Experimental Philosophy

Chomsky and Moral Philosophy

Some experimental philosophers might be interested in "Chomsky and Moral Philosophy," a new paper I recently posted on SSRN.   It will appear in the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (J. McGilvray, ed), which is due out later this year.  Here is the abstract:

Every great philosopher has important things to say about moral philosophy. Chomsky is no exception. Chomsky’s remarks on this topic, however, are not systematic. Instead, they consist mainly of brief and occasional asides. Although often provocative, they tend to come across as digressions from his central focus on linguistics and related disciplines, such as epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Perhaps as a result, moral philosophers have paid relatively little attention to Chomsky over the past sixty years.

This neglect is unfortunate. Chomsky’s insights into the nature and origin of human morality are fundamental and penetrating. They address deep philosophical problems that have shaped the aims of moral philosophy for centuries. They also reinforce many of the lessons Chomsky has taught about the nature and origins of human language. Elaborating upon these themes, this chapter begins by recounting two of Chomsky’s most extensive discussions of moral philosophy, each of which draws attention to the fact that, like linguistic knowledge, moral knowledge is an example of Plato’s problem: a complex mental competence characterized by a profound poverty of the stimulus. The chapter then places these remarks in a broader context by providing a brief discussion of mentalist, modular, and nativist theories of moral cognition from Plato to the present. Finally, the chapter responds to one prominent criticism of Chomsky’s naturalistic approach to moral philosophy, that of the late philosopher, Bernard Williams. I argue that Williams’ “Wittgensteinian” skepticism about moral rules is no more convincing than a similar skepticism about grammatical rules in the context of linguistic theory.

Formal Semantics and Experimental Philosophy

The idea of using experiments to address philosophical questions has provoked heated debate in many areas of philosophy. However, if there is one area in which this approach has been completely uncontroversial, it is the field of formal semantics. This field unites researchers in philosophy and linguistics in an interdisciplinary attempt to make progress on semantic questions. The field has always understood itself as an empirical one, and researchers within it have basically welcomed the arrival of experimental techniques with open arms.

Just in the past few years, philosophers working in formal semantics have authored or coauthored experimental papers on vagueness (Egré et al., Ripley), the relationship between semantics and pragmatics (Chemla, Homer & Rothschild), conditionals (Cariani & Rips), generics (Prasada, Khemlani, Leslie & Glucksberg), modals (Knobe & Szabó; Knobe & Yalcin), the language of probability (Yalcin), gradable adjectives used for color (Hansen & Chemla) and aesthetics (Liao & Meskin), presupposition projection (Chemla & Schlenker), the determiners ‘most’ (Pietroski et al.) and ‘many’ (Egré & Cova), and much, much more. Clearly, the field as a whole is moving very strongly in an experimental direction.

Just to highlight one example of some of the amazing work that’s been going on these days, I thought it might be helpful to discuss a new experimental paper from philosopher Justin Khoo (MIT).

Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy

I am happy to announce a forthcoming new volume from the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy Series: A Companion to Experimental Philosophy. It is edited by Justin Sytsma and myself and features over forty chapters from leading philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists from several countries across three continents. These chapters detail the application of empirical methods to philosophical questions across major sub-disciplines including the philosophy of action, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, logic, and metaphilosophy.

The general introduction to the volume is available online here, offering a summary of the goals of the volume and a brief introduction to experimental philosophy for a general audience. The table of contents and list of contributors can be found below:

Conference Announcement

Epistemology for the Rest of the World

「残りの世界」のための認識論

世界各地的認識論

세계의 나머지 부분에 대한 인식론

दुनिया के बाकी के लिए ज्ञान - मीमांसा

An International Conference on Epistemology, Linguistic Diversity & Cultural Diversity

 

