In Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds, Edouard Machery argues that resolving many traditional and contemporary philosophical issues is beyond our epistemic reach and that philosophy should re-orient itself toward more humble, but ultimately more important intellectual endeavors, such as the analysis of concepts.

I am grateful for Joshua Alexander and Jonathan Weinberg’s, Avner Baz’s and Max Deutsch’s insightful comments on Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds. I have lea.

In a recent paper, Joshua Knobe (2019) offers a startling account of the metaphilosophical implications of findings in experimental philosophy. We argue that Knobe’s account is seriously mistaken, and that it is based on a radically misleading portrait of recent work in experimental philosophy and cultural psychology.

<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>. (shrink)

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one's intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology has shown systematic differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases. In light of these findings on (...) cultural differences, two experiments were conducted which explored intuitions about reference in Westerners and East Asians. Both experiments indicate that, for certain central cases, Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view. These results constitute prima facie evidence that semantic intuitions vary from culture to culture, and that paper argues that this fact raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference. (shrink)

This chapter shows that the experimental philosophy has much to offer to philosophy of science by reviewing the existing experimental‐philosophy work in the philosophy of science and by defending it against an important criticism. A natural way of extending experimental philosophy methods to the philosophy of science is to survey scientists’ judgments. The chapter presents two projects in the philosophy of science that can benefit from such surveys: analyzing the scientific concepts found in particular scientific communities and studying scientific cognition. (...) It explains how surveying lay people's judgments can bear on issues in the philosophy of science. The chapter examines the possible contributions of bibliometric, ethnographic and cliometric methods to the philosophy of science. Ethnographic methods are particularly useful to study the social structure of science, the nature and role of social norms in the production of scientific knowledge, and the discovery heuristics at work in everyday scientific practice. (shrink)

In this article, we present evidence that in four different cultural groups that speak quite different languages there are cases of justified true beliefs that are not judged to be cases of knowledge. We hypothesize that this intuitive judgment, which we call “the Gettier intuition,” may be a reflection of an underlying innate and universal core folk epistemology, and we highlight the philosophical significance of its universality.

La problématique des rapports entre l’agriculture et le capitalisme resurgit à intervalles réguliers, et suscite des controverses entre des chercheurs se réclamant, de près ou de loin, de Marx et de ses continuateurs. Des deux côtés de la Manche, la fin des années 1960 et le début des années 1970 constituent un moment important de redécouverte, de discussion et de réinterprétation des travaux marxistes sur la question paysanne et agraire. Pourtant, le débat en France à cette époque tranche nettement avec (...) celui qu’on peut observer au sein du « peasants seminar » de la School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) de Londres. Ce regain d’intérêt pour la paysannerie et l’agriculture s’accompagna en Angleterre d’une relecture des thèses classiques de Marx, d’Engels, de Lénine ou encore de Kautsky. Il ne s’agissait pas de « jeter le bébé marxiste avec l’eau du bain », comme ce fut le cas en France, mais bien de prolonger et d’enrichir l’analyse marxiste classique et de l’actualiser dans un contexte marqué par les luttes anticoloniales, la remise en cause du « productivisme », et la remise en question du modèle soviétique. (shrink)

Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs of the budding neuropsychology of concepts. But our empirical knowledge about concepts has yet to be organized in a coherent framework. -/- In Doing without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant psychological theories of concepts fail to provide such a framework and that drastic conceptual changes are required to (...) make sense of the research on concepts in psychology and neuropsychology. Machery shows that the class of concepts divides into several distinct kinds that have little in common with one another and that for this very reason, it is a mistake to attempt to encompass all known phenomena within a single theory of concepts. In brief, concepts are not a natural kind. Machery concludes that the theoretical notion of concept should be eliminated from the theoretical apparatus of contemporary psychology and should be replaced with theoretical notions that are more appropriate for fulfilling psychologists' goals. The notion of concept has encouraged psychologists to believe that a single theory of concepts could be developed, leading to useless theoretical controversies between the dominant paradigms of concepts. Keeping this notion would slow down, and maybe prevent, the development of a more adequate classification and would overshadow the theoretical and empirical issues that are raised by this more adequate classification. Anyone interested in cognitive science's emerging view of the mind will find Machery's provocative ideas of interest. (shrink)

Although cognitive scientists have learned a lot about concepts, their findings have yet to be organized in a coherent theoretical framework. In addition, after twenty years of controversy, there is little sign that philosophers and psychologists are converging toward an agreement about the very nature of concepts.Doing without Concepts(Machery 2009) attempts to remedy this state of affairs. In this article, I review the main points and arguments developed at greater length inDoing without Concepts.

