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Eric Schwitzgebel
University of California, Riverside
  1.  83
    Perplexities of Consciousness.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2011 - Bradford.
    Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recount your vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950s researchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when most movies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreams contained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher Eric (...)
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  2. Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-Philosophers.Eric Schwitzgebel & Fiery Cushman - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (2):135-153.
    We examined the effects of order of presentation on the moral judgments of professional philosophers and two comparison groups. All groups showed similar-sized order effects on their judgments about hypothetical moral scenarios targeting the doctrine of the double effect, the action-omission distinction, and the principle of moral luck. Philosophers' endorsements of related general moral principles were also substantially influenced by the order in which the hypothetical scenarios had previously been presented. Thus, philosophical expertise does not appear to enhance the stability (...)
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  3. The unreliability of naive introspection.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2006 - Philosophical Review 117 (2):245-273.
    We are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our own ongoing conscious experience, our current phenomenology. Even in this apparently privileged domain, our self-knowledge is faulty and untrustworthy. We are not simply fallible at the margins but broadly inept. Examples highlighted in this essay include: emotional experience (for example, is it entirely bodily; does joy have a common, distinctive phenomenological core?), peripheral vision (how broad and stable is the region of visual clarity?), and the (...)
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  4. Knowing That P without Believing That P.Blake Myers-Schulz & Eric Schwitzgebel - 2013 - Noûs 47 (2):371-384.
    Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing that P. Accordingly, (...)
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  5. Acting contrary to our professed beliefs or the gulf between occurrent judgment and dispositional belief.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2010 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91 (4):531-553.
    People often sincerely assert or judge one thing (for example, that all the races are intellectually equal) while at the same time being disposed to act in a way evidently quite contrary to the espoused attitude (for example, in a way that seems to suggest an implicit assumption of the intellectual superiority of their own race). Such cases should be regarded as ‘in-between’ cases of believing, in which it's neither quite right to ascribe the belief in question nor quite right (...)
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  6. A Phenomenal, Dispositional Account of Belief.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2002 - Noûs 36 (2):249-275.
    This paper describes and defends in detail a novel account of belief, an account inspired by Ryle's dispositional characterization of belief, but emphasizing irreducibly phenomenal and cognitive dispositions as well as behavioral dispositions. Potential externalist and functionalist objections are considered, as well as concerns motivated by the inevitably ceteris paribus nature of the relevant dispositional attributions. It is argued that a dispositional account of belief is particularly well-suited to handle what might be called "in-between" cases of believing - cases in (...)
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  7. Philosophers’ biased judgments persist despite training, expertise and reflection.Eric Schwitzgebel & Fiery Cushman - 2015 - Cognition 141 (C):127-137.
    We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers’ judgments about a moral puzzle case (the “trolley problem”) and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman “Asian disease” scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants were encouraged to consider “different variants of the (...)
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  8.  96
    Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic.Russell T. Hurlburt & Eric Schwitzgebel - 2007 - MIT Press.
    On a remarkably thin base of evidence – largely the spectral analysis of points of light – astronomers possess, or appear to possess, an abundance of knowledge about the structure and history of the universe. We likewise know more than might even have been imagined a few centuries ago about the nature of physical matter, about the mechanisms of life, about the ancient past. Enormous theoretical and methodological ingenuity has been required to obtain such knowledge; it does not invite easy (...)
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  9. If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (7):1697-1721.
    If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of naturally-evolved alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a materialist who (...)
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  10. Do ethics classes influence student behavior? Case study: Teaching the ethics of eating meat.Eric Schwitzgebel, Bradford Cokelet & Peter Singer - 2020 - Cognition 203 (C):104397.
    Do university ethics classes influence students’ real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy article on their assigned topic and optionally (...)
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  11. Belief.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2006 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  12.  73
    Creating a large language model of a philosopher.Eric Schwitzgebel, David Schwitzgebel & Anna Strasser - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (2):237-259.
    Can large language models produce expert‐quality philosophical texts? To investigate this, we fine‐tuned GPT‐3 with the works of philosopher Daniel Dennett. To evaluate the model, we asked the real Dennett 10 philosophical questions and then posed the same questions to the language model, collecting four responses for each question without cherry‐picking. Experts on Dennett's work succeeded at distinguishing the Dennett‐generated and machine‐generated answers above chance but substantially short of our expectations. Philosophy blog readers performed similarly to the experts, while ordinary (...)