Since the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word  ‘know’ and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge.  When someone says “S knows that p”, what does the word ‘knows’ mean?  What concept does it express?  How should that concept be analyzed?  More recently, contextualists have argued that the truth conditions for “S knows that p,” or the proposition it expresses, varies depending on the context of the speaker.   Invariantists have used sophisticated linguistic arguments to challenge contextualism, and some of them, the subject-sensitive invariantists who embrace the pragmatic encroachment thesis, have gone on to claim that the truth conditions of ‘S knows that p’ are sensitive to factors like how important the truth of p is to S.  In all of this literature, hypothetical cases play an important role.  A situation is described, almost always in English, and then philosophers judge whether it is true that in that situation, S knows that p, or whether saying “S knows that p” is false, or deviant, or intuitively unacceptable.  With the emergence of experimental philosophy, it has become increasingly common to present these scenarios to ordinary English speakers, and ask them to judge whether it’s true that S knows that p.

But English is just one of over 6000 languages spoken around the world.  Though it is the third most common language, it is the native language of less than 6% of the world’s population.   And when Western epistemology first emerged, in ancient Greece, English did not exist.  So why should we think that facts about the English word “know,” the concept it expresses, or subtle semantic properties of “S knows that p” have important implications for epistemology? 

One possible answer invokes what might be called the “universality thesis,” which claims that the properties of the English word “know” and the English sentence ‘S knows that p’ that have been studied by epistemologists are shared by the translations of these expressions in most or all languages.  If the universality thesis is true, then the Chinese and Japanese and Korean and Hindi translations of ‘know’ all express the same concept.  So when we have a good account of the concept expressed by the English verb ‘know’ we will have a good account of the concept of knowledge.   And if it is established that contextualism is true for ‘S knows that p,’ then contextualism is true for knowledge attributions in most languages. 

If the universality thesis turns out to be true, it will be a remarkable fact that cries out for an explanation.  But there is currently very little reason to think that the universality thesis is true, since little or nothing is known about the meaning and use of epistemic terms in languages other than English.  What little is known looks to point in the other direction.  For example, in Japanese there are two words used to translate ‘know’ in propositional knowledge attributions, ‘Shitte-iru’ and ‘Wakatte-iru’, neither of which has the same extension as ‘know’. 

 If the universality thesis is false, what are the implications for epistemology?  Should epistemologists study knowledge attributions in languages other than English with the same diligence they have shown for the study of English knowledge attributions? If not, why not?  Are the concepts expressed by ‘Shitte-iru,’ ‘Wakatte-iru’ and the epistemic terms in other languages as important for epistemology as the concept expressed by ‘know’?  If not, why not?  If pragmatic encroachment is true for knowledge attributions in English but not for knowledge attributions in Korean, what, if anything, does this tell us about the questions that philosophers interested in epistemology have been asking since the Meno?  Would findings like this support Allan Hazlett’s provocative suggestion that epistemologists should “stop looking at linguistic phenomena altogether?”     

 This conference will be bringing together philosophers, linguists, psychologists and social scientists from Asia and the West to discuss and debate both the empirical and the philosophical questions raised by linguistic and cultural diversity in the epistemic domain.  Does the available evidence suggest that the universality thesis is false?  If so, in what ways do the concepts expressed by ‘know’ and its counterparts in different languages differ?  What do we know, and how can we learn more, about the workings of knowledge attributions in languages quite different from English?  And what should philosophers interested in epistemology make of all this?

We strongly encourage participation by philosophers, linguists and psychologists who are knowledgeable about the languages and cultures of non-Western countries, and of Western philosophers who are interested in epistemology for the rest of the world.      

Date and Venue:

August 8 and 9, 2013, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) Tokyo Satellite Office, Shinagawa Tokyo, Japan  http://www.jaist.ac.jp/satellite/sate/eng/index.html

 Organizing Committee:

Stephen Stich, Rutgers University

Masaharu Mizumoto, JAIST

Yukihiro Nobuhara, Tokyo University

Eric McCready, Aoyama Gakuin University

 

People interested in presenting their work at the conference should send an Abstract to Prof. Masaharu Mizumoto (mizumoto@jaist.ac.jp). 