Moral philosophers and psychologists often assume that people judge morally lucky and morally unlucky agents differently, an assumption that stands at the heart of the Puzzle of Moral Luck. We examine whether the asymmetry is found for reflective intuitions regarding wrongness, blame, permissibility, and punishment judg- ments, whether people’s concrete, case-based judgments align with their explicit, abstract principles regarding moral luck, and what psychological mechanisms might drive the effect. Our experiments produce three findings: First, in within-subjects experiments favorable to reflective (...) deliberation, the vast majority of people judge a lucky and an unlucky agent as equally blameworthy, and their actions as equally wrong and permissible. The philosophical Puzzle of Moral Luck, and the challenge to the very possibility of systematic ethics it is frequently taken to engender, thus simply do not arise. Second, punishment judgments are significantly more outcome- dependent than wrongness, blame, and permissibility judgments. While this constitutes evidence in favor of current Dual Process Theories of moral judgment, the latter need to be qualified: punishment and blame judgments do not seem to be driven by the same process, as is commonly argued in the literature. Third, in between-subjects experiments, outcome has an effect on all four types of moral judgments. This effect is mediated by negligence ascriptions and can ultimately be explained as due to differing probability ascriptions across cases. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that experts’ semantic intuitions are more reliable and provide better evidence than lay people’s intuitions—a thesis commonly called “the Expertise Defense.” Focusing on the intuitions about the reference of proper names, this article critically assesses the Expertise Defense.

Le problème public de l’exclusion du logement est régulé depuis les années 1980 par une action publique d’urgence : l’urgence sociale. Un de ces dispositifs centraux, l’hébergement, fonctionnait avant 2007 sur une temporalité spécifique : l’aide ponctuelle, qui fragmente l’habitat des plus précaires et qui fragilise leur rapport à l’avenir. C’est en ce sens que l’urgence sociale peut être conceptualisée comme une chronopolitique. En raison des conséquences épuisantes qu’elle a sur ses « bénéficiaires », cette chronopolitique a fait l’objet d’une (...) mobilisation revendiquant un droit à la continuité de l’habitat. Une écologie temporelle, prenant la forme d’une durée de séjour adaptée aux besoins singuliers des hébergés, est inscrite dans le droit par la loi Dalo. Mais ce droit est encore ineffectif, et les raisons s’en retrouvent aux différents niveaux de l’action publique : les gestionnaires de places se voient souvent contraints de partager temporellement le bien rare en donnant sa chance à tout le monde ; la rareté des places d’hébergement est entretenue par l’État central qui cherche ainsi à limiter l’appel d’air des précaires ; les travailleurs sociaux ressentent un désarroi face aux manières d’habiter inconditionnellement un hébergement à durée indéterminée. La possibilité d’habiter durablement dans un lieu garanti par des institutions et en dehors du marché du logement souffre d’une faible légitimité. (shrink)

This article develops a new, general account of replication. I argue that a replication is an experiment that resamples the experimental components of an ori...

In this précis, I review the main points and arguments developed at greater length in Doing without Concepts, and I explain why eliminating the notion of concept would contribute to the progress of the psychology of higher cognition.

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

Benjamin et al. Nature Human Behavior 2, 6–10 proposed decreasing the significance level by an order of magnitude to improve the replicability of psychology. This modest, practical proposal has been widely criticized, and its prospects remain unclear. This article defends this proposal against these criticisms and highlights its virtues.

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong-Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage (...) in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

L’article confronte la théorie de l’exploitation de Marx (qui envisage le capitalisme sous le prisme de la contradiction entre le capital et le travail) et la théorie de la destruction de Polanyi (qui l’envisage, lui, sous le prisme de la contradiction entre le marché autorégulé et la société toute entière). Plus profondément, il s’agit de savoir quelle place il faut accorder, aujourd’hui, aux luttes autour du soin (care), de la préservation ou de la réparation des « relations conditionnantes » aux (...) autruis humains et non humains qui composent notre milieu de vie. L’hypothèse développée ici, à partir des travaux de Nancy Fraser, est de penser les catégories de soin et de souci comme des conditions de l’émancipation. Autrement dit, il ne suffit pas de faire droit aux luttes féministes, « culturelles » ou écologistes à côté des luttes sociales, mais de repérer, derrière toute lutte sociale-économique, ces luttes dont le but est la préservation de sphères non-économiques d’existence. (shrink)

Introduction Cet article prend pour objet d’analyse un thème restreint : le sens de la technique, confronté au problème de l’histoire « entre » Hans Jonas et Günther Anders. Sur un plan biographique, Jonas mentionne à plusieurs reprises Anders dans ses Souvenirs essentiellement pour décrire leur rencontre, lorsqu’ils étaient tous les deux étudiants. Il le désigne également, dans leur correspondance, comme étant l’un de ses plus vieux amis. En dépit de la grande richesse de cette corres-pondan...