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  13. In-between believing.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2001 - Philosophical Quarterly 51 (202):76-82.
    For any proposition P, it may sometimes occur that a person is not quite accurately describable as believing that P, nor quite accurately describable as failing to believe that P. Such a person, I will say, is in an "in-between state of belief." This paper argues for the prevalence of in-between states of believing and asserts the need for an account of belief that allows us intelligibly to talk about in-between believing. It is suggested that Bayesian and representationalist approaches are (...)
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  14. The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior.Eric Schwitzgebel & Joshua Rust - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (3):293-327.
    Do philosophy professors specializing in ethics behave, on average, any morally better than do other professors? If not, do they at least behave more consistently with their expressed values? These questions have never been systematically studied. We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to (...)
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  15. A Defense of the Rights of Artificial Intelligences.Eric Schwitzgebel & Mara Garza - 2015 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 39 (1):98-119.
    There are possible artificially intelligent beings who do not differ in any morally relevant respect from human beings. Such possible beings would deserve moral consideration similar to that of human beings. Our duties to them would not be appreciably reduced by the fact that they are non-human, nor by the fact that they owe their existence to us. Indeed, if they owe their existence to us, we would likely have additional moral obligations to them that we don’t ordinarily owe to (...)
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  16. Introspection.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  17. A Dispositional Approach to the Attitudes.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2013 - In Nikolaj Nottelmann (ed.), New Essays on Belief: Constitution, Content and Structure. New York: Palgrave. pp. 75-99.
    I argue that to have an attitude is, primarily, (1.) to have a dispositional profile that matches, to an appropriate degree and in appropriate respects, a stereotype for that attitude, typically grounded in folk psychology, and secondarily, (2.) in some cases also to meet further stereotypical attitude-specific conditions. To have an attitude, on the account I will recommend here, is mainly a matter of being apt to interact with the world in patterns that ordinary people would regard as characteristic of (...)
     
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  18.  76
    Is There Something it’s Like to be a Garden Snail.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2020 - Philosophical Topics 48 (1):39-63.
    The question “are garden snails conscious?” or equivalently “is there something it’s like to be a garden snail?” admits of three possible answers: yes, no, and denial that the question admits of a yes-or-no answer. All three answers have some antecedent plausibility, prior to the application of theories of consciousness. All three answers retain their plausibility after the application of theories of consciousness. This is because theories of consciousness, when applied to such a different species, are inevitably question-begging and rely (...)
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  19. The Pragmatic Metaphysics of Belief.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2021 - In Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 350-375.
    On an intellectualist approach to belief, the intellectual endorsement of a proposition (such as “The working poor deserve as much respect as the handsomely paid”) is sufficient or nearly sufficient for believing it. On a pragmatic approach to belief, intellectual endorsement is not enough. Belief is behaviorally demanding. To really, fully believe, you must also “walk the walk.” This chapter argues that the pragmatic approach is preferable on pragmatic grounds: It rightly directs our attention to what matters most in thinking (...)
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  20.  93
    The Diversity of Philosophy Students and Faculty.Eric Schwitzgebel, Liam Kofi Bright, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Morgan Thompson & Eric Winsberg - 2021 - The Philosophers' Magazine 93:71-90.
    How diverse is philosophy? In this paper we explore recent data on the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of philosophy students and faculty in the United States. We have found that women are underrepresented in philosophy at all levels from first-year intention to major through senior faculty. The past four years have seen an increase in the percentage of women philosophy majors at the undergraduate level, but it remains to be seen if this recent increase in the percentage of women (...)
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  21. Introspection, What?Eric Schwitzgebel - 2012 - In Declan Smithies & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Introspection and Consciousness. Oxford University Press. pp. 29--48.
    My thesis is: introspection is not a single process but a plurality of processes. It’s a plurality both within and between cases: most individual introspective judgments arise from a plurality ofprocesses (that’s the Within-case claim), and the collection of processes issuing in introspective judgments differs from case to case (that’s the between-case claim). Introspection is not the operation of a single cognitive mech- anism or small collection ofmechanisms. Introspective judgments arise from a shift- ing confluence ofmany processes, recruited opportunistically.
