var xpapers_embed_buffer = ''; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  1. The common effect of value on prioritized memory and category representation.Joshua Knobe & Fiery Cushman - forthcoming - Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
    The way we represent categories depends on both the frequency and value of the category’s members. Thus, for instance, prototype representations can be impacted both by information about what is statistically frequent and by judgments about what is valuable. Notably, recent research on memory suggests that prioritized memory is also influenced by both statistical frequency and value judgments. Although work on conceptual representation and work on prioritized memory have thus far proceeded almost entirely independently, the patterns of existing findings provide evidence for a link between these two phenomena. In particular, these patterns provide evidence for the hypothesis that the impact of value on conceptual representation arises from its co-dependent relationship with prioritized memory.
    2. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  2. A Review of \"Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind\". [REVIEW]Kaija Mortensen - forthcoming - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
    3. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  3. The effect of abstract versus concrete framing on judgments of biological and psychological bases of behavior.Kim Nancy, Samuel Johnson, Woo-Kyoung Ahn & Joshua Knobe - forthcoming - Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.
    Human behavior is frequently described both in abstract, general terms and in concrete, specific terms. We asked whether these two ways of framing equivalent behaviors shift the inferences people make about the biological and psychological bases of those behaviors. In five experiments, we manipulated whether behaviors are presented concretely (i.e. with reference to a specific person, instantiated in the particular context of that person’s life) or abstractly (i.e. with reference to a category of people or behaviors across generalized contexts). People judged concretely framed behaviors to be less biologically based and, on some dimensions, more psychologically based than the same behaviors framed in the abstract. These findings held true for both mental disorders (Experiments 1 and 2) and everyday behaviors (Experiments 4 and 5) and yielded downstream consequences for the perceived efficacy of disorder treatments (Experiment 3). Implications for science educators, students of science, and members of the lay public are discussed.
    4. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  4. The true self: A psychological concept distinct from the self.Nina Strohminger, Joshua Knobe & George Newman - forthcoming - Perspectives on Psychological Science.
    A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of research has begun examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the true self and identify features that distinguish people’s understanding of the true self from their understanding of the self more generally. In particular, we consider recent findings that the true self is perceived as positive and moral, and that this tendency is actor-observer invariant and cross-culturally stable. We then explore possible explanations for these findings and discuss their implications for a variety of issues in psychology.
    5. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  5. Does Macbeth See a Dagger? An Empirical Argument for the Existence-Neutrality of Seeing.André Sant’Anna & Vilius Dranseika - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):641-664.
    In a recent paper, Justin D’Ambrosio (2020) has offered an empirical argument in support of a negative solution to the puzzle of Macbeth’s dagger—namely, the question of whether, in the famous scene from Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth sees a dagger in front of him. D’Ambrosio’s strategy consists in showing that “seeing” is not an existence-neutral verb; that is, that the way it is used in ordinary language is not neutral with respect to whether its complement exists. In this paper, we offer an empirical argument in favor of an existence-neutral reading of “seeing”. In particular, we argue that existence-neutral readings are readily available to language users. We thus call into question D’Ambrosio’s argument for the claim that Macbeth does not see a dagger. According to our positive solution, Macbeth sees a dagger, even though there is not a dagger in front of him.
    6. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  6. Experimental Philosophy of Emotion: Emotion Theory.Rodrigo Díaz - 2023 - In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 353-370.
    7. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  7. Do you believe that aliens feel pain? An empirical investigation of mental state attributions.Gregory Johnson & Alana Knowles - 2023 - Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal 27 (2):199-213.
    On what basis do we attribute phenomenal states to others? One answer, defended by John Stuart Mill, appeals to an analogy between ourselves and the similar bodies and actions of others (1865, p. 208). Despite its intuitive plausibility, this position is often rejected (Arico et al., 2011; Buckwalter & Phelan, 2014; Knobe & Prinz, 2008). In line with Mill’s account, we propose that the primary factors used when making phenomenal state ascriptions are the appropriate display of functional and behavioral cues and having bodies with the right kind of physical composition. To test this account, we gave five groups of participants a vignette followed by three to six questions. For four of the groups, the vignette described an alien-human encounter and the participants had to judge the likelihood (on a 7-point scale) that the alien had a non-phenomenal state (a belief) and the likelihood that it could have a phenomenal state (pain). The fifth group, as a control, read a vignette about a similar interaction between two humans. We found that, as appropriate functional and behavioral cues and then humanoid features are added to the alien, people are more willing to attribute a phenomenal state to it. Attributions of the non-phenomenal state are primarily dependent on the appropriate functional and behavioral cues, not on having humanoid features.
    8. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  8. Why do evaluative judgments affect emotion attributions? The roles of judgments about fittingness and the true self.Michael Prinzing, Brian D. Earp & Joshua Knobe - 2023 - Cognition 239 (C):105579.
    Past research has found that the value of a person's activities can affect observers' judgments about whether that person is experiencing certain emotions (e.g., people consider morally good agents happier than morally bad agents). One proposed explanation for this effect is that emotion attributions are influenced by judgments about fittingness (whether the emotion is merited). Another hypothesis is that emotion attributions are influenced by judgments about the agent's true self (whether the emotion reflects how the agent feels “deep down”). We tested these hypotheses in six studies. After finding that people think a wide range of emotions can be fitting and reflect a person's true self (Study 1), we tested the predictions of these two hypotheses for attributions of happiness, love, sadness, and hatred. We manipulated the emotions' fittingness (Studies 2a-b and 4) and whether the emotions reflected an agent's true self (Studies 3 and 5), measuring emotion attributions as well as fittingness judgments and true self judgments. The fittingness manipulation only impacted emotion attributions in the cases where it also impacted true self judgments, whereas the true self manipulation impacted emotion attribution in all cases, including those where it did not impact fittingness judgments. These results cast serious doubt on the fittingness hypothesis and offer some support for the true self hypothesis, which could be developed further in future work.

    9. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  9. What do people think is an emotion?Rodrigo Díaz - 2022 - Affective Science 3:438–450.
    In emotion research, both conceptual analyses and empirical studies commonly rely on emotion reports. But what do people mean when they say that they are angry, afraid, joyful, etc.? Building on extant theories of emotion, this paper presents four new studies (including a pre-registered replication) measuring the weight of cognitive evaluations, bodily changes, and action tendencies in people’s use of emotion concepts. The results of these studies suggest that the presence or absence of cognitive evaluations has the largest impact on people’s emotion attributions, and that bodily changes and action tendencies are considered to depend on cognitive evaluations. Implications for theories of emotion (concepts) and the interpretation of emotion reports are discussed.
    10. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  10. Emotions and the body. Testing the subtraction argument.Rodrigo Díaz - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (1):47-65.
    Can we experience emotion without the feeling of accelerated heartbeats, perspiration, or other changes in the body? In his paper “What is an emotion”, William James famously claimed that “if we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind” (1884, p. 193). Thus, bodily changes are essential to emotion. This is known as the Subtraction Argument. The Subtraction Argument is still used to support Embodied theories of emotion. Proponents of Disembodied theories, however, have different intuitions regarding the role of bodily changes in the experience of emotion. In order to advance this debate, I conducted a series of studies testing people’s intuitions regarding the Subtraction Argument. Results show that, against James’ claims, most people consider that their hypothetical (Study 1) and actual (Study 2) emotions persist in the absence of bodily feelings. Furthermore, Study 1 found that participants’ responses were not related to individual differences in reflection or interoceptive awareness. These results pose a problem for Embodied theories of emotion and challenge extant explanations for the persistence of emotional experience in cases of impaired interoception.
    11. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  11. 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.
    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).
    12. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  12. Is Pain “All in your Mind”? Examining the General Public’s Views of Pain.Tim V. Salomons, Richard Harrison, Nat Hansen, James Stazicker, Astrid Grith Sorensen, Paula Thomas & Emma Borg - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):683-698.
    By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that both aspects of pain are critical to its experience. Recent experimental work, however, suggests a public view that is at odds with this conceptualisation. By demonstrating that the public does not necessarily endorse central tenets of the “mental” view of pain (subjectivity, privacy, and incorrigibility), experimental philosophers have argued that the public holds a more “body-centric” view than most clinicians and scholars. Such a discrepancy would have important implications for how the public interacts with pain science and clinical care. In response, we tested the hypothesis that the public is capable of a more “mind-centric” view of pain. Using a series of vignettes, we demonstrate that in situations which highlight mental aspects of pain the public can, and does, recognize pain as a mental phenomenon. We also demonstrate that the public view is subject to context effects, by showing that the public’s view is modified when situations emphasizing mental and somatic aspects of pain are presented together.
