Experimental Philosophy

Epistemic Intuitions are Shockingly Robust Across Cultural Differences

Around a year ago, I wrote about a really beautiful study by Machery and colleagues on cross-cultural similarities in epistemic intuitions. The study looked at intuitions about Gettier cases in four different cultures and found that the Gettier intuition was remarkably robust across demographic differences. 

 

But of course, I could imagine some readers seeing this as relatively poor evidence of cross-cultural robustness. "After all," they might say, "the Gettier intuition is one of the most fundamental aspects of our practice of knowledge attribution. Even if this one intuition turns out to be widely shared, the more subtle and complex aspects of our epistemic intuitions might easily turn out to vary across cultures." 

 

Now, a year later, we have more information about this question. The unstoppable team of Minsun Kim and Yuan Yuan has just completed a new paper on the topic, and they provide evidence for a very surprising degree of cross-cultural robustness. 

 

Kim and Yuan look at three different effects that have been obtained in studies on Western participants:

 

Call for Posters: Buffalo Annual Experimental Philosophy Conference 2016

We have a few more open slots for poster presentation at the upcoming Buffalo Annual Experimental Philosophy Conference 2016. If you wish to be considered for a poster presentation, please submit your idea ASAP to Robert Kelly ([email protected]). 

Conference dates: Fri., Sept. 9 – Sat., Sept. 10, 2016

Conference Venue: Embassy Suites Buffalo, 200 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York, 14202, United States, 716-842-1000. 

Keynote Speaker: Helen de Cruz, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in philosophy at Oxford Brooks University.

Call for Unpublished Studies on Means/Byproduct Distinction

Josh May and I are conducting a meta-analysis on judgments related to the Doctrine of Double Effect. In particular, we are interested in seeing if the byproduct/means distinction is reflected in everyday moral judgments. The classic cases that illustrate the byproduct/means distinction are the Bystander and Footbridge cases (respectively). Or course, there are many different variations on these paradigmatic cases that also involve exploring the means/byproduct distinction.

We are currently looking for unpublished studies that you may have that are relevant to this meta-analysis. We would greatly appreciate you sending us descriptive statistics or the raw data so that we could include your unpublished studies in the meta-analysis. We are only interested in unpublished studies that experimentally manipulate the means/byproduct distinction.

Unpublished studies can be crucially important for accurately estimating mean effect sizes, so your help in this endeavor would help the community interested in this distinction.

If you have any unpublished studies, or have questions, please email them to Adam Feltz ([email protected]). We’ll start compiling the data we receive in two weeks (July 15^th). Thanks for your help!