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  22.  75
    The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (3):293-327.
    We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with self-report. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, (...)
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  23. Do ethicists steal more books?Eric Schwitzgebel - 2009 - Philosophical Psychology 22 (6):711-725.
    If explicit cognition about morality promotes moral behavior then one might expect ethics professors to behave particularly well. However, professional ethicists' behavior has never been empirically studied. The present research examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% (...)
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  24. Women in Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses of Specialization, Prevalence, Visibility, and Generational Change.Eric Schwitzgebel & Carolyn Dicey Jennings - 2017 - Public Affairs Quarterly 31:83-105.
    We present several quantitative analyses of the prevalence and visibility of women in moral, political, and social philosophy, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation has changed over time. Measures include faculty lists from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, PhD job placement data from the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project, the National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates, conference programs of the American Philosophical Association, authorship in elite philosophy journals, citation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and (...)
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  25. The Moral Behaviour of Ethicists: Peer Opinion.Eric Schwitzgebel & J. Rust - 2009 - Mind 118 (472):1043-1059.
    If philosophical moral reflection tends to improve moral behaviour, one might expect that professional ethicists will, on average, behave morally better than non-ethicists. One potential source of insight into the moral behaviour of ethicists is philosophers' opinions about ethicists' behaviour. At the 2007 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, we used chocolate to entice 277 passers-by to complete anonymous questionnaires without their knowing the topic of those questionnaires in advance. Version I of the questionnaire asked respondents to compare, (...)
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  26. Mad Belief?Eric Schwitzgebel - 2011 - Neuroethics 5 (1):13-17.
    “Mad belief” (in analogy with Lewisian “mad pain”) would be a belief state with none of the causal role characteristic of belief—a state not caused or apt to have been caused by any of the sorts of events that usually cause belief and involving no disposition toward the usual behavioral or other manifestations of belief. On token-functionalist views of belief, mad belief in this sense is conceptually impossible. Cases of delusion—or at least some cases of delusion—might be cases of belief (...)
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  27.  19
    Borderline consciousness, when it’s neither determinately true nor determinately false that experience is present.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (12):3415-3439.
    This article defends the existence of _borderline consciousness._ In borderline consciousness, conscious experience is neither determinately present nor determinately absent, but rather somewhere between. The argument in brief is this. In considering what types of systems are conscious, we face a quadrilemma. Either nothing is conscious, or everything is conscious, or there’s a sharp boundary across the apparent continuum between conscious systems and nonconscious ones, or consciousness is a vague property admitting indeterminate cases. Assuming mainstream naturalism about consciousness, we ought (...)
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  28. Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors?Eric Schwitzgebel & Joshua Rust - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):189-199.
    If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behavior, one might expect ethics professors to behave morally better than socially similar non-ethicists. Under the assumption that forms of political engagement such as voting have moral worth, we looked at the rate at which a sample of professional ethicists—and political philosophers as a subgroup of ethicists—voted in eight years’ worth of elections. We compared ethicists’ and political philosophers’ voting rates with the voting rates of three other groups: philosophers not specializing in ethics, political (...)
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  29. The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4):665-682.
    The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind. . ???aop.label???
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  30. Kant Meets Cyberpunk.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2019 - Disputatio 11 (55).
    I defend a how-possibly argument for Kantian (or Kant*-ian) transcendental idealism, drawing on concepts from David Chalmers, Nick Bostrom, and the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. If we are artificial intelligences living in a virtual reality instantiated on a giant computer, then the fundamental structure of reality might be very different than we suppose. Indeed, since computation does not require spatial properties, spatiality might not be a feature of things as they are in themselves but instead only the way that (...)
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  31.  98
    The Insularity of Anglophone Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses.Eric Schwitzgebel, Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Andrew Higgins & Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera - 2018 - Philosophical Papers 47 (1):21-48.
    We present evidence that mainstream Anglophone philosophy is insular in the sense that participants in this academic tradition tend mostly to cite or interact with other participants in this academic tradition, while having little academic interaction with philosophers writing in other languages. Among our evidence: In a sample of articles from elite Anglophone philosophy journals, 97% of citations are citations of work originally written in English; 96% of members of editorial boards of elite Anglophone philosophy journals are housed in majority-Anglophone (...)
