to what is often called “pragmatic determinants of what is said.” We turn next to a possible implication of this ﬁnding: It seems to suggest that hitherto seemingly promising evidence from ASD about the semantics/pragmatics boundary is..
Intuitions about consciousness: Experimental studies.Joshua Knobe & Jesse Prinz - 2008 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (1):67-83.details
When people are trying to determine whether an entity is capable of having certain kinds of mental states, they can proceed either by thinking about the entity from a *functional* standpoint or by thinking about the entity from a *physical* standpoint. We conducted a series of studies to determine how each of these standpoints impact people’s mental state ascriptions. The results point to a striking asymmetry. It appears that ascriptions of states involving phenomenal consciousness are sensitive to physical factors in a way that ascriptions of other states are not.
(1 other version)Pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder : a case study in philosophy and the empirical.Robert Stainton - 2007 - In Peter A. French & Howard K. Wettstein, Philosophy and the Empirical. Blackwell. pp. 292-317.details
This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind.