Experimental Philosophy

Actually, women are MORE likely to share their (mostly-male) professors' intuitions...

...at least for the 9 questions I studied for my 2013 paper, and for the 3 of those that Buckwaler and Stitch included in their widely-discussed paper on the subject. Plus: why has philosophy made so much less progress toward gender equality than the STEM disciplines have over the past two decades? I address these issues in my new article in Hypatia.

Negative Public Perceptions of Philosophical Research

Philosophy is not always perceived as well as philosophers would like. There are public discussions of whether philosophy has any value at all (The New York Times or The Chronicle of Higher Education). Members of our own draft manifestos criticizing philosophy's contributions to the academy (see Glymour’s “Manifesto” or Thagard’s “Eleven Dogmas of Analytic Philosophy”). Presidential candidates quip we need less philosophers.

In the latest incident, my personal childhood hero, Bill Nye got skeptical with BigThink about how far philosophical methods can take you in life, compared to say, scientific ones:

  

What contributes to negative opinions about philosophical research?

The proto-reliabilist hypothesis

In contemporary Anglo-American epistemology, it is almost universally assumed that knowledge must be reliably produced. On this view, knowledge must be produced by abilities (processes, faculties, powers, etc.) that “will or would yield mostly true beliefs,” as William Alston put it. Call this consensus view “knowledge reliabilism.”

One thing I’ve always been surprised by is how little explicit, direct argumentation there is for knowledge reliabilism in the literature. An old paper by Goldman contains a weak explanatory argument, which gets cited sometimes. Aside from that, the main consideration offered in support of knowledge reliabilism is that it’s just commonsense. For instance, Edward Craig claims that reliabilism “matches our everyday practice with the concept of knowledge as actually found,” that it is “a good fit to the intuitive extension of ‘know’.” And Ernest Sosa claims that reliabilism is the theoretical “correlate” of “commonsense” epistemology. Call this “the proto-reliabilist hypothesis” about folk epistemology.

The proto-reliabilist hypothesis makes at least a couple straightforward predictions. First, people will tend to deny knowledge in cases of unreliably formed belief. Second, clear and explicit differences in reliability should produce large differences in people’s willingness to attribute knowledge. These predictions can be tested with some very simple experiments. Below I briefly describe one I ran.

Knowledge of being manipulated does not affect moral responsibility. What?!

This past semester I was working with Fiery Cushman and an RA (Becca Ramos) on some studies on manipulation and moral responsibility and we ended up with some findings that I'm completely puzzled by, so I thought I'd see if you all have any ideas about them. (In case you want to read more on the background x-phi work on manipulation, you can find some of that: here, here, here, and here). 

One of the things I wanted to test was the intuitive idea that a critical aspect of being manipulated was not knowing that you were being manipulated. Intuitively, it seems like one is more responsible for doing an immoral action when you are aware that the environment has been set up so that you'll do that action. To test this basic idea, we designed a relatively simple study.

In one condition, the manipulated agent didn't know they were being manipulated:

In the 1950s, the government of a small Eastern European country plotted to secretly start a war, using industrial workers, and get revenge on a neighboring country. For the first part of their plan, the government intentionally destroyed farm machinery and set fire to several food stores on purpose. As a result, there was a serious lack of food in the country. Soon the people living in the city couldn't get enough food to feed themselves. The whole city shut down, crime skyrocketed and a small but violent uprising broke out.

The government knew their plan was working perfectly. Right at that time, a group of industrial workers heard on the government news channel that a neighboring village had a surplus of food. After hearing the news, the group of industrial workers raided the small village on the country's border, stealing food from the farmers and killing innocent people. The government had known this would happen all along and felt great about their successful plan.

In the other condition, the agent did know that they were being manipulated (differences in italics):

In the 1950s, the government of a small Eastern European country plotted to secretly start a war, using industrial workers, and get revenge on a neighboring village. For the first part of their plan, the government intentionally destroyed farm machinery and set fire to several food stores on purpose. As a result, there was a serious lack of food in the country. Soon the people living in the city couldn't get enough food to feed themselves. The whole city shut down, crime skyrocketed and a small but violent uprising broke out. The government knew their plan was working perfectly.

Not long after, a couple of the industrial workers were informed by some government employees about the government’s plan to use the workers to attack the neighboring village.

Right at that time, a group of industrial workers heard on the government news channel that a neighboring village had a surplus of food. After hearing the news, the group of industrial workers raided the small village on the country's border, stealing food from the farmers and killing innocent people. The government had known this would happen all along and felt great about their successful plan.