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  32. Do You Have Constant Tactile Experience of Your Feet in Your Shoes? Or Is Experience Limited to What’s in Attention?Eric Schwitzgebel - 2007 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (3):5-35.
    According to rich views of consciousness (e.g., James, Searle), we have a constant, complex flow of experience (or 'phenomenology') in multiple modalities simultaneously. According to thin views (e.g., Dennett, Mack and Rock), conscious experience is limited to one or a few topics, regions, objects, or modalities at a time. Existing introspective and empirical arguments on this issue (including arguments from 'inattentional blindness') generally beg the question. Participants in the present experiment wore beepers during everyday activity. When a beep sounded, they (...)
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  33. Whose concepts are they, anyway? The role of philosophical intuition in empirical psychology.Alison Gopnik & Eric Schwitzgebel - 1998 - In M. R. DePaul & William Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 75--91.
    This chapter examines several ways in which philosophical attention to intuition can contribute to empirical scientific psychology. The authors then discuss one prevalent misuse of intuition. An unspoken assumption of much argumentation in the philosophy of mind has been that to articulate our folk psychological intuitions, our ordinary concepts of belief, truth, meaning, and so forth, is itself sufficient to give a theoretical account of what belief, truth, meaning, and so forth, actually are. It is believed that this assumption rests (...)
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  34. Susan Schneider's Proposed Tests for AI Consciousness: Promising but Flawed.D. B. Udell & Eric Schwitzgebel - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (5-6):121-144.
    Susan Schneider (2019) has proposed two new tests for consciousness in AI (artificial intelligence) systems, the AI Consciousness Test and the Chip Test. On their face, the two tests seem to have the virtue of proving satisfactory to a wide range of consciousness theorists holding divergent theoretical positions, rather than narrowly relying on the truth of any particular theory of consciousness. Unfortunately, both tests are undermined in having an ‘audience problem’: Those theorists with the kind of architectural worries that motivate (...)
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  35. Part One Proponent Meets Skeptic.Russell T. Hurlburt & Eric Schwitzgebel - 2007 - In Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic.
  36. Rationalization in Philosophical and Moral Thought.Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Ellis - 2017 - In Jean-François Bonnefon & Bastien Trémolière (eds.), Moral Inferences. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Rationalization, in our intended sense of the term, occurs when a person favors a particular conclusion as a result of some factor (such as self-interest) that is of little justificatory epistemic relevance, if that factor then biases the person’s subsequent search for, and assessment of, potential justifications for the conclusion. Empirical evidence suggests that rationalization is common in people’s moral and philosophical thought. We argue that it is likely that the moral and philosophical thought of philosophers and moral psychologists is (...)
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  37. Designing AI with Rights, Consciousness, Self-Respect, and Freedom.Eric Schwitzgebel & Mara Garza - 2020 - In Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. New York, NY, USA: pp. 459-479.
    We propose four policies of ethical design of human-grade Artificial Intelligence. Two of our policies are precautionary. Given substantial uncertainty both about ethical theory and about the conditions under which AI would have conscious experiences, we should be cautious in our handling of cases where different moral theories or different theories of consciousness would produce very different ethical recommendations. Two of our policies concern respect and freedom. If we design AI that deserves moral consideration equivalent to that of human beings, (...)
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  38. Self-Ignorance.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2012 - In Consciousness and the Self.
    Philosophers tend to be pretty impressed by human self-knowledge. Descartes (1641/1984) thought our knowledge of our own stream of experience was the secure and indubitable foundation upon which to build our knowledge of the rest of the world. Hume – who was capable of being skeptical about almost anything – said that the only existences we can be certain of are our own sensory and imagistic experiences (1739/1978, p. 212). Perhaps the most prominent writer on self-knowledge in contemporary philosophy is (...)
     
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  39. 1% Skepticism.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2017 - Noûs 51 (2):271-290.
    A 1% skeptic is someone who has about a 99% credence in non-skeptical realism and about a 1% credence in the disjunction of all radically skeptical scenarios combined. The first half of this essay defends the epistemic rationality of 1% skepticism, appealing to dream skepticism, simulation skepticism, cosmological skepticism, and wildcard skepticism. The second half of the essay explores the practical behavioral consequences of 1% skepticism, arguing that 1% skepticism need not be behaviorally inert.
