Work In Experimental Philosophy Research Articles

On scepticism about personal identity thought experiments

AbstractMany philosophers have become sceptical of the use of thought experiments in theorising about personal identity. In large part, this is due to work in experimental philosophy that appears to confirm long‐held philosophical suspicions that thought experiments elicit inconsistent judgements about personal identity and hence judgements that are thought to be the product of cognitive biases. If so, these judgements appear to be useless at informing our theories of personal identity. Using the methods of experimental philosophy, we investigate whether people exhibit inconsistent judgements and, if they do, whether these judgements are likely to be the source of cognitive bias or, instead, sensitivity to some relevant factor. We do not find that people's judgements are sensitive to any of the factors we investigate (relevant or irrelevant), nor that people have inconsistent judgements across cases. Rather, people's judgements are best explained by them having a very minimal account of what it takes for a person to survive. Since this pattern of judgements is no reason to think that we are subject to cognitive bias, we see no reason, as things stand, to be sceptical of our judgements.

The Origins of Consciousness or the War of the Five Dimensions

The goal of this article is to break down the dimensions of consciousness, attempt to reverse engineer their evolutionary function, and make sense of the origins of consciousness by breaking off those dimensions that are more likely to have arisen later. A Darwinian approach will allow us to revise the philosopher’s concept of consciousness away from a single “thing,” an all-or-nothing quality, and towards a concept of phenomenological complexity that arose out of simple valenced states. Finally, I will offer support for an evaluation-first view of consciousness by drawing on recent work in experimental philosophy of mind.

Pain priors, polyeidism, and predictive power: a preliminary investigation into individual differences in ordinary thought about pain

According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon (typically, a kind of conscious experience). In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experimental studies have provided evidence that the ordinary (‘folk’) concept of pain is more complex than previously assumed: rather than tracking only bodily or only mental aspects of pain, the ordinary concept of pain can actually track either of these aspects. The polyeidic (or ‘many ideas’) analysis of the folk concept of pain, as proposed by Emma Borg et al., captures this complexity. Whereas previous empirical support for the polyeidic view has focused on the context-sensitivity of the folk concept of pain, here we discuss individual differences in people’s ‘pain priors’—namely, their standing tendencies to think of pain in relatively mind-centric or body-centric ways. We describe a preliminary empirical study and present a small number of findings, which will be explored further in future work. The results we discuss are part of a larger programme of work which seeks to integrate philosophical pain research into clinical practice. For example, we hypothesise that variations in how patients with chronic pain are thinking about pain could help predict their responses to treatment.

Les choix moraux du psychopathe sous le prisme de la théorie de l’identité morale

GoalsContrary to the hypothesis that psychopaths do not possess the moral discernment required to think about their actions on the basis of certain moral reasons, several studies suggest the presence of a gap between what these individuals evaluate, judge, or recognize and what they actually choose to do. While theories of moral motivation designed to account for this discordance generally favor either rationalist or emotivist positions, recent work in experimental philosophy as well as in moral psychology tends to give an increasingly central place to the notion of moral identity, which would constitute an additional – and ultimately truly decisive – source of moral motivation, drawing on norms that are not objective and impersonal, but subjective and personal. MethodAfter having shown that our moral reasoning and our affects are not in themselves sufficient to shed light on the origin – and the intra- and inter-individual variability – of our moral decisions, we present the personological conception of the moral self and the normative relationship to oneself that it supposes. We then discuss the nature of the relationship between psychopathic personality and moral identity. ResultsSome research with adults has shown that differences in moral judgment skills do not predict the levels of psychopathic traits assessed. However, subjects who function psychopathically would only minimally – and anecdotally – incorporate moral traits into their self-concept. They would find it difficult to perceive or conceive of themselves as moral agents shaped and defined by a series of ethical commitments. DiscussionThe motivational influence of the moral self on our moral choices rests on a self-referential process that resembles a third-order reflection consisting in questioning – and then conforming to – the kind of person I want to be, that I have to be; to evaluate the degree of conformity of my momentary desires with what I wish to desire on the moral domain. This presupposes, as we will see, a kind of extraction, of detachment from the present, in order to identify – and thus identify with – past moral resolutions. ConclusionWe finish by defending the thesis according to which psychopathy could, in some cases at least, result from the subject's inability to mentally “time travel,” thus compromising the capacity to distance or to disengage oneself from a present desire, or to situate it in the competitive “space” of previously (self)contracted normative requirements. Such temporal inefficiency disrupts the movements of identification with particular moral commitments; paralyzes the prospective impulses projecting the person we will be if we make such and such a choice; and, moreover, neutralizes the narrative process that contributes to the construction of our moral identity by assigning us moral dispositions or tendencies to which we ultimately refer when it comes to making moral decisions.