We also included a condition in which the agent was not being manipulated (the government had no intention for the workers to attack the village). We used five different scenarios in total. Each participant read a single vignette and then was asked whether they agreed or disagreed with a statement of the form:

• The workers should be blamed for the damage to the neighboring village. 

Here's the pattern of results we got:

 

Does emotion explain the side-effect effect?

As many of you will know, there has been a certain amount of controversy about whether the impact of moral judgment on intentional action intuitions is explained by something about people's emotions. Recently, two new papers on the topic have come out. Both use innovative and sophisticated methods, and both are very much worth reading, but unfortunately, the two papers arrive at completely opposite answers. So I was curious to hear what people thought about how to make sense of these new results.

On one side, Elise Cardinale and colleagues tried looking for the effect in children with psychopathic tendencies. Psychopaths have a well-documented deficit in emotional responses.. Yet children with psychopathic tendencies show exactly the same effect that other children do. This result seems to suggest that the effect observed in most people is not due to their specifically emotional capacities.

On the other side, Lawrence Ngo and colleagues conducted a neuroimaging study of people's responses in these cases. They find that intentional action attributions for harmful side-effects are predicted by amygdala activation and that this effect is mediated by self-reported emotion (see figure on right). So they suggest that emotion actually is explaining this part of the effect.

What do you folks think is going on here?

Mturk Now More Expensive

As many readers have probably heard, Amazon's Mechanical Turk will soon (July 22, 2015) be charging substantially more for its services. Before, Mturk took 10% of what researchers ("requesters") paid workers. Now it will be effectively 40% (in the rare case that you need fewer than 10 distinct participants, then it's only 20%).

Naturally, some researchers are upset, as documented at The Chronicle of Higher Education ("Researchers Complain About Changes in Amazon Tool Used for Surveys").

Two quick downsides that stand out to me:

(1) Running even a small x-phi study on Mturk will more likely require grant money, which is scarce in the humanities.

(2) An increase in operating costs will probably motivate researchers to still get the same mileage out of their funds. This makes it even less likely that workers will get paid a living wage, which is an ongoing ethical issue with use of the site.

Any reactions from the x-phi community?

(Note: If interested, this blog recently featured an excellent post on the status of Mturk as a research tool.)

Knobe in the NYT

Our own Joshua Knobe has an interesting piece on theory of mind and corporations that just appeared in The New York Times entitled, "Do Corporations Have Minds?" He reports some interesting findings that address a very important moral, legal, and political issue (especially given some of the awful U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the past few years about these and related issues).  So, go check it out!

On Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions

As some (hopefully many) of you know, several years ago I started an effort to systematically replicate diverse results from the experimental philosophy literature. That work produced two papers (link to paper on gender and link to paper on ethnicity) and for the SSRN versions, see paper on gender and paper on ethnicity.  Others who became interested in this kind of work carried out similar replications and verified my original findings (link 1 and link 2).

In one of my papers (paper on ethnicity) I attempted replication of the influential article by Weinberg, Nichols and Stich (2001) that in large part gave rise to the experimental philosophy movement.  None of the findings of the original paper were reproducible.

I wanted to post a quick note on a related study I conducted recently.  I will not be submitting this for publication and so wanted to share the results via this blog post. 

The data for the exact replication of Weinberg et al. (2001) surveyed individuals of East and South Asian backgrounds living and studying in the West (as the original paper by Weinberg and colleagues also surveyed individuals from different ethnic background living and/or studying in the West).

I had previously considered collecting data from East and South Asians living in their respective regions and a referee made a similar suggestion.  My response to the referee was that individuals of different ethnic backgrounds living in their native regions were not the concern of Weinberg and colleagues’ study, and hence it was beyond the scope of my exact replication.

Since then I collected data on Indians living in India and the findings again show that there are no cross-cultural differences in epistemic intuitions.  Unfortunately, I could not collect data for East Asians living in East Asia as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk seems to have changed it's policies and does not allow survey/task distribution internationally.  I did manage to collect data from South Asia and the findings are presented in the research note uploaded to SSRN.  I will try to update this post with a link to the raw data.

I also checked the data set for differences based on gender and age (since there have been reports on differences based on these variables) and here again there were no significant differences.

Turri's "The Problem of ESEE Knowledge" Published in Ergo!