    13. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  13. 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.
    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.
    14. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  14. Are observer memories (accurate) memories? Insights from experimental philosophy.Vilius Dranseika, Christopher Jude McCarroll & Kourken Michaelian - 2021 - Consciousness and Cognition 96 (C):103240.
    A striking feature of our memories of the personal past is that they involve different visual perspectives: one sometimes recalls past events from one’s original point of view (a field perspective), but one sometimes recalls them from an external point of view (an observer perspective). In philosophy, observer memories are often seen as being less than fully genuine and as being necessarily false or distorted. This paper looks at whether laypeople share the standard philosophical view by applying the methods of experimental philosophy. We report the results of five studies suggesting that, while participants clearly categorize both field and observer memories as memories, they tend to judge that observer memories are slightly less accurate than field memories. Our results suggest, however, that in lay thought, the difference between field and observer memories is not nearly as clear-cut as philosophers have generally taken it to be.
    15. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  15. Against Teleological Essentialism.Eleonore Neufeld - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (4):e12961.
    In two recent papers, Rose and Nichols present evidence in favor of the view that humans represent category essences in terms of a telos, such as honey-making, and not in terms of scientific essences, such as bee DNA. In this paper, I challenge their interpretation of the evidence, and show that it is directly predicted by the main theory they seek to undermine. I argue that their results can be explained as instances of diagnostic reasoning about scientific essences.
    16. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  16. Reflective intuitions about the causal theory of perception across sensory modalities.R. Roberts, K. Allen & Kelly Schmidtke - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (2):257-277.
    Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain stimulation). They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.’s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense.
    17. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  17. Impact of Teacher's Mental State Talk on Young Children's Theory of Mind: A Quasi-Experiment Study.Jianfen Wu, Minmin Liu & Wenqi Lin - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12.
    This study investigated the relationship between teachers' mental state talk and young children's theory of mind with a quasi-experiment. In total, 56 young children were assigned to the experiment group and the control group. The experiment group was engaged in a 12-week intervention program with mental state talk in storytelling, casual conversations, and role-playing games, whereas the control group received no interventions. All the children were tested with three theory of mind tasks before and after the intervention. The results indicated that the experimental group had a significant improvement in the ToM scores, whereas the control group showed no significant change. The educational implications of these findings are discussed.
    18. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  18. Happiness is from the soul: The nature and origins of our happiness concept.Fan Yang - 2021 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 150 (2):276-288.
    What is happiness? Is happiness about feeling good or about being good? Across five studies, we explored the nature and origins of our happiness concept developmentally and crosslinguistically. We found that surprisingly, children as young as age 4 viewed morally bad people as less happy than morally good people, even if the characters all have positive subjective states (Study 1). Moral character did not affect attributions of physical traits (Study 2), and was more powerfully weighted than subjective states in attributions of happiness (Study 3). Moreover, moral character but not intelligence influenced children and adults’ happiness attributions (Study 4). Finally, Chinese people responded similarly when attributing happiness with two words, despite one (“Gao Xing”) being substantially more descriptive than the other (“Kuai Le”) (Study 5). Therefore, we found that moral judgment plays a relatively unique role in happiness attributions, which is surprisingly early emerging and largely independent of linguistic and cultural influences, and thus likely reflects a fundamental cognitive feature of the mind.
    19. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  19. Feeling the right way: Normative influences on people's use of emotion concepts.Rodrigo Díaz & Kevin Reuter - 2020 - Mind and Language 36 (3):451-470.
    It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are experienced. People consider that emotions are not just about feeling in certain ways, but also about feeling the right way.
    20. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  20. The intuitive invalidity of the pain-in-mouth argument.Michelle Liu - 2020 - Analysis 80 (3):463-474.
    In a recent paper, Reuter, Seinhold and Sytsma put forward an implicature account to explain the intuitive failure of the pain-in-mouth argument. They argue that utterances such as ‘There is tissue damage / a pain / an inflammation in my mouth’ carry the conversational implicature that there is something wrong with the speaker’s mouth. Appealing to new empirical data, this paper argues against the implicature account and for the entailment account, according to which pain reports using locative locutions, such as ‘There is a pain in my mouth’, are intuitively understood as entailing corresponding predicative locutions, such as ‘My mouth hurts.’ On this latter account, the pain-in-mouth argument seems invalid because the conclusion is naturally understood as entailing something which cannot be inferred from the premisses. Implications for the philosophical debate about pain are also drawn.
    21. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  21. Filosofia e Direito: Estudos.Daniel Pires Nunes, Jayme Paviani & Gabriel Guilherme Frigo - 2020 - Caxias do Sul - Galópolis, Caxias do Sul - RS, Brasil: EDUCS.
    “O estudo de questões jurídicas, em seus aspectos filosóficos, é um modo de compreender um dos fenômenos mais completos da vida humana, da vida em sociedade, embora os aspectos legais sejam diferentes em cada grupo social. Nesse sentido, Filosofia e Direito: estudos é uma contribuição que serve para aprofundar a presença jurídica de bases filosóficas. É preciso recordar que as distinções servem para a compreensão humana e para melhor entender a unidade dos fenômenos. Enquanto a ciência estuda os aspectos dogmáticos do Direito, a filosofia estuda os fundamentos ontológicos, epistemológicos e éticos do Direito. O explícito pressupõe o implícito. Além dessas distinções disciplinares, inúmeros outros ângulos do problema podem ser examinados. Uma prova disso é a natureza dos ensaios apresentados nesse livro como resultados de estudos programados e sistemáticos. Os autores dos ensaios, aqui publicados, portanto, não excluem outras investigações e nem sequer se pensam completos.”

    Jayme Paviani.

    22. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  22. Water is and is not H 2 O.Kevin P. Tobia, George E. Newman & Joshua Knobe - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (2):183-208.
    The Twin Earth thought experiment invites us to consider a liquid that has all of the superficial properties associated with water (clear, potable, etc.) but has entirely different deeper causal properties (composed of “XYZ” rather than of H2O). Although this thought experiment was originally introduced to illuminate questions in the theory of reference, it has also played a crucial role in empirically informed debates within the philosophy of psychology about people’s ordinary natural kind concepts. Those debates have sought to accommodate an apparent fact about ordinary people’s judgments: Intuitively, the Twin Earth liquid is not water. We present results from four experiments showing that people do not, in fact, have this intuition. Instead, people tend to have the intuition that there is a sense in which the liquid is not water but also a sense in which it is water. We explore the implications of this finding for debates about theories of natural kind concepts, arguing that it supports views positing two distinct criteria for membership in natural kind categories – one based on deeper causal properties, the other based on superficial, observable properties.
    23. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  23. 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.
    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.
    24. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  24. Choosing and refusing: doxastic voluntarism and folk psychology.John Turri, David Rose & Wesley Buckwalter - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (10):2507-2537.
    A standard view in contemporary philosophy is that belief is involuntary, either as a matter of conceptual necessity or as a contingent fact of human psychology. We present seven experiments on patterns in ordinary folk-psychological judgments about belief. The results provide strong evidence that voluntary belief is conceptually possible and, granted minimal charitable assumptions about folk-psychological competence, provide some evidence that voluntary belief is psychologically possible. We also consider two hypotheses in an attempt to understand why many philosophers have been tempted to view belief as involuntary: that belief is a prototype concept and that belief is a dual character concept. Altogether, our findings contribute to longstanding philosophical debates about the relationship between the will and the intellect, while also advancing scientific understanding of important social judgments.
    25. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  25. Positive messages may reduce patient pain: A meta-analysis.Jeremy Howick & Alexander Mebius - 2017 - European Journal of Integrative Medicine 11:31-38.
    Introduction Current treatments for pain have limited benefits and worrying side effects. Some studies suggest that pain is reduced when clinicians deliver positive messages. However, the effects of positive messages are heterogeneous and have not been subject to meta-analysis. We aimed to estimate the efficacy of positive messages for pain reduction.