Recent experimental work on “ought” implies “can”

AbstractWhile philosophers generally accept some version of the principle “ought” implies “can,” recent work in experimental philosophy and cognitive science provides evidence against a presupposition or a conceptual entailment from “ought” to “can.” Here, we review some of this evidence, its effect on particular formulations of the principle, and future directions for cognitive scientists and philosophers.

Mapping Cognitive Structure onto the Landscape of Philosophical Debate: an Empirical Framework with Relevance to Problems of Consciousness, Free will and Ethics

There has been considerable debate in the literature as to whether work in experimental philosophy (X-Phi) actually makes any significant contribution to philosophy. One stated view is that many X-Phi projects, notwithstanding their focus on topics relevant to philosophy, contribute little to philosophical thought. Instead, it has been claimed the contribution they make appears to be to cognitive science. In contrast to this view, here we argue that at least one approach to X-Phi makes a contribution which parallels, and also extends, historically salient forms of philosophical analysis, especially contributions from Immanuel Kant, William James, Peter F. Strawson and Thomas Nagel. The framework elaborated here synthesizes philosophical theory with empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience and applies it to three perennial philosophical problems. According to this account, the origin of these three problems can be illuminated by viewing them as arising from a tension between two distinct types of cognition, each of which is associated with anatomically independent and functionally inhibitory neural networks. If the parallel we draw, between an empirical project and historically highly influential examples of philosophical analysis, is viewed as convincing, it follows that work in the cognitive sciences can contribute directly to philosophy. Further, this conclusion holds whether the empirical details of the account are correct or not.

Philosophical Expertise

AbstractRecent work in experimental philosophy has indicated that intuitions may be subject to several forms of bias, thereby casting doubt on the viability of intuition as an evidential source in philosophy. A common reply to these findings is the ‘expertise defense’ – the claim that although biases may be found in the intuitions of non‐philosophers, persons with expertise in philosophy will be resistant to these biases. Much debate over the expertise defense has centered over the question of the burden of proof; must defenders of expertise provide empirical evidence of its existence, or should we grant the existence of philosophical expertise as a ‘default’ assumption? Defenders have frequently appealed to analogy with other fields; since expertise clearly exists in, e.g., the sciences, we are entitled to assume its existence in philosophy. Recently, however, experimentalists have begun to provide empirical evidence that biases in intuition extend even to philosophers. Though these findings don't yet suffice to defeat the default assumption of expertise the analogy argument motivates, they do force any proponent of the analogy argument to provide more specific and empirically informed proposals for the possible nature of philosophical expertise.

The Reliability of Armchair Intuitions

AbstractArmchair philosophers have questioned the significance of recent work in experimental philosophy by pointing out that experiments have been conducted on laypeople and undergraduate students. To challenge a practice that relies on expert intuitions, so the armchair objection goes, one needs to demonstrate that expert intuitions rather than those of ordinary people are sensitive to contingent facts such as cultural, linguistic, socio‐economic, or educational background. This article does exactly that. Based on two empirical studies on populations of 573 and 203 trained philosophers, respectively, it demonstrates that expert intuitions vary dramatically according to at least one contingent factor, namely, the linguistic background of the expert: philosophers make different intuitive judgments if their native language is English rather than Dutch, German, or Swedish. These findings cast doubt on the common armchair assumption that philosophical theories based on armchair intuitions are valid beyond the linguistic background against which they were developed.