Machery et al. reported some preliminary evidence that intuitions about reference vary within and across cultures, and they argued that if real, such variation would have significant philosophical implications. In a recent article, Genoveva Martí argues that the type of intuitions examined by Machery and colleagues is evidentially irrelevant for identifying the correct theory of reference, and she concludes that the variation in the relevant intuitions about reference within and across cultures has not been established.To substantiate this criticism, Martí draws (...) a distinction between two types of intuitions: metalinguistic intuitions and what we will call ‘linguistic’ intuitions. Metalinguistic intuitions are judgements about the semantic properties of mentioned words, while, if we understand Martí correctly, linguistic intuitions are judgements about the individuals described in the actual and possible cases used by philosophers of language. These judgements would be expressed by sentences using words rather than mentioning them. An example might clarify this distinction. In Kripke's Gödel case, the judgement that the proper name ‘Gödel’ refers to Gödel and not to Schmidt is a metalinguistic intuition, since it is about the reference of the proper name ‘Gödel’; by contrast, the judgement that in this case Gödel should not have claimed credit for the incompleteness theorem is a linguistic intuition. Because Martí holds that only linguistic intuitions provide evidence for determining how reference is fixed and because Machery and colleagues used a question that elicited metalinguistic intuitions, she concludes that the variation in the relevant intuitions about reference …. (shrink)

Grau and Pury (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5, 155–168, 2014) reported that people’s views about love are related to their views about reference. This surprising effect was however not replicated in Cova et al.’s (in press) replication study. In this article, we show that the replication failure is probably due to the replication’s low power and that a metaanalytic reanalysis of the result in Cova et al. suggests that the effect reported in Grau and Pury is real. We then (...) report a large, highly powered replication that successfully replicates Grau and Pury 2014. This successful replication is a case study in the challenges involved in replicating scientific work, and our article contributes to the discussion of these challenges. (shrink)

In this paper I explore an underdiscussed factor contributing to the replication crisis: Scientists, and following them policy makers, often neglect sources of errors in the production and interpretation of data and thus overestimate what can be learnt from them. This neglect leads scientists to conduct experiments that are insufficiently informative and science consumers, including other scientists, to put too much weight on experimental results. The former leads to fragile empirical literatures, the latter to surprise and disappointment when the fragility (...) of the empirical basis of some disciplines is revealed. (shrink)

The question, ‘Is cognition linguistic?' divides recent cognitive theories into two antagonistic groups. Sententialists claim that we think in some language, while advocates of non linguistic views of cognition deny this claim. The Introspective Argument for Sententialism is one of the most appealing arguments for sententialism. In substance, it claims that the introspective fact of inner speech provides strong evidence that our thoughts are linguistic. This article challenges this argument. I claim that the Introspective Argument for Sententialism confuses the content (...) of our thoughts with their vehicles: while sententialism is a thesis about the vehicles of our thoughts, inner speech sentences are the content of auditory or articulatory images. The rebuttal of the introspective argument for sententialism is shown to have a general significance in cognitive science: Introspection does not tell us how we think. (shrink)

Le Sur la manière dont l’embryon reçoit l’âme, souvent appelé Ad Gaurum du nom de son dédicataire Gauros, est un traité qui fut longtemps attribué au médecin philosophe Galien (IIe siècle apr. J.‑C.) mais qui, depuis la fin du XIXe siècle, est attribué au philosophe néoplatonicien Porphyre (IIIe siècle apr. J.‑C.). En voici une admirable traduction commentée, précédée d’une riche introduction. P. 7-9, un avant-propos de L. Brisson souligne le caractère collectif de ce livre et donne les référ...