    Methods We included randomized trials of the effects of positive messages in a subset of the studies included in a recent systematic review of context factors for treating pain. Several electronic databases were searched. Reference lists of relevant studies were also searched. Two authors independently undertook study selection, data extraction, risk of bias assessment, and analyses. Our primary outcome measures were differences in patient- or observer-reported pain between groups who were given positive messages and those who were not.

    Results Of the 16 randomized trials (1703 patients) that met the inclusion criteria, 12 trials had sufficient data for meta-analysis. The pooled standardized effect size was −0.31 (95% confidence interval [CI] −0.61 to −0.01, p = 0.04, I2 = 82%). The effect size remained positive but not statistically significant after we excluded studies considered to have a high risk of bias (standard effect size −0.17, 95% CI −0.54 to 0.19, P = 0.36, I2 = 84%).

    Conclusion Care of patients with chronic or acute pain may be enhanced when clinicians deliver positive messages about possible clinical outcomes. However, we have identified several limitations of the present study that suggest caution when interpreting the results. We recommend further high-quality studies to confirm (or falsify) our result.

    FUNDING

    Alexander Mebius research has been funded through the ERC grant "Philosophy of Pharmacology: Safety, Statistical Standards, and Evidence Amalgamation" (GA: 639276).

    26. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  26. Attempts to Prime Intellectual Virtues for Understanding of Science: Failures to Inspire Intellectual Effort.Joanna Huxster, Melissa Hopkins, Julia Bresticker, Jason Leddington & Matthew Slater - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (8):1141-1158.
    Strategies for effectively communicating scientific findings to the public are an important and growing area of study. Recognizing that some complex subjects require recipients of information to take a more active role in constructing an understanding, we sought to determine whether it was possible to increase subjects’ intellectual effort via “priming” methodologies. In particular, we asked whether subconsciously priming “intellectual virtues”, such as curiosity, perseverance, patience, and diligence might improve participants’ effort and performance on various cognitive tasks. In the first experiment, we found no significant differences in either effort or understanding between IV-primed and neutrally-primed individuals across two different priming techniques. The second experiment measured the effect of IV-priming on intellectual effort in simpler, shorter-duration puzzles and exploration activities; here, we observed an effect, but given its low strength and short duration, we do not believe that priming of IVs is a promising strategy for science communication.
    27. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  27. Aesthetic Adjectives: Experimental Semantics and Context-Sensitivity.Shen-yi Liao & Aaron Meskin - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2):371–398.
    One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations. And despite the wealth of attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary linguistic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context-sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment might turn out to be different from what they had in mind.
    28. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  28. True happiness: The role of morality in the folk concept of happiness.Jonathan Phillips, Christian Mott, Julian De Freitas, June Gruber & Joshua Knobe - 2017 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 146 (2):165-181.
    Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents’ psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness is also sensitive to the moral value of agents’ lives. Five studies systematically investigate and explain the impact of morality on ordinary assessments of happiness. Study 1 demonstrates that moral judgments influence assessments of happiness not only for untrained participants, but also for academic researchers and even in those who study happiness specifically. Studies 2 and 3 then respectively ask whether this effect may be explained by general motivational biases or beliefs in a just world. In both cases, we find evidence against these explanations. Study 4 shows that the impact of moral judgments cannot be explained by changes in the perception of descriptive psychological states. Finally, Study 5 compares the impact of moral and non-moral value, and provides evidence that unlike non-moral value, moral value is part of the criteria that govern the ordinary concept of happiness. Taken together, these studies provide a specific explanation of how and why the ordinary concept of happiness deviates from the definition used by researchers studying happiness.
    29. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  29. Behavioral Circumscription and the Folk Psychology of Belief: A Study in Ethno-Mentalizing.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 - 2017 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (3):193-203.
    Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subjects assertion that p matches her non-verbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from nearly 6,000 people across twenty-six samples, spanning twenty-two countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we suggest that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, non-linguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology.
    30. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  30. Intuitions' Linguistic Sources: Stereotypes, Intuitions and Illusions.Eugen Fischer & Paul E. Engelhardt - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (1):67-103.
    Intuitive judgments elicited by verbal case-descriptions play key roles in philosophical problem-setting and argument. Experimental philosophy's ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess our warrant for accepting them. This article develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception, trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension, and employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to elicit the relevant stereotypical associations of perception- and appearance-verbs. We obtain a debunking explanation that resolves the philosophical paradox.
    31. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  31. More dead than dead? Attributing mentality to vegetative state patients.Anil Gomes, Matthew Parrott & Joshua Shepherd - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (1):84-95.
    In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner present three experiments which they take to show that people perceive patients in a persistent vegetative state to have less mentality than the dead. Following on from Gomes and Parrott, we provide evidence to show that participants' responses in the initial experiments are an artifact of the questions posed. Results from two experiments show that, once the questions have been clarified, people do not ascribe more mental capacity to the dead than to PVS patients. There is no reason to think that people perceive PVS patients as more dead than dead.
    32. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  32. The group mind: In commonsense psychology.Bryce Huebner - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 292-305.
    33. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  33. 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.
    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.
    34. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  34. Atheists and Agnostics Are More Reflective than Religious Believers: Four Empirical Studies and a Meta-Analysis.Gordon Pennycook, Robert M. Ross, Derek J. Koehler & Jonathan A. Fugelsang - 2016 - PLoS ONE 11 (4):e0153039.
    Individual differences in the mere willingness to think analytically has been shown to predict religious disbelief. Recently, however, it has been argued that analytic thinkers are not actually less religious; rather, the putative association may be a result of religiosity typically being measured after analytic thinking (an order effect). In light of this possibility, we report four studies in which a negative correlation between religious belief and performance on analytic thinking measures is found when religious belief is measured in a separate session. We also performed a meta-analysis on all previously published studies on the topic along with our four new studies (N = 15,078, k = 31), focusing specifically on the association between performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test (the most widely used individual difference measure of analytic thinking) and religious belief. This meta-analysis revealed an overall negative correlation (r) of -.18, 95% CI [-.21, -.16]. Although this correlation is modest, self-identified atheists (N = 133) scored 18.7% higher than religiously affiliated individuals (N = 597) on a composite measure of analytic thinking administered across our four new studies (d = .72). Our results indicate that the association between analytic thinking and religious disbelief is not caused by a simple order effect. There is good evidence that atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers.
    35. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  35. The Concept of Innateness as an Object of Empirical Enquiry.Richard Samuels - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 504–519.
    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.
    36. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  36. Naturalistic approaches to creativity.Dustin Stokes & Elliot Samuel Paul - 2016 - In J. Systma W. Buckwalter (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy.
    We offer a brief characterization of creativity, followed by a review of some of the reasons people have been skeptical about the possibility of explaining creativity. We then survey some of the recent work on creativity that is naturalistic in the sense that it presumes creativity is natural (as opposed to magical, occult, or supernatural) and is therefore amenable to scientific inquiry. This work is divided into two categories. The broader category is empirical philosophy, which draws on empirical research while addressing questions that have traditionally been regarded as philosophical. The second category is experimental philosophy, a special branch of empirical philosophy in which experiments are designed (by philosophers) with the explicit purpose of addressing philosophical questions. All of this highlights the relative theoretical neglect of creativity, while at the same time suggesting ample opportunity for experimentally minded philosophers to break new ground.
    37. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  37. Thin, fine and with sensitivity: a metamethodology of intuitions.James Andow - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology (1):1-21.
    Do philosophers use intuitions? Should philosophers use intuitions? Can philosophical methods (where intuitions are concerned) be improved upon? In order to answer these questions we need to have some idea of how we should go about answering them. I defend a way of going about methodology of intuitions: a metamethodology. I claim the following: (i) we should approach methodological questions about intuitions with a thin conception of intuitions in mind; (ii) we should carve intuitions finely; and, (iii) we should carve to a grain to which we are sensitive in our everyday philosophising. The reason is that, unless we do so, we don’t get what we want from philosophical methodology. I argue that what we want is information that will aid us in formulating practical advice concerning how to do philosophy responsibly/well/better.
    38. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  38. Belief through Thick and Thin.Wesley Buckwalter, David Rose & John Turri - 2015 - Noûs 49 (4):748-775.