Inherent emotional quality of human speech sounds

In Plato’s work Cratylus, Socrates and his two interlocutors discuss the relationship between names and their referents.  One interlocutor, Hermogenes, argues that the relationship between a name and its referent is simply arbitrary and based on social convention.  The other interlocutor, Cratylus, rejects this view and argues that a name has a natural, nonconventional connection with its referent (e.g., perhaps due to certain qualities that the name shares with its referent).

This discussion continued throughout the Greco-Roman world, with many philosophers developing accounts that incorporate features of both Hermogenes and Cratylus (see Frede and Inwood, 2005).  In the seventeenth century, John Locke, by contrast, took a more exclusive approach, arguing for a thoroughly Hermogenean view.  In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke writes, “[W]ords being sounds, can produce in us no other simple ideas than of those very sounds; nor excite any in us, but by that voluntary connexion which is known to be between them and those simple ideas which common use has made them the signs of” (III.4.11).

Locke’s exclusively Hermogenean view is also shared by many philosophers today.  Michael Rescorla, in his (2011) Stanford Encyclopedia article on convention, writes, “Nowadays, virtually all philosophers side with Hermogenes.  Barring a few possible exceptions such as onomatopoeia, the association between a word and its referent is not grounded in the intrinsic nature of either the word or the referent.  Rather, the association is arbitrary.”

In opposition to the exclusively Hermogenean view, a new paper by Maia Pujara, Richard Wolf, Michael Koenigs, and myself provides evidence that phonemes (the human speech sounds that constitute words) have an inherent, non-arbitrary emotional quality.  Moreover, our data suggest that the perceived emotional valence of certain phoneme combinations depends on a specific acoustic feature—namely, the dynamic shifts within the phonemes’ first two frequency components.

Our study is predicated on a number of previous observations.  First, during the production of human phonemes, air within the vocal tract vibrates at several different frequencies simultaneously; each of these frequencies is known as a “formant frequency.”  Second, humans’ ability to auditorily differentiate between phonemes is largely mediated by the relative positions and transition patterns of the first two formant frequencies (F1 and F2).  Third, numerous nonhuman animal species lower their vocal tracts (thereby lowering the frequencies of their vocalizations) in order to appear larger and more threatening to antagonists or competitors.

Thus, we predicted that strings of phonemes characterized by downward shifts in F1/F2 formants (perhaps evolutionarily rooted in antagonistic/competitive behavior) would be associated with negative emotion, whereas strings of human phonemes characterized by upward shifts in F1/F2 formants (perhaps evolutionarily rooted in conciliative/submissive behavior) would be associated with positive emotion.

To test this prediction, we adapted a two-alternative forced-choice test in which subjects were instructed to match strings of phonemes (comprising nonsense words) with pictures.  The non-words were constructed so as to exhibit either an overall upward or downward shift in F1/F2 frequencies.  The pictures were selected on the basis of eliciting positive or negative emotion.  During the test, consisting of 20 experimental trials, subjects saw a pair of non-words (one with upward F1/F2 shifts, the other with downward F1/F2 shifts), and a pair of pictures (one positive, one negative).  Subjects were instructed to mentally sound out each word, and then match each word to one of the two pictures.  As predicted, subjects reliably paired the downward F1/F2 shift non-words with the negative images and the upward F1/F2 shift non-words with the positive images (see Figure 1 below).  A detailed description of the data and methods can be found in the paper.

These results seem to suggest that (contrary to the exclusively Hermogenean view popular amongst many philosophers) certain strings of phonemes have a non-arbitrary emotional quality, and, moreover, that the emotional quality can be predicted on the basis of specific acoustic features.

 

 

Figure 1. A, B: Spectrograms illustrating the first four formants (F1-F4) of the nonsense words “bupaba” and “dugada” as obtained with Praat software (version 5.1.20).  When distinguishing between these words, the most salient formant transitions are the F2 transitions from consonants to vowels (outlined in red), which move slightly upward for “bupaba” and downward for “dugada”.   C: Example of a trial from the visual task.  Subjects pressed a vertical arrow button to match the non-words/pictures vertically, or a horizontal arrow button to match the non-words/pictures horizontally.  D: Visual task data (n=32 adult subjects, 15 males, mean age 35.5±15.2).  The proportion of individuals selecting a majority of predicted responses (i.e., on more than 10 out of the 20 trials) was significantly greater than expected by chance (Yates’ χ²= 23.8; p=0.000001).