" Descartes ne qualifie sa cosmologie que sous le modeste diminutif d'une "fable du monde". Ceci peut s'interpréter comme l'aveu d'une impuissance de la raison à atteindre l'authentique fabrique du monde. Mais avant d'être une fiction dénuée de toute vérité, une fable est d'abord un récit, comme celui que l'Ecriture propose au premier livre de la Genèse. Nous enquêtons ici sur le commentaire cartésien de la Genèse, texte perdu, mais suffisamment avancé pour que Descartes envisageât, en 1640, de le soumettre (...) à l'approbation de la Sorbonne. Qu'y aurait-il montré? Qu'en concevant le mouvement comme une séparation réciproque des parties de l'étendue, il se conformait à la lettre au récit mosaïque de la création. Descartes s'appuie sur une lecture précise de la Genèse, mais une lecture si originale et si peu orthodoxe qu'il doit presque aussitôt renoncer à en faire une caution pour sa philosophie naturelle. Nous enquêtons donc moins sur cet In Genesim, que sur les raisons de sa disparition. ". (shrink)

L’autobiographie intellectuelle du Discours de la méthode fait reposer la vocation philosophique de Descartes sur un événement, souvent associé à la découverte des « fondements de la science admirable », le 10 novembre 1619. L’article rapporte ici cet événement à l’injonction à « l’étude de soi » prescrite par les premières pages de la Sagesse de Charron. Il montre ensuite les similitudes entre la structure narrative du récit cartésien (le voyage, la halte, le choix du chemin, la mathesis comme « (...) chemin sûr ») et les auto-fictions narratives publiées par le mathématicien Caspar Grünewald entre 1617 et 1619. Enfin, il montre que le « désir d’apprendre à distinguer le vrai d’avec le faux » réécrit, sans lyrisme ni fioritures, le récit séminal du placard de la licence en droit (1616), où le récit de la vocation entrecroisait poétiquement les références mythologiques et théologiques. (shrink)

La justice prédictive a pour objet de dire ce qui pourrait être jugé en se fondant sur ce qui a déjà été jugé. Elle repose ainsi sur l’exploitation des bases de données de jurisprudence en cours de développement. Conçue pour éclairer les personnes sur l’issue probable d’un litige, elle pourrait avoir pour effet premier de dissuader des personnes de recourir à un juge pour régler un litige dont la solution apparaîtrait prévisible. Elle ne peut se substituer à l’acte de juger, (...) qui consiste à rendre une décision motivée en fait et en droit sur la base d’éléments ayant pu être débattus contradictoirement. Elle pourrait toutefois enrichir les débats judiciaires et contribuer à définir et préciser l’équilibre entre prévisibilité et imprévisibilité nécessaire à l’exercice de la justice. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans la revue Sociologie du travail, vol. 59 - n° 3 | Juillet-Septembre 2017. Nous remercions Edouard Gardella de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Résumé : Dans les travaux sociologiques problématisant la pauvreté comme une relation d'assistance, il est courant d'analyser les aidants et/ou les aidés. Il est plus rare d'observer leur interdépendance, en considérant de manière systématique les pratiques par lesquelles chacun tient compte des effets de son action sur l'autre — (...) - Sociologie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

The present research examines whether identity essentialism, an important component of psychological essentialism, is a fundamental feature of human cognition. Across three studies (Ntotal = 1723), we report evidence that essentialist intuitions about the identity of kinds are culturally dependent, demographically variable, and easily malleable. The first study considered essentialist intuitions in 10 different countries spread across four continents. Participants were presented with two scenarios meant to elicit essentialist intuitions. Their answers suggest that essentialist intuitions vary dramatically across cultures. Furthermore, (...) these intuitions were found to vary with gender, education, and across eliciting stimuli. The second study further examined whether essentialist intuitions are stable across different kinds of eliciting stimuli. Participants were presented with two different scenarios meant to elicit essentialist intuitions—the “discovery” and “transformation” scenarios. Their answers suggest that the nature of the eliciting stimuli influences whether or not people report essentialist intuitions. Finally, the third study demonstrates that essentialist intuitions are susceptible to framing effects. Keeping the eliciting stimulus (i.e., the scenario) constant, we show that the formulation of the question eliciting a judgment influences whether or not people have essentialist intuitions. Implications of these findings for identity essentialism and psychological essentialism, in general, are discussed. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines, n° 4, 2003. Nous remercions Édouard Gardella de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Pour un cheminement vers la notion de « self » (Goffman) Là où l'âme prétend s'unifier, là où le Moi s'invente une identité ou une cohérence, le généalogiste part à la recherche du commencement – des commencements innombrables […]. Suivre la filière complexe de la provenance, […] c'est découvrir qu'à la racine de ce que (...) nous connaissons et de ce que nous sommes, (...) - Sociologie – Nouvel article. (shrink)