    We distinguish between two categories of belief—thin belief and thick belief—and provide evidence that they approximate genuinely distinct categories within folk psychology. We use the distinction to make informative predictions about how laypeople view the relationship between knowledge and belief. More specifically, we show that if the distinction is genuine, then we can make sense of otherwise extremely puzzling recent experimental findings on the entailment thesis (i.e. the widely held philosophical thesis that knowledge entails belief). We also suggest that the distinction can be applied to debates in the philosophy of mind and metaethics.
    39. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  39. Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics.Florian Cova, Amanda Garcia & Shen-yi Liao - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (12):927-939.
    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.
    40. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  40. Experimental philosophy of actual and counterfactual free will intuitions.Adam Feltz - 2015 - Consciousness and Cognition 36 (C):113-130.
    Five experiments suggested that everyday free will and moral responsibility judgments about some hypothetical thought examples differed from free will and moral responsibility judgments about the actual world. Experiment 1 (N = 106) showed that free will intuitions about the actual world measured by the FAD-Plus poorly predicted free will intuitions about a hypothetical person performing a determined action (r = .13). Experiments 2–5 replicated this result and found the relations between actual free will judgments and free will judgments about hypothetical determined or fated actions (rs = .22–.35) were much smaller than the differences between them (ηp2 = .2–.55). These results put some pressure on theoretical accounts of everyday intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility.
    41. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  41. Virtues, ecological momentary assessment/intervention and smartphone technology.Jason D. Runyan & Ellen G. Steinke - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology:1-24.
    Virtues, broadly understood as stable and robust dispositions for certain responses across morally relevant situations, have been a growing topic of interest in psychology. A central topic of discussion has been whether studies showing that situations can strongly influence our responses provide evidence against the existence of virtues (as a kind of stable and robust disposition). In this review, we examine reasons for thinking that the prevailing methods for examining situational influences are limited in their ability to test dispositional stability and robustness; or, then, whether virtues exist. We make the case that these limitations can be addressed by aggregating repeated, cross-situational assessments of environmental, psychological and physiological variables within everyday life—a form of assessment often called ecological momentary assessment (EMA, or experience sampling). We, then, examine how advances in smartphone application (app) technology, and their mass adoption, make these mobile devices an unprecedented vehicle for EMA and, thus, the psychological study of virtue. We, additionally, examine how smartphones might be used for virtue development by promoting changes in thought and behavior within daily life; a technique often called ecological momentary intervention (EMI). While EMA/I have become widely employed since the 1980s for the purposes of understanding and promoting change amongst clinical populations, few EMA/I studies have been devoted to understanding or promoting virtues within non-clinical populations. Further, most EMA/I studies have relied on journaling, PDAs, phone calls and/or text messaging systems. We explore how smartphone app technology provides a means of making EMA a more robust psychological method, EMI a more robust way of promoting positive change, and, as a result, opens up new possibilities for studying and promoting virtues.
    42. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  42. The Moral Status of an Action Influences its Perceived Intentional Status in Adolescents with Psychopathic Traits.Elise Cardinale, Elizabeth Finger, Julia Schechter, Ilana Jurkowitz, R. J. R. Blair & Abigail Marsh - 2014 - In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy: Volume 1. Oxford University Press. pp. 131-151.
    Moral judgments about an action are influenced by the action’s intentionality. The reverse is also true: judgments of intentionality can be influenced by an action’s moral valence. For example, respondents judge a harmful side-effect of an intended outcome to be more intentional than a helpful side-effect. Debate continues regarding the mechanisms underlying this “side-effect effect” and the conditions under which it will persist. The research behind this chapter tested whether the side-effect effect is intact in adolescents with psychopathic traits, who are characterized by persistent immoral behavior, deficient moral emotions, and impairments in some forms of moral judgment. Results showed no differences between healthy adolescents and those with psychopathic traits: both groups judged harmful side-effects to be more intentional than helpful side-effects by an approximately 2:1 ratio. The chapter discusses these results in light of hypothesized mechanisms underlying the side-effect effect, and in light of our current understanding of moral reasoning deficits in psychopathy.
    43. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  43. Moral responsibility and free will: A meta-analysis.Adam Feltz & Florian Cova - 2014 - Consciousness and Cognition 30 (C):234-246.
    Fundamental beliefs about free will and moral responsibility are often thought to shape our ability to have healthy relationships with others and ourselves. Emotional reactions have also been shown to have an important and pervasive impact on judgments and behaviors. Recent research suggests that emotional reactions play a prominent role in judgments about free will, influencing judgments about determinism’s relation to free will and moral responsibility. However, the extent to which affect influences these judgments is unclear. We conducted a metaanalysis to estimate the impact of affect. Our meta-analysis indicates that beliefs in free will are largely robust to emotional reactions.
    44. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  44. You, Robot.Brian Fiala, Adam Arico & Shaun Nichols - 2014 - In Edouard Machery (ed.), Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 31-47.
    How do people think about the mental states of robots? Experimental philosophers have developed various models aiming to specify the factors that drive people's attributions of mental states to robots. Here we report on a new experiment involving robots, the results of which tell against competing models. We advocate a view on which attributions of mental states to robots are driven by the same dual-process architecture that subserves attributions of mental states more generally. In support of this view, we leverage recent psychological research on human-robot interaction that involve ecologically-valid stimuli such as Roombas and humanoid robots.
    45. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  45. Die Experimentelle Philosophie in der Diskussion.Thomas Grundmann, Joachim Horvath & Jens Kipper (eds.) - 2014 - Suhrkamp.
    Philosophen berufen sich in Gedankenexperimenten oft auf Intuitionen. Doch werden diese Intuitionen auch von anderen Philosophen oder von philosophischen Laien geteilt? Und durch welche Faktoren werden sie eigentlich bestimmt? Experimentelle Philosophen gehen solchen Fragen seit einigen Jahren mit empirischen Methoden auf den Grund. Ihre Ergebnisse sind mitunter verblüffend und haben für Aufsehen gesorgt. Der vorliegende Band lässt führende Vertreter und Gegner dieser wachsenden Bewegung zu Wort kommen und will die bislang überwiegend englischsprachige Debatte verstärkt in die deutsche Philosophie hineintragen.
    46. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  46. More than a feeling: counterintuitive effects of compassion on moral judgment.Anthony I. Jack, Philip Robbins, Jared Friedman & Chris Meyers - 2014 - In Justin Sytsma (ed.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind. New York: Bloomsbury. pp. 125-179.
    Seminal work in moral neuroscience by Joshua Greene and colleagues employed variants of the well-known trolley problems to identify two brain networks which compete with each other to determine moral judgments. Greene interprets the tension between these brain networks using a dual process account which pits deliberative reason against automatic emotion-driven intuitions: reason versus passion. Recent neuroscientific evidence suggests, however, that the critical tension that Greene identifies as playing a role in moral judgment is not so much a tension between reason and passion, but a tension between distinct forms of deliberative reasoning: analytic versus empathetic. In this paper we present results from several new studies supporting this alternative hypothesis.
    47. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  47. Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy.Edouard Machery & Elizabeth O'Neill (eds.) - 2014 - New York: Routledge.
    <P>Experimental philosophy is one of the most active and exciting areas in philosophy today. In <EM>Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy</EM>, Elizabeth O’Neill and Edouard Machery have brought together twelve leading philosophers to debate four topics central to recent research in experimental philosophy. The result is an important and enticing contribution to contemporary philosophy which thoroughly reframes traditional philosophical questions in light of experimental philosophers’ use of empirical research methods, and brings to light the lively debates within experimental philosophers’ intellectual community. Two papers are dedicated to the following four topics:</P> <P></P> <UL> <LI>Language (Edouard Machery & Genoveva Martí)</LI> <LI>Consciousness (Brian Fala, Adam Arico, and Shaun Nicols & Justin Sytsma)</LI> <LI>Free Will and Responsibility (Joshua Knobe & Eddy Nahmias and Morgan Thompson)</LI> <LI>Epistemology and the Reliability of Intuitions (Kenneth Boyd and Jennifer Nagel & Joshua Alexander and Jonathan Weinberg).</LI></UL> <P></P> <P>Preliminary descriptions of each chapter, annotated bibliographies for each controversy, and a supplemental guide to further controversies in experimental philosophy (with bibliographies) help provide clearer and richer views of these live controversies for all readers.</P> <P></P> <P> </P>.
    48. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  48. The role of intuition.Jennifer Ellen Nado - 2014 - In Justin Sytsma (ed.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind. New York: Bloomsbury. pp. 11-44.