 

 

Thinking Things and Feeling Things

Casual reflection on the daily news reminds us that we often ascribe intentional mental states, such as beliefs and desires, to groups. For example, Apple thinks its smartphone patents are worth more than Microsoft's. And surely it's reconsidering its new iMaps.The commonality of such ascriptions is often taken to constitute important evidence, both for experimental philosophers exploring the folk metaphysics of mind, and for non-experimentalists, interested in collective intentionality. However, such ascriptions actually constitute important data for these projects only on the assumption that people are realists about group mental state ascriptions--that is, only on the assumption that people interpret such ascriptions as really attributing mental states to groups over and above their members. In our recently published paper, "Thinking things and feeling things: on an alleged discontinuity in folk metaphysics of mind," Adam Arico, Shaun Nichols, and I argue against realism and offer a distributive account of group mental state ascriptions. (Paper available at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/4r026767m4101381/ and in a penultimate draft here: Download TTFTPreprint.)

At the heart of our view is the claim that intentional state ascriptions to groups are unremarkable. Intentional and phenomenal mental states constitute one subset of those states that, according to folk metaphysics, cannot be appropriately attributed to groups over and above the members that constitute them. Just as a group cannot get drunk or be well-dressed over and above its members, so a group cannot want or believe over and above its members. On our view, when a state is not appropriately attributed to a group , verbal ascriptions of that state to a group are understood distributively in terms of attributions of states to (a set of) group members qua members of the relevant group. In effect, such ascriptions are understood as attributions to (a subset of) those who make up the group in their role as members of the group. And this verbal shorthand is tolerated insofar as it secures brevity at a tolerable cost to innaccuracy.

What then explains the purported acceptability of group intentional state talk? To see this we have to first recognize what makes us think it is appropriate to ascribe a state to a person as the occupant of any role whatsoever. Suppose John is both a husband and the mayor. It no doubt strikes us as more appropriate to say, "As a husband, John loves his wife," than to say, "As a mayor, John loves his wife," though, of course, John actually occupies the state whether or not we are thinking of him as a husband. Such asymmetries in perceived appropriateness seem to reveal little more than our presuppositions about what states are saliently associated with a given role. On our view, there is nothing special when it comes to occupying the role of a group member. Thus, verbal ascriptions of states to a group--which are understood as attributions of states to the members that constitute the group (under the role of group member)--will be deemed appropriate insofar as the relevant state is saliently associated with the role of being a member of the relevant group. For example, the belief that profit margins will increase is more saliently associated with the role of being an Acme Corp employ than is the experience of existential angst. Thus, it strikes us as more appropriate to say, "Acme Corp believes profit margins will increase," than to say, "Acme Corp is experiencing existential angst."  Along these lines, we maintain that the purported asymmetry in favor of group intentionality state talk is due to nothing more than a selective consideration of cases. 

All of this is discussed more carefully and in much more detail in the paper, where it is also supported by argument and experimental findings. Here we offer but one graph as a teaser. This study demonstrates the way in which salient association leads to higher appropriateness ratings for group state ascriptions across a variety of states (non-mental, intentional, and phenomenal). Light gray bars record mean appropriateness assessments of ascriptions to groups for which the relevant state is more saliently associated. Note that the trend for group mental state ascriptions is mirrored for non-mental states that obviously cannot be attributed to the group over and above the members (such as getting drunk). Note also that in this study ascriptions of phenomenal states to groups were deemed more appropriate than either intentional or non-mental states. 

We look forward to your comments. 