Experimental Philosophy, Clinical Intentions, and Evaluative Judgment

Recent empirical work on the concept of intentionality suggests that people’s assessments of whether an action is intentional are subject to uncertainty. Some researchers have gone so far as to claim that different people employ different concepts of intentional action. These possibilities have motivated a good deal of work in the relatively new field of experimental philosophy. The findings from this empirical research may prove to be relevant to medical ethics. After all, the intentions of medical professionals are widely considered to be important in the ethical assessment of their actions. For example, in the debate over palliative sedation for terminally ill patients, it is often said that it is permissible for a clinician to administer a potentially lethal dose of pain medication to a patient, provided that he or she by doing so intends only to relieve the patient’s suffering and does not intend to kill or hasten the death of the patient. This idea—that it can be permissible to bring about a foreseen but unintended effect (the patient’s death), although it would not be permissible to intend to bring about this same effect—is central to the principle of double effect (PDE), which has found expression in both the law and the professional codes of medical organizations. Notwithstanding this point, over the past decade or so, a number of writers have challenged the value of focusing on the intentions of clinicians when considering questions of ethically permissible conduct. They have claimed that clinical intentions are often equivocal and multiple. They also have claimed that clinicians frequently have difficulty identifying what their intentions are in a given case. In light of the importance that intention plays in medical ethics, it is surprising that no research has been done to identify causes or psychological factors that might help to explain this uncertainty over intentions in clinical reasoning. In this article, we address this issue head on. We first describe a study we conducted on intention ascription. Drawing on recent work in experimental philosophy, we investigated the possibility that the ascription of intentions to clinical actors in clinical settings is influenced by prior judgments about the goodness or badness of the consequences of the action in question. Our study was modeled on experimental studies in other contexts that have shown that people, when presented with a range of scenarios, are more likely to classify a side effect of an action as intended if the side effect is negative or reflects poorly on the actor than if it is positive or reflects well on the actor. We investigated whether this asymmetry in intention ascriptions was also present among physicians who were asked to ascribe intentions to clinical actors in certain well-defined clinical scenarios. After describing the study and its results, we discuss its implications for medical ethics.

Thought experiments, real experiments, and the expertise objection

It is a commonplace that in philosophy, intuitions supply evidence for and against philosophical theories. Recent work in experimental philosophy has brought to bear the intuitions of philosophically naive subjects in a number of different ways. One line of response to this work has been to claim that philosophers have expertise that privileges their intuitive judgments, and allows them to disregard the judgments of non-experts. This expertise is supposed to be analogous to the expertise of the mathematician or the physicist. This paper critically evaluates this appeal to philosophical expertise.

The Centrality of Belief and Reflection in Knobe-Effect Cases

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 the belief-formation asymmetry is also rational because it is more useful to form some beliefs than others.

Experimental Philosophy

AbstractClaims about people's intuitions have long played an important role in philosophical debates. The new field of experimental philosophy seeks to subject such claims to rigorous tests using the traditional methods of cognitive science – systematic experimentation and statistical analysis. Work in experimental philosophy thus far has investigated people's intuitions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Although it is now generally agreed that experimental philosophers have made surprising discoveries about people's intuitions in each of these areas, considerable disagreement remains about the philosophical significance of the key findings. Some have argued that work in experimental philosophy should be assessed by asking whether it can contribute to the kind of inquiry that is normally pursued within analytic philosophy, while others suggest that work in experimental philosophy is best understood as a contribution to a more traditional sort of philosophical inquiry that long predates the birth of analytic philosophy.

Analytic Epistemology and Experimental Philosophy

AbstractIt has been standard philosophical practice in analytic philosophy to employ intuitions generated in response to thought‐experiments as evidence in the evaluation of philosophical claims. In part as a response to this practice, an exciting new movement –experimental philosophy– has recently emerged. This movement is unified behind both a common methodology and a common aim: the application of methods of experimental psychology to the study of the nature of intuitions. In this paper, we will introduce two different views concerning the relationship that holds between experimental philosophy and the future of standard philosophical practice (what we call, theproper foundation viewand therestrictionist view), discuss some of the more interesting and important results obtained by proponents of both views, and examine the pressure these results put on analytic philosophers to reform standard philosophical practice. We will also defend experimental philosophy from some recent objections, suggest future directions for work in experimental philosophy, and suggest what future lines of epistemological response might be available to those wishing to defend analytic epistemology from the challenges posed by experimental philosophy.