    49. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  49. A Naturalistic Vision of Free Will.Eddy Nahmias & Morgan Thompson - 2014 - In Elizabeth O'Neill & Edouard Machery (eds.), Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy. Routledge.
    We argue, contra Joshua Knobe in a companion chapter, that most people have an understanding of free will and responsible agency that is compatible with a naturalistic vision of the human mind. Our argument is supported by results from a new experimental philosophy study showing that most people think free will is consistent with complete and perfect prediction of decisions and actions based on prior activity in the brain (a scenario adapted from Sam Harris who predicts most people will find it inconsistent with free will). We explain why most people are "theory-lite" about the nature of mind and free will--they are not committed to substantive theories of the underlying causal structure of mind, such as Knobe's "transcendence vision". Rather, we suggest a "causal competition principle"--that an agent's actions will be deemed unfree when they are perceived to be fully caused by factors that do not include her reasons. This principle explains why people, including some scientists, perceive neuroscientific explanations as threatening free will when they are described in terms of neural processes fully causing actions to the exclusion of agents' reasons or reasoning processes.
    50. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  50. When Words Speak Louder Than Actions: Delusion, Belief, and the Power of Assertion.David Rose, Wesley Buckwalter & John Turri - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy (4):1-18.
    People suffering from severe monothematic delusions, such as Capgras, Fregoli, or Cotard patients, regularly assert extraordinary and unlikely things. For example, some say that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors. A popular view in philosophy and cognitive science is that such monothematic delusions aren't beliefs because they don't guide behaviour and affect in the way that beliefs do. Or, if they are beliefs, they are somehow anomalous, atypical, or marginal beliefs. We present evidence from five studies that folk psychology unambiguously views monothematic delusions as stereotypical beliefs. This calls into question widespread assumptions in the professional literature about belief's stereotypical functional profile. We also show that folk psychology views delusional patients as holding contradictory beliefs. And we show that frequent assertion is a powerful cue to belief ascription, more powerful than even a robust and consistent track record of non-verbal behaviour.
    51. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  51. Does Belief in Dualism Protect against Maladaptive Psycho-Social Responses to Deep Brain Stimulation? An Empirical Exploration.Jason Shepard & Joshua May - 2014 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 5 (4):40–42.
    We provide empirical evidence that people who believe in dualism are more likely to be uncomfortable with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and to view it as threatening to their identity, humanity, or self. It is (neurocentric) materialists—who think the mind just is the brain—that are less inclined to fear DBS or to see it as threatening. We suggest various possible reasons for this connection. The inspiration for this brief report is a target article that addresses this issue from a theoretical perspective.
    52. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  52. Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind.Justin Sytsma (ed.) - 2014 - New York: Bloomsbury.
    Leading researchers in the philosophy of mind present and explore cutting edge research in the exciting new field of experimental philosophy.
    53. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  53. How Many of Us Are There?Hannah Tierney, Chris Howard, Victor Kumar, Trevor Kvaran & Shaun Nichols - 2014 - In Justin Sytsma (ed.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind. New York: Bloomsbury.
    54. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  54. Phenomenal Abilities: Incompatibilism and the Experience of Agency.Oisín Deery, Matthew S. Bedke & Shaun Nichols - 2013 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 126–50.
    Incompatibilists often claim that we experience our agency as incompatible with determinism, while compatibilists challenge this claim. We report a series of experiments that focus on whether the experience of having an ability to do otherwise is taken to be at odds with determinism. We found that participants in our studies described their experience as incompatibilist whether the decision was (i) present-focused or retrospective, (ii) imagined or actual, (iii) morally salient or morally neutral. The only case in which participants did not give incompatibilist judgments was when the question was explicitly about whether one’s ignorance of the future was compatible with determinism. This lends empirical support to claims made by incompatibilists about the experience of agency, while also showing that compatibilist accounts of ability are inadequate to the reported phenomenology. Our results also inform recent debates about the presuppositions of deliberation.
    55. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  55. The Centrality of Belief and Reflection in Knobe-Effect Cases.Mark Alfano, James R. Beebe & Brian Robinson - 2012 - The Monist 95 (2):264-289.
    Recent work in experimental philosophy has shown that people are more likely to attribute intentionality, knowledge, and other psychological properties to someone who causes a bad side effect than to someone who causes a good one. We argue that all of these asymmetries can be explained in terms of a single underlying asymmetry involving belief attribution because the belief that one’s action would result in a certain side effect is a necessary component of each of the psychological attitudes in question. We argue further that this belief-attribution asymmetry is rational because it mirrors a belief-formation asymmetry, and that thebelief-formation asymmetry is also rational because it is more useful to form some beliefs than others.
    56. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  56. Breaking Out of Moral Typecasting.Adam J. Arico - 2012 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (3):425-438.
    In their recent paper, Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner offer a model of moral cognition, the “Moral Typecasting” thesis, in which they claim that perceptions of moral agency are inversely related to perceptions of moral patiency. Once we see someone as a moral agent, they claim, we cannot see them as a moral patient (and vice versa). In this paper, I want both to challenge the conception of morality on which the typecasting thesis is fundamentally based and to raise some concerns with the data offered in favor of moral typecasting. I first argue that the dyadic definition of morality is far too narrow to fully capture either all of morality or all of moral psychology. Further, even setting aside the problems with the dyadic notion of morality, I argue that the experimental data Gray and Wegner appeal to fail to demonstrate the sort of mutual exclusivity of and causal interaction between moral perceptions that the moral typecasting thesis proposes. Rather, I suggest, the perceptual differences that do show up in the cited studies arguably arise not from a psychological tendency towards moral typecasting, but from confounding features of the characters in the stimuli.
    57. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  57. Judgments about moral responsibility and determinism in patients with behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia: Still compatibilists.Florian Cova, Maxime Bertoux, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde & Bruno Dubois - 2012 - Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2):851-864.
    Do laypeople think that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Recently, philosophers and psychologists trying to answer this question have found contradictory results: while some experiments reveal people to have compatibilist intuitions, others suggest that people could in fact be incompatibilist. To account for this contradictory answers, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have advanced a ‘performance error model’ according to which people are genuine incompatibilist that are sometimes biased to give compatibilist answers by emotional reactions. To test for this hypothesis, we investigated intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility in patients suffering from behavioural frontotemporal dementia. Patients suffering from bvFTD have impoverished emotional reaction. Thus, the ‘performance error model’ should predict that bvFTD patients will give less compatibilist answers. However, we found that bvFTD patients give answers quite similar to subjects in control group and were mostly compatibilist. Thus, we conclude that the ‘performance error model’ should be abandoned in favour of other available model that best fit our data.
    58. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  58. Side-Effect effect without side effects: The pervasive impact of moral considerations on judgments of intentionality.Florian Cova & Hichem Naar - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (6):837-854.
    Studying the folk concept of intentional action, Knobe (2003a) discovered a puzzling asymmetry: most people consider some bad side effects as intentional while they consider some good side effects as unintentional. In this study, we extend these findings with new experiments. The first experiment shows that the very same effect can be found in ascriptions of intentionality in the case of means for action. The second and third experiments show that means are nevertheless generally judged more intentional than side effects, and that people do take into account the structure of the action when ascribing intentionality. We then discuss a number of hypotheses that can account for these data, using reactions times from our first experiment.
    59. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  59. Testing Sripada's Deep Self model.Florian Cova & Hichem Naar - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (5):647 - 659.
    Sripada has recently advanced a new account for asymmetries that have been uncovered in folk judgments of intentionality: the ?Deep Self model,? according to which an action is more likely to be judged as intentional if it matches the agent's central and stable attitudes and values (i.e., the agent's Deep Self). In this paper, we present new experiments that challenge this model in two ways: first, we show that the Deep Self model makes predictions that are falsified, then we present cases that it cannot account for. Finally, we discuss how the Deep Self model could be modified to accommodate these new data.
    60. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  60. Mind Perception is the Essence of Morality.Kurt Gray, Liane Young & Adam Waytz - 2012 - Psychological Inquiry 23 (2):101-124.