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  40.  54
    Students Eat Less Meat After Studying Meat Ethics.Eric Schwitzgebel, Bradford Cokelet & Peter Singer - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-26.
    In the first controlled, non-self-report studies to show an influence of university-level ethical instruction on everyday behavior, Schwitzgebel et al. (2020) and Jalil et al. (2020) found that students purchase less meat after exposure to material on the ethics of eating meat. We sought to extend and conceptually replicate this research. Seven hundred thirty students in three large philosophy classes read James Rachels’ (2004) “Basic Argument for Vegetarianism”, followed by 50-min small-group discussions. Half also viewed a vegetarianism advocacy video containing (...)
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  41. Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?Eric Schwitzgebel - 2002 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 33 (4):649-660.
    In the 1950s, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were predominantly a black and white phenomenon, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming assume or assert that dreams have color. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of black and white film media, and it is likely that the emergence of the view that dreams are black and white was connected to this change in film technology. If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can (...)
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  42. How well do we know our own conscious experience? The case of human echolocation.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2000 - Philosophical Topics 28 (5-6):235-46.
    Researchers from the 1940's through the present have found that normal, sighted people can echolocate - that is, detect properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected from them. We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our conscious, perceptual experience. Despite this, we argue that people are often grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. If so, echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we cannot be seriously mistaken about our own current conscious experience.
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  43. Ethicists' courtesy at philosophy conferences.Eric Schwitzgebel, Joshua Rust, Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Alan T. Moore & D. Justin Coates - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (3):331 - 340.
    If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (versus leaving one's seat tidy). (...)
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  44.  76
    The Nature of Belief From a Philosophical Perspective, With Theoretical and Methodological Implications for Psychology and Cognitive Science.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
  45.  30
    A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2019 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
    A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other burning (...)
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  46.  87
    Aiming for Moral Mediocrity.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2019 - Res Philosophica 96 (3):347-368.
    Most people aim to be about as morally good as their peers—not especially better, not especially worse. We do not aim to be good, or non-bad, or to act permissibly rather than impermissibly, by fixed moral standards. Rather, we notice the typical behavior of our peers, then calibrate toward so-so. This is a somewhat bad way to be, but it’s not a terribly bad way to be. We are somewhat morally criticizable for having low moral ambitions. Typical arguments defending the (...)
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  47. The Unskilled Zhuangzi: Big and Useless and Not So Good at Catching Rats.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2019 - In Karyn Lai & Wai Wai Chiu (eds.), Skill and Mastery Philosophical Stories from the Zhuangzi. London: Rowman and Littlefield International. pp. 101-110.
    The mainstream tradition in recent Anglophone Zhuangzi interpretation treats spontaneous skillful responsiveness – similar to the spontaneous responsiveness of a skilled artisan, athlete, or musician – as a, or the, Zhuangzian ideal. However, this interpretation is poorly grounded in the Inner Chapters. On the contrary, in the Inner Chapters, this sort of skillfulness is at least as commonly criticized as celebrated. Even the famous passage about the ox-carving cook might be interpreted more as a celebration of the knife’s passivity than (...)
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  48.  93
    Do Things Look Flat?Eric Schwitzgebel - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3):589-599.
    Does a penny viewed at an angle in some sense look elliptical, as though projected on a two-dimensional surface? Many philosophers have said such things, from Malebranche (1674/1997) and Hume (1739/1978), through early 20th-century sense-data theorists, to Tye (2000) and Noë (2004). I confess that it doesn't seem this way to me, though I'm somewhat baffled by the phenomenology and pessimistic about our ability to resolve the dispute. I raise geometrical complaints against the view and conjecture that views of this (...)
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  49.  30
    1% Skepticism.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2016 - Noûs 50 (4).
    A 1% skeptic is someone who has about a 99% credence in non-skeptical realism and about a 1% credence that some radically skeptical scenario obtains. The first half of this essay defends the epistemic rationality of 1% skepticism, endorsing modest versions of dream skepticism, simulation skepticism, cosmological skepticism, and wildcard skepticism. The second half of the essay explores the practical behavioral consequences of 1% skepticism.
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  50. The Behavior of Ethicists.Eric Schwitzgebel & Joshua Rust - 2016 - In Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell.
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