Factive Verbs and Protagonist Projection

Throughout most of the 20^th century, the medical community knew that large amounts of stress causes stomach ulcers—or at least they though they did.  Here are some "known facts" (things that doctors thought were true) prior to 1979 about ulcers:

 

From "Helicobacter Connections"

But then, in the 1980s an Australian physician Dr. Barry Marshall, convinced that the medical community had it all wrong, infected himself with what he believed to be the real culprit responsible for the disease, H. pylori.  In order to prove his theories against the overwhelming consensus, Marshall famously drank the bacteria in question.

 

And as it turns out, he was absolutely right.  We now know that peptic ulcer disease is actually caused by bacterial infection. 

Often, when people tell this story, they say things like "Everyone knew that stress caused ulcers, before an Australian doctor in the early 1980s proved that ulcers are actually caused by bacteria."  But as philosophers we might wonder what we should make of this kind of claim.  Did the doctors really know that stress was causing the ulcers or did they only think they knew it?  Or phrased a bit more generally by Socrates “If one fails to get at the truth of a thing, will he ever be a person who knows that thing?” The resulting dialogue in Plato’s Theatetus reveals his interlocutor’s answer (186c-187b).  Knowledge cannot be mere opinion, because there may be a false opinion.  And the answer contemporary philosophers give has changed little since.  Basically every epistemic analysis today includes a truth condition for knowledge.  It’s just overwhelmingly clear to philosophers that only true things can be known. 

Nonetheless, there seem to be several examples today showing that non-philosophers do not find this thesis obvious, and that at least as far as ordinary language is concerned, people frequently use ‘know’ in what appear to be blatantly non-factive ways.  A quick Google search--from the ulcer case, to headlines in the New York Times, to major blockbuster movies--reveals that non-factivity may be all around us!

 

Examples like these have led a growing number of philosophers to begin to speculate about the role of factivity in the actual knowledge judgments people make, as well as the significance these ordinary judgments might have for traditional epistemic theorizing.  John Turri for instance, has advanced a performance-view of knowledge that allows for knowledge of “approximate truths”, which are strictly speaking, false beliefs (2011; forthcoming).  Sympathy for non-factivity has been expressed in research by Daniel Nolan (2008).  And, the possibility that epistemic contextualism might allow for contexts under which certain kinds of false beliefs qualify as knowledge has also been (at least) discussed in the works of Keith DeRose (2009).

And perhaps the most comprehensive challenge against orthodoxy to date is presented by Allan Hazlett. In two recent papers, “The Myth of Factive Verbs,” and “Factive Presupposition and the Truth Condition on Knowledge” Hazlett displays compelling evidence that people ordinarily use purportedly factive verbs like ‘know’, ‘learn’, ‘remember’, and ‘realize’ in utterances of the form ‘S knows that p’ in ways that frequently do NOT require that p is true.  Hazlett’s theory is that these kinds of sentences are acceptable to non-philosophers because the folk concept underlying the meaning of ‘knows’ allows that false things can genuinely be known.  

But given that a number of epistemologists have begun to focus more on the truth condition in light of intuitions about ordinary usage, we may wonder, could it really be that the folk concept of knowledge is truly a non-factive concept?  Afterall, if true, it seems this would have a series of important epistemic and methodological implications about the connection between the ordinary concept and the (decidedly factive) concept of knowledge philosophers have historically been interested in analyzing.

Besides non-factivity however, another possible explanatory hypothesis of these linguistic data (like the ulcer case) is that ordinary uses of ‘knows’ are highly sensitive to something called ‘protagonist projection’.  The basic idea basic idea is that non-factive uses frequently might just appear acceptable to us only because we take up the protagonist’s perspective and say what seems true from their perspective--and not because people think it's actually possible to know false things. (This is kind of like when one talks about someone else, and—with sufficient cues, e.g. imitating their bodily language and tone of voice—can then use ‘I’ to refer to this other person.)