    Mind perception entails ascribing mental capacities to other entities, whereas moral judgment entails labeling entities as good or bad or actions as right or wrong. We suggest that mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. In particular, we suggest that moral judgment is rooted in a cognitive template of two perceived minds—a moral dyad of an intentional agent and a suffering moral patient. Diverse lines of research support dyadic morality. First, perceptions of mind are linked to moral judgments: dimensions of mind perception (agency and experience) map onto moral types (agents and patients), and deficits of mind perception correspond to difficulties with moral judgment. Second, not only are moral judgments sensitive to perceived agency and experience, but all moral transgressions are fundamentally understood as agency plus experienced suffering—that is, interpersonal harm—even ostensibly harmless acts such as purity violations. Third, dyadic morality uniquely accounts for the phenomena of dyadic completion (seeing agents in response to patients, and vice versa), and moral typecasting (characterizing others as either moral agents or moral patients). Discussion also explores how mind perception can unify morality across explanatory levels, how a dyadic template of morality may be developmentally acquired, and future directions.
    61. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  61. On Doing Things Intentionally.Pierre Jacob, Cova Florian & Dupoux Emmanuel - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (4):378-409.
    Recent empirical and conceptual research has shown that moral considerations have an influence on the way we use the adverb 'intentionally'. Here we propose our own account of these phenomena, according to which they arise from the fact that the adverb 'intentionally' has three different meanings that are differently selected by contextual factors, including normative expectations. We argue that our hypotheses can account for most available data and present some new results that support this. We end by discussing the implications of our account for folk psychology.
    62. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  62. Experimental Philosophy.Joshua Knobe, Wesley Buckwalter, Shaun Nichols, Philip Robbins, Hagop Sarkissian & Tamler Sommers - 2012 - Annual Review of Psychology 63 (1):81-99.
    Experimental philosophy is a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy. The present review focuses on research in experimental philosophy on four central questions. First, why is it that people's moral judgments appear to influence their intuitions about seemingly nonmoral questions? Second, do people think that moral questions have objective answers, or do they see morality as fundamentally relative? Third, do people believe in free will, and do they see free will as compatible with determinism? Fourth, how do people determine whether an entity is conscious?
    63. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  63. What in the World is Weakness of Will?Joshua May & Richard Holton - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 157 (3):341–360.
    At least since the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to identify weakness of will with akrasia—i.e. acting, or having a disposition to act, contrary to one‘s judgments about what is best for one to do. However, there has been some recent debate about whether this captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will. Richard Holton (1999, 2009) claims that it doesn’t, while Alfred Mele (2010) argues that, to a certain extent, it does. As Mele recognizes, the question about an ordinary concept here is one apt for empirical investigation. We evaluate Mele’s studies and report some experiments of our own in order to investigate what in the world the ordinary concept of weakness of will is. We conclude that neither Mele nor Holton (previously) was quite right and offer a tentative proposal of our own: the ordinary notion is more like a prototype or cluster concept whose application is affected by a variety of factors.
    64. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  64. Awareness of Unawareness Folk Psychology and Introspective Transparency.Benjamin Kozuch & Shaun Nichols - 2011 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (11-12):11-12.
    A tradition of work in cognitive science indicates that much of our mental lives is not available to introspection . Though the researchers often present these results as surprising, little has been done to explore the degree to which people presume introspective access to their mental events. In this paper, we distinguish two dimensions of introspective access: the power of access, i.e. whether people believe they can unfailingly or only typically introspect mental events; and the domain of access, i.e. what types of mental events people believe they are able to introspect. We report five experiments carried out to discover where lay beliefs about introspection fall on these dimensions. In our experiments, people did not presume universal introspective access, but they did overestimate the amount of access they actually have, particularly in the case of decisions.
    65. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  65. Frankfurt and the folk: An experimental investigation of Frankfurt-style cases.Jason S. Miller & Adam Feltz - 2011 - Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2):401-414.
    An important disagreement in contemporary debates about free will hinges on whether an agent must have alternative possibilities to be morally responsible. Many assume that notions of alternative possibilities are ubiquitous and reflected in everyday intuitions about moral responsibility: if one lacks alternatives, then one cannot be morally responsible. We explore this issue empirically. In two studies, we find evidence that folk judgments about moral responsibility call into question two popular principles that require some form of alternative possibilities for moral responsibility. Survey participants given scenarios involving agents that fail to satisfy these principles nonetheless found these agents to be morally responsible, blameworthy, deserving of blame, and at fault for morally bad actions and consequences. We defend our interpretation of this evidence against objections and explore some implications of these findings for the free will debate.
    66. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  66. Philosophy's New challenge: Experiments and Intentional Action.N. Ángel Pinillos, Nick Smith, G. Shyam Nair, Peter Marchetto & Cecilea Mun - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (1):115-139.
    Experimental philosophers have gathered impressive evidence for the surprising conclusion that philosophers' intuitions are out of step with those of the folk. As a result, many argue that philosophers' intuitions are unreliable. Focusing on the Knobe Effect, a leading finding of experimental philosophy, we defend traditional philosophy against this conclusion. Our key premise relies on experiments we conducted which indicate that judgments of the folk elicited under higher quality cognitive or epistemic conditions are more likely to resemble those of the philosopher. We end by showing how our experimental findings can help us better understand the Knobe Effect.
    67. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  67. Persistent bias in expert judgments about free will and moral responsibility: A test of the Expertise Defense.Eric Schulz, Edward T. Cokely & Adam Feltz - 2011 - Consciousness and Cognition 20 (4):1722-1731.
    Many philosophers appeal to intuitions to support some philosophical views. However, there is reason to be concerned about this practice as scientific evidence has documented systematic bias in philosophically relevant intuitions as a function of seemingly irrelevant features (e.g., personality). One popular defense used to insulate philosophers from these concerns holds that philosophical expertise eliminates the influence of these extraneous factors. Here, we test this assumption. We present data suggesting that verifiable philosophical expertise in the free will debate-as measured by a reliable and validated test of expert knowledge-does not eliminate the influence of one important extraneous feature (i.e., the heritable personality trait extraversion) on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important cases, the expertise defense fails. Implications for the practice of philosophy, experimental philosophy, and applied ethics are discussed.
    68. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  68. Empirical tests of philosophical intuitions.Robert L. Woolfolk - 2011 - Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2):415-416.
    Experimental philosophy seeks to examine empirically various factual issues that, either explicitly or implicitly, lie at the foundations of philosophical positions. A study of this genre (Miller & Feltz, 2011) was critiqued. Questions about the study were raised and broader issues pertaining to the field of experimental philosophy were discussed.
    69. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  69. Colours, colour relationalism and the deliverances of introspection.J. Cohen & S. Nichols - 2010 - Analysis 70 (2):218-228.
    An important motivation for relational theories of color is that they resolve apparent conflicts about color: x can, without contradiction, be red relative to S1 and not red relative to S2. Alas, many philosophers claim that the view is incompatible with naive, phenomenally grounded introspection. However, when we presented normal adults with apparent conflicts about color (among other properties), we found that many were open to the relationalist's claim that apparently competing variants can simultaneously be correct. This suggests that, philosophers' claims to the contrary notwithstanding, introspection does not supply authoritative and unambiguous reason to reject color relationalism.
    70. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  70. Intuitions, counter-examples, and experimental philosophy.Max Deutsch - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3):447-460.
    Practitioners of the new ‘experimental philosophy’ have collected data that appear to show that some philosophical intuitions are culturally variable. Many experimental philosophers take this to pose a problem for a more traditional, ‘armchair’ style of philosophizing. It is argued that this is a mistake that derives from a false assumption about the character of philosophical methods; neither philosophy nor its methods have anything to fear from cultural variability in philosophical intuitions.
    71. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  71. Person as scientist, person as moralist.Joshua Knobe - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):315.
    It has often been suggested that people’s ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people’s moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people’s moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. It is argued that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.
    72. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  72. Editorial: Psychology and Experimental Philosophy.Joshua Knobe, Tania Lombrozo & Edouard Machery - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):157-160.
    Recent years have seen an explosion of new work at the intersection of philosophy and experimental psychology. This work takes the concerns with moral and conceptual issues that have so long been associated with philosophy and connects them with the use of systematic and well-controlled empirical investigations that one more typically finds in psychology. Work in this new field often goes under the name "experimental philosophy".
    73. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  73. Scientists and the Folk Have the Same Concepts.Neil Levy - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):344.
    If Knobe is right that ordinary judgments are normatively suffused, how do scientists free themselves from these influences? I suggest that because science is distributed and externalized, its claims can be manipulated in ways that allow normative influences to be hived off. This allows scientists to deploy concepts which are not normatively suffused. I suggest that there are good reasons to identify these normatively neutral concepts with the folk concepts.