For starters, I would like to thank Franz Huber and Jonathan Weisberg for the work they’ve done to successfully develop and launch Ergo—a much needed, new, open access, online philosophy journal. Here is a description of the journal from its homepage:

Ergo is a general, open access philosophy journal accepting submissions on all philosophical topics and from all philosophical traditions. This includes, among other things: history of philosophy, work in both the analytic and continental traditions, as well as formal and empirically informed philosophy. Submission and publication are free. Authors retain the copyright of their work under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. Papers are published as they are accepted; there is no regular publication schedule.

With Weisberg and Huber serving as managing editors and an all-star cast of section editors to assist them, Ergo is going to be an excellent new venue for publishing first rate philosophy—a venue which has the added virtue of not being locked behind a pay wall (thereby benefiting authors and readers alike)! They say more about the laudable goals of Ergo here. My fingers are crossed that the discipline will get behind Huber, Weisberg, and the rest of their team. Philosophy needs more journals like Ergo. So, we should all applaud their efforts to move our field in the right direction.

Given my views concerning the importance of open access philosophy, I was both delighted and honored when Huber and Weisberg asked me to write a commentary on one of the papers from the inaugural issue of Ergo—namely, “The Problem of ESEE Knowledge,” by our own John Turri. My assignment was to write a blog post designed both to alert readers to the publication of the first issue and to encourage readers to participate in a discussion thread about Turri’s interesting and important paper. While I am admittedly not a card carrying epistemologist—indeed, I don’t even play one on television—I nevertheless thought it would be fun to post an overview of Turri’s contribution in the hopes that others would take a look at the paper and join the discussion here on the blog. So, I happily accepted the invitation to play along.  That said, let’s get started! 

Mixed Thinking about Free Will & Responsibility

There is a well-known "mystery" surrounding free will (to use van Inwagen's term): acting freely seems to require both the truth and falsity of determinism. Now that's a serious problem!

Here's a way to illustrate it. Suppose determinism is true and you're deciding whether to commit some crime, say embezzlement. Given how things have gone before and the nature of the world you're in, only one option is possible. Let's suppose you embezzle. To many, especially incompatibilists, this seems to preclude freedom and responsibility since, in an important sense, you couldn't have done otherwise. You lack any real options; embezzlement was inevitable.

But now suppose determinism is false so that you have a robust sense of options. Then which action you perform seems partly a matter of luck. Your embezzlement won't entirely be determined by the kind of world you're in or the past leading up to the act, but that includes your character, preferences, deliberation, knowledge, etc. Compatibilists often like to press on this point, insisting that the right kind of control over one's action is what really matters.

This mystery rears its ugly head among both philosophers and ordinary folks. The debates among philosophers seem to lead to dialectical stalemates (to use Fischer's phrase) between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Each camp seems equally confident that one of their preferred factors is or is not a necessary condition for free will, and they can't argue otherwise without begging the question against their opponents. Among non-specialists,  there are similarly mixed results. Some data suggest ordinary thinking is compatibilist while others suggest it is incompatibilist. 

What gives? I'm interested in acquiring a better understanding of the nature and source of the above mystery, but it is affected by existing research on which position is more "intuitive." Many have tried to discount intuitions on one side or the other or to treat the issue as resting on a mere verbal dispute. But I provide experimental evidence for an alternative account in a new paper---"On the Very Concept of Free Will" (PDF). I argue that our ordinary attributions of acting freely are affected by factors emphasized by both sides of the debate and that neither can be tossed out as an error. I propose a "cluster theory" that treats the concept of free will as non-classical, along the lines of a prototype account. 

Here's a quick sense of the data. I systematically varied two factors (which I label "liberty" and "ensurance"), each of which is tied to the kind of options and control, respectively, highlighted in debates about free will. The data fit the following predictions:

1. When both factors are present, people are highly inclined to attribute freedom to the protagonist of the vignette.
2. When both factors are absent, people are inclined to deny freedom.
3. But, when only one is present, responses on average are near the midpoint.
4. And each of these factors have an independent and significant impact on responses.

I'd love to hear what others think about this apporach to the "mystery," as well as how it fits with the complicated and burgeoning amount of data on this topic in experimental philosophy. My hope is that such a theory can go some way toward explaining such mixed thinking about free will, but this is only a start.

___

Note 1: For those interested, this topic connects up with many previously discussed on the blog. In particular, it engages with: the affective error theory proposed by Nichols and Knobe, which Florian Cova discussed last year; Murray and Nahmias's fascinating bypassing account, which Knobe nicely summarizes here and Rose and Nichols have recently challenged in a clever way.

Note 2: My cluster theory was inspired to a large extent by the interesting non-experimental work of John Maier as well as my previous work with Richard Holton on weakness of will, which Knobe summarized at Flickers of Freedom several years ago.