To prove that Experimental Philosophy isn’t always about attacking the great tradition, I went ahead and ran some experiments attempting to confirm armchair intuitions about the factivity of ‘knows’.  A draft of the paper is available HERE.  The main goal of these experiments was to use explicit paraphrasing tasks (a method pioneered in the study of mental state attributions to groups) to see if the linguistic evidence about factivity collected so far is better explained by (i) the folk tendency to adopt the perspective of the putative ‘knower’ via protagonist projection when attributing knowledge to falsehoods or (ii) an underlying folk concept which really does allow for knowledge of false things.  

What Metaphors Mean

Consider the metaphorical sentence: 

(1) God is my copilot.

Now suppose that someone asked you to explain precisely what this sentence meant. You might be able to say various things that would provide a sense of more or less what the sentence was supposed to convey, but it seems that you would never be able to capture the full richness of the metaphor itself: inevitably, you would end up leaving something out. A number of philosophers have pointed to this striking difficulty we face in explaining the meaning of metaphors and used it as the basis for philosophical theories about the nature of metaphor itself. 

In a forthcoming paper, Mark Phelan takes up this supposed fact about our inability to paraphrase metaphors and subjects it to actual empirical study. But Phelan introduces a surprising new twist. Instead of simply asking people to explain what metaphors mean, he compares people's ability to explain the meanings of metaphors with their ability to explain the meanings of perfectly literal sentences. So, for example, people's ability to explain the meaning of sentence (1) could be compared with their ability to explain the meaning of the sentence: 

(2) Bill Thompson is my copilot.

Phelan asked experimental subjects to give paraphrases for metaphorical sentences; then he took these paraphrases and presented them to other experimental subjects, asking them whether the paraphrase captured the full meaning of the original or whether it left something out. Just as one might predict, subjects felt that the paraphrases inevitably left something out. This confirms the usual philosophical view. However, when Phelan did the same with paraphrases of perfectly literal sentences, he got exactly the same result! In fact, he sometimes found that subjects were, if anything, more likely to think that something had been left out of the paraphrases of literal sentences than they were to think that something had been left out of the paraphrases of metaphorical sentences. 

In short, it looks like it really is pretty impossible to explain what a metaphor means. But that is not because of anything special about metaphors. It is merely a reflection of the fact that we can't explain what any sentence means. 

New experiments (perhaps) support the thesis that knowledge is sensitive to stakes

Hi Everyone. I am linking here a new paper with a bunch of new studies about knowledge and practical interests. The main claims are that (1) folk attributions of knowledge are sensitive to stakes, (2) the data presented supports Interest Relative Invariantism (IRI), but (3) it is not so good for contextualism about knowledge. This paper might be of special interest since some recent work by Buckwalter, Feltz & Zarpentine, and May, Sinnott-Armstrong, Hull and Zimmerman have been interpreted by many to give evidence against (1). I discuss these other studies but, unfortunately, not in a lot of detail (the paper is not really about criticizing those studies). I also have not yet incorporated Keith DeRose's recent criticism of those papers but it looks like there is some overlap (also, see Jonathan Weinberg's blog post from two days ago).

One main idea behind the study is the introduction of "evidence seeking" experiments. This type of probe gets around some possible problems with previous experiments (there are no knowledge attributions inside the vignettes). Basically these new tests work like this: I set up a pair of vignettes where a student wants to proofread his class paper for typos. In one case there is a lot at stake if he has a single typo, and in another case there is little at stake. I then ask subjects to fill in the blank (with a number) in the following prompt: 

"How many times do you think the student has to proofread his paper before he knows that there are no typos?  ____ times." 

It turns out that the subjects given the high stakes vignettes write higher numbers than those who are given the lower stakes vignette. (differences are very much stat. sig.). This sort of result supports the idea that folk attributions of knowledge are sensitive to stakes (practical interests). This is just (1)

Ichikawa, Maitra, and Weatherson Defend a Dogma

Jonathan Ichikawa, Ishani Maitra, and Brian Weatherson have written a short, but dense reply to the work on intuitions about reference. Their paper, In Defence of a Kripkean Dogma, is forthcoming in PPR.

Brian's post and a link to their paper can be found there.