    74. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  74. Expectations and morality: A dilemma.Eric Mandelbaum & David Ripley - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):346-346.
    We propose Knobe's explanation of his cases encounters a dilemma: Either his explanation works and, counterintuitively, morality is not at the heart of these effects; or morality is at the heart of the effects and Knobe's explanation does not succeed. This dilemma is then used to temper the use of the Knobe paradigm for discovering moral norms.
    75. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  75. The Intentional Action Factory.Mark Phelan - 2010 - The Philosophers' Magazine 52.
    This short paper, forthcoming as part of a symposium on experimental philosophy to appear in the popular publication, The Philosophers’ Magazine (including contributions by Papineau, Stich, Machery, Sommers, and Knobe), offers an accessible summary of seven years of experimental-philosophical research into intentional action attributions.
    76. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  76. The Deep Self Model and asymmetries in folk judgments about intentional action.Chandra Sekhar Sripada - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 151 (2):159-176.
    Recent studies by experimental philosophers demonstrate puzzling asymmetries in people’s judgments about intentional action, leading many philosophers to propose that normative factors are inappropriately influencing intentionality judgments. In this paper, I present and defend the Deep Self Model of judgments about intentional action that provides a quite different explanation for these judgment asymmetries. The Deep Self Model is based on the idea that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, an Acting Self that contains the desires, means-end beliefs, and intentions that are the immediate causal source of an agent’s actions, and a Deep Self, which contains an agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes, including the agent’s values, principles, life goals, and other more fundamental attitudes. The Deep Self Model proposes that when people are asked to make judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally, in addition to standard criteria proposed in traditional models, people also assess an additional ‘Concordance Criterion’: Does the outcome concord with the psychological attitudes of the agent’s Deep Self? I show that the Deep Self Model can explain a very complex pattern of judgment asymmetries documented in the experimental philosophy literature, and does so in a way that has significant advantages over competing models.
    77. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  77. The proper province of philosophy.Justin Sytsma - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3):427-445.
    The practice of conceptual analysis has undergone a revival in recent years. Although the extent of its role in philosophy is controversial, many now accept that conceptual analysis has at least some role to play. Granting this, I consider the relevance of empirical investigation to conceptual analysis. I do so by contrasting an extreme position (anti-empirical conceptual analysis) with a more moderate position (non-empirical conceptual analysis). I argue that anti-empirical conceptual analysis is not a viable position because it has no means for resolving conceptual disputes that arise between seemingly competent speakers of the language. This is illustrated by considering one such dispute that has been pressed by a prominent advocate of anti-empirical conceptual analysis: Bennett and Hacker ( 2003 ) assert that psychological predicates only logically apply to whole living animals, but many scientists and philosophers use the terms more broadly. I argue that to resolve such disputes we need to empirically investigate the common understanding of the terms at issue. I then show how this can be done by presenting the results of three studies concerning the application of “calculates” to computers.
    78. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  78. Dennett’s Theory of the Folk Theory of Consciousness.Justin Sytsma - 2010 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (3-4):3-4.
    It is not uncommon to find assumptions being made about folk psychology in the discussions of phenomenal consciousness in philosophy of mind. In this article I consider one example, focusing on what Dan Dennett says about the 'folk theory of consciousness'. I show that he holds that the folk believe that qualities like colours that we are acquainted with in ordinary perception are phenomenal qualities. Nonetheless, the shape of the folk theory is an empirical matter and in the absence of empirical investigation there is ample room for doubt. Fortunately, experimental evidence on the topic is now being produced by experimental philosophers and psychologists. This article contributes to this growing literature, presenting the results of six new studies on the folk view of colours and pains. I argue that the results indicate against Dennett's theory of the folk theory of consciousness.
    79. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  79. Moral Typecasting: Divergent perceptions of moral agents and moral patients.Kurt Gray & Daniel Wegner - 2009 - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96 (3):505-520.
    80. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  80. At the Heart of Morality Lies Folk Psychology.Steve Guglielmo, Andrew E. Monroe & Bertram F. Malle - 2009 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 52 (5):449-466.
    Moral judgments about an agent's behavior are enmeshed with inferences about the agent's mind. Folk psychology—the system that enables such inferences—therefore lies at the heart of moral judgment. We examine three related folk-psychological concepts that together shape people's judgments of blame: intentionality, choice, and free will. We discuss people's understanding and use of these concepts, address recent findings that challenge the autonomous role of these concepts in moral judgment, and conclude that choice is the fundamental concept of the three, defining the core of folk psychology in moral judgment.
    81. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  81. The Pervasive Impact of Moral Judgment.Dean Pettit & Joshua Knobe - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (5):586-604.
    Shows that the very same asymmetries that arise for intentionally also arise from deciding, desiring, in favor of, opposed to, and advocating. It seems that the phenomenon is not due to anything about the concept of intentional action in particular. Rather, the effects observed for the concept of intentional action should be regarded as just one manifestation of the pervasive impact of moral judgment.
    82. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  82. Experimental Philosophy Is Here to Stay.Chris Weigel - 2009 - Analyse & Kritik 31 (2):221-242.
    Experimental philosophy is comprised of two broad projects, the negative project and the positive project, each of which is a response to a kind of armchair use of intuitions. I examine two examples of the negative project-the analysis of knowledge and the theory of reference-and two examples of the positive project-free will and intentional action-and review criticisms of each example. I show how the criticisms can be met and argue that even if they could not have been met, experimental philosophy raises important questions about methodology, opening the door on new questions and new ways of looking at old questions. For that reason, experimental philosophy as a movement is robust and full of potential.
    83. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  83. Replies to Kornblith, Jackson and Moore.Timothy Williamson - 2009 - Analysis 69 (1):125-135.
    My agreement with Hilary Kornblith goes deeper than any remaining disagreement. We agree that armchair methods have a legitimate place in philosophy, for instance in logic. We agree that appeals to experimental data also have a legitimate place in philosophy, for instance in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of time, and that those branches study mind and time themselves, not just our concepts of them. We agree that the proper balance between armchair and other methods cannot be fully determined in advance, but should to some extent emerge from the future development of the discipline. Nevertheless, as Kornblith says, we are not placing quite the same bets on what that balance will be. I expect armchair methods to play legitimately a more dominant role in future philosophy than he expects them to – of course, such differences in emphasis can result in widening divergence in practice.The Philosophy of Philosophy welcomes a significant degree of methodological diversity short of ‘Anything goes’, for often the best long-run way to evaluate a philosophical method is for many able philosophers to use it for many years . That includes methods that make heavy use of experimental data. The book is not an attack on experimental philosophy, in which I have even dabbled myself . I could hardly object to Kornblith's suggestion that experimental psychology should contribute to epistemology, since in discussing the epistemology of logic I appeal to experimental data from the psychology of reasoning . Indeed, it would be a grave failure of philosophy in its current state of development if it neglected to explore the philosophical applications of experimental data far more extensively than has hitherto been done. It is work that needs doing and surely will be done, although I do not expect to ….
    84. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  84. Asymmetries in judgments of responsibility and intentional action.Jennifer Cole Wright & John Bengson - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (1):24-50.
    Abstract: Recent experimental research on the 'Knobe effect' suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that there is a bi-directional relation between attributions of intentional action and evaluative considerations. We defend a novel account of this phenomenon that exploits two factors: (i) an intuitive asymmetry in judgments of responsibility (e.g. praise/blame) and (ii) the fact that intentionality commonly connects the evaluative status of actions to the responsibility of actors. We present the results of several new studies that provide empirical evidence in support of this account while disconfirming various currently prominent alternative accounts. We end by discussing some implications of this account for folk psychology.
    85. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  85. Bad acts, blameworthy agents, and intentional actions : some problems for juror impartiality.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2008 - In Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 149.
    86. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  86. The folk psychology of souls.Jesse M. Bering - 2006 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (5):453-+.
    The present article examines how people’s belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal behavior represented as being causally related to one’s afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is “like” to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people’s interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive “system” dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment.
    87. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  87. Is There a “Pessimistic” Bias in Individual Beliefs? Evidence from a Simple Survey.Selima Ben Mansour, Elyès Jouini & Clotilde Napp - 2006 - Theory and Decision 61 (4):345-362.
