Experimental Philosophy

Unifying Morality's Effect on Non-moral Cognition

At this point, it is pretty clear is that people’s moral judgments affect a surprisingly large number of their judgments that do not seem to be straightforwardly moral (e.g., belief, causation, doing vs. allowing, freedom, happiness, innateness, intentional action, knowledge, love, and so on) 

The sheer number of different judgments affected by morality provides some reason against continuing to search for separate explanations for each effect. Rather, it looks as though we should be searching for ways in which the various effects of morality may be unified. Of course, the sort of explanation that could unify these various effects would have to be so abstract that it could be playing a role in each of these diverse kinds of judgments.

In a new paper, we propose that the key to understanding how these effects can be unified is to begin thinking about the role of alternative possibilities. The basic idea is that our way of understanding many aspects of the world involves not only thinking about the things that actually happened but also considering other alternative ways that things could have happened but didn’t. Along these lines, our proposal has two key components:

(1) Morality affects which alternative possibilities are relevant.

(2) Each of the ordinary judgments affected by morality involve the representation of alternative possibilities in some way or another.

To test this unifying framework, we took the original materials from four previous studies which showed that agents who acted immorally (vs. neutrally) were more thought to have acted freely, caused the outcome that occurred, did something rather than allowed it to happen, and acted more intentionally. Using the original materials, we both replicated the four original effects, and also found that changes in the morality of the agent’s action impacted participants’ judgments of the relevance of alternative possibilities. Critically though, we also found that participants’ judgments of the relevance of alternatives mediated the effect of morality on judgments of freedom, causation, doing vs. allowing, and intentional action.

 

We then sought to further confirm this general framework by manipulating rather than measuring changes in the relevance of alternatives.

 

Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language

The latest installment in The Advances in Experimental Philosophy series is now in print. The topic is: Experimental Philosophy of Language. Here is the abstract:

Should philosophy of language use experimental methods, or can it be pursued in the armchair? Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language represents a balanced variety of positions on this extensively discussed question. In the first collection of its kind, leading experts in the field present a number of different perspectives on the relevance of experimental methods in philosophy of language, ranging from complete dismissals of traditional methods to defences of armchair approaches. As well as exploring possible novel experimental techniques, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language evaluates the philosophical relevance of existing experimental results and presents new data from new experimental studies. For scholars looking to stay ahead of the latest developments and trends in the philosophy of language, this important contribution to the field brings the reader up-to-date. 

And here is the table of contents:

1. Introduction, Jussi Haukioja (Norwegian University of Science And Technology, Trondheim, Norway)
2. Kripke's Gödel Case, Max Deutsch (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
3. Testing Theories of Reference, Michael Devitt (City University of New York, USA)
4. A Rylean Argument against Reference, Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
5. The Metaphilosophy of Language, Daniel Cohnitz (Tartu University, Estonia)
6. Experimental Semantics: The Case of Natural Kind Terms, Sören Häggqvist & Åsa Wikforss (Stockholm University, Sweden)
7. Ambiguity and Referential Machinery, Ángel Pinillos (Arizona State University, USA)
8. General Terms, Hybrid Theories and Ambiguity: A Discussion of Some Experimental Results, Genoveva Marti (University of Western Ontario, Canada)
9. Testing Transparent Ascriptions: A Plea for an Experimental Approach, Mark Phelan (Lawrence University, USA)
Index 

For those working in the philosophy of language, this should be a must read!