    It is an important issue for economic and finance applications to determine whether individuals exhibit a behavioral bias toward pessimism in their beliefs, in a lottery or more generally in an investment opportunities framework. In this paper, we analyze the answers of a sample of 1,540 individuals to the following question “Imagine that a coin will be flipped 10 times. Each time, if heads, you win \\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$10\\texttt{C}\\!\\!\\!\\rule[2.3pt]{.4em}{.3pt}\\!\\!\\rule[3.3pt]{.4em}{.3pt}$$\\end{docum ent}. How many times do you think that you will win?” The average answer is surprisingly about 3.9 which is below the average 5, and we interpret this as a pessimistic bias. We find that women are more “pessimistic” than men, as are old people relative to young. We also analyze how our notion of pessimism is related to more general notions of pessimism previously introduced in psychology.
    88. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  88. Desire, foresight, intentions, and intentional actions: Probing folk intuitions.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):133-157.
    A number of philosophers working under the rubric of “experimental philosophy” have recently begun focusing on analyzing the concepts of ordinary language and investigating the intuitions of laypersons in an empirically informed way.1 In a series of papers these philosophers—who often work in collaboration with psychologists—have presented the results of empirical studies aimed at proving folk intuitions in areas as diverse as ethics, epistemology, free will, and the philosophy of action. In this paper, I contribute to this research program by discussing the results of some new experiments that further probe folk intuitions about the relationship between desire, foresight, intent, intentional action, and moral considerations.
    89. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  89. The phenomenal stance.Philip Robbins & Anthony I. Jack - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 127 (1):59-85.
    Cognitive science is shamelessly materialistic. It maintains that human beings are nothing more than complex physical systems, ultimately and completely explicable in mechanistic terms. But this conception of humanity does not ?t well with common sense. To think of the creatures we spend much of our day loving, hating, admiring, resenting, comparing ourselves to, trying to understand, blaming, and thanking -- to think of them as mere mechanisms seems at best counterintuitive and unhelpful. More often it may strike us as ludicrous, or even abhorrent. We are.
    90. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  90. Immunity to error through misidentification and the bodily illusion experiment.Masaharu Mizumoto & Masato Ishikawa - 2005 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (7):3-19.
    In this paper we introduce a paradigm of experiment which, we believe, is of interest both in psychology and philosophy. There the subject wears an HMD (head-mount display), and a camera is set up at the upper corner of the room, in which the subject is. As a result, the subject observes his own body through the HMD. We will mainly focus on the philosophical relevance of this experiment, especially to the thesis of so-called 'immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun'. We will argue that one experiment conducted in this setting, which we call the bodily illusion experiment, provides a counterexample to that thesis.
    91. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  91. On praise, side effects, and folk ascriptions of intentionality.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):196-213.
    In everyday discourse, we often draw a distinction between actions that are performed intentionally (e.g. opening your car door) and those that are performed unintentionally (e.g. shutting a car door on your finger). This distinction has interested philosophers working in a number of different areas. Indeed, intentional actions are not only the primary focus of those concerned with understanding and explaining human behavior, but they often occupy center stage in philosophical discussions of free will and moral and legal responsibility as well. And while most philosophers agree that the distinction between intentional and unintentional action plays an important role in our folk psychology, there is still wide-scale disagreement about the precise nature of this role. Until recently, there has been a lack of empirical data about the folk concept of intentional action and as a result the debate among philosophers has been mostly.
    92. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  92. The folk psychology of free will: Fits and starts.Shaun Nichols - 2004 - Mind and Language 19 (5):473-502.
    According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develops from a prior notion of obligation. Finally, the paper sets out how this work might illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.
    93. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  93. Folk Psychology and Social Inference: Everyday Solutions to the Problem of Other Minds.Daniel Robert Ames - 1999 - Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
    In the course of everyday life, perceivers make sense of one another with speed and confidence, judging intentions, forming impressions, predicting a person's next move. But what is the nature of such social inferences and how do they unfold? Building on the work of philosophers and developmental psychologists, I argue that, at its core, person perception is bound up with the so-called problem of other minds: the inference of other people's thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires. While this folk psychological approach resonates with earlier social psychological work, it stands in contrast with contemporary scholarship that stresses the role of behaviors in social judgment and affords almost no place to mental state inferences. ;A model of mental state inferences is developed to describe impression formation. Perceivers are portrayed as using three inferential strategies: evidence use, implicit theory use, and social projection. Five studies reveal empirical support for this approach. In Studies 1, 2, and 3, university students judged scenarios of ambiguous behaviors. Impressions of targets were closely related to inferences about beliefs, desires, and feelings; these judgments fully mediated the connection between behaviors and impressions in a variety of cases. In Study 4, judgments of scenario actor mental states showed the predicted effects of implicit theory use and social projection. In Study 5, unacquainted participants were randomly paired with one another for conversation and a variety of tasks. Subsequent responses showed the predicted mental state inference mediation pattern: the effect of behaviors on global impressions of the partner was fully mediated by judgments about the partner's mental states. ;While these findings build on earlier approaches, they are the first direct evidence of mental state inference mediation in person perception. The results hold implications for various traditions. Notably, process models of dispositional inference, which describe links between behaviors and trait judgments, are challenged to accommodate mental state inferences. More broadly, scholars of social judgment are encouraged to consider the role of mental state inference. Reframing various phenomena of social sensemaking as issues of judgments about other minds holds the potential for novel insights and greater theoretical integration.
    94. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  94. 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.
    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.
    95. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  95. Internal consistency of subjective probabilities.Cameron R. Peterson, Z. J. Ulehla, Alan J. Miller, Lyle E. Bourne & Donald W. Stilson - 1965 - Journal of Experimental Psychology 70 (5):526.
    96. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  96. The prediction of decisions among bets.Ward Edwards - 1955 - Journal of Experimental Psychology 50 (3):201.
    97. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  97. The Robots of the Dawn of Experimental Philosophy of Mind.Justin Sytsma - unknown
    In this chapter, I consider two hypotheses that have informed recent work in experimental philosophy of mind. The first is a positive hypothesis put forward by Fiala, Arico, and Nichols : Categorization of an entity as an agent through fast, automatic, and domain-specific processing produces a disposition to ascribe a wide range of mental states to that entity. The second is a negative hypothesis put forward by Sytsma and Machery: The existence of phenomenally conscious mental states is not obvious from first-person experience with states like seeing red and feeling pain. I argue that these hypotheses are not necessary at odds. Despite this, empirical results reported by Sytsma and Machery raise concerns for FAN's hypothesis, while results reported by FAN in response raise concerns for our hypothesis. I address these concerns in this essay, presenting the results of four new studies that support our negative hypothesis against FAN's challenge.
    98. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  98. A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the methods of experimental philosophy.John Yates - unknown
    Actual situations where folk philosophy might have predicted precognition effects were studied and dealt with experimentally and theoretically. Extremely strong experimental results were obtained but the findings supported not precognition but the Many Bubble Interpretation, which uses at this time dynamical systems theory as applied to the physics of the brain. Further experiments and theoretical work were discussed.
    99. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  99. The Many Bubble Interpretation, externalism, the extended mind of David Chalmers and Andy Clark, and the work of Alva Noe in connection with Experimental Philosophy and Dreamwork.John Yates - unknown
    The idea of dreams being mere internal artifacts of the mind does not seem to be essential to externalism and extended mind theories, which seem as if they would function as well without this additional assumption. The Many Bubble Interpretation could allow a simpler rationale to externalist theories, which may be even simpler if the assumption that dreams have no worthwhile content outside the mind is omitted.
    100. "; function xpapers_embed_init() { if (arguments.callee.done) return; arguments.callee.done = true; var el = document.getElementById('xpapers_gadget'); if (el) { el.innerHTML = xpapers_embed_buffer + "
    powered by PhilPapers"; } } if (document.addEventListener) { document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', xpapers_embed_init, false); } (function() { /*@*/ try { document.body.doScroll('up'); return xpapers_embed_init(); } catch(e) {} /* (false) @*/ if (/loaded|complete/.test(document.readyState)) return xpapers_embed_init(); /* @*/ if (!xpapers_embed_init.done) setTimeout(arguments.callee, 30); })(); if (window.addEventListener) { window.addEventListener('load', xpapers_embed_init, false); } else if (window.attachEvent) { window.attachEvent('onload', xpapers_embed_init); } //v1.0