Experimental Philosophy

Mele & Nahmias on Philosophy TV

Al Mele and Eddy Nahmias have an illuminating conversation about the relationship between free will and recent advances in neuroscience and social psychology in the latest episode of Philosophy TV. Here is the overview:

Mele and Nahmias start by explaining how they first became seriously interested in the relationship of free will to science. Then (12:44) they discuss the infamous Libet experiments, which are often interpreted as evidence that our conscious decisions are determined by earlier nonconscious brain activity, along with a range of other experiments in neuroscience that also bear on issues concerning human free agency. Next (25:31) they consider general worries that underlie neuroscientific investigations of free will. Then (41:28) they discuss whether (and how) results in social psychology could undermine free human agency. After that, they discuss future prospects for scientific investigation of free will (46:14), including Mele’s (exceptionally generous) Templeton-sponsored grants. They conclude (53:55) with some reflections on the definition of free will.

So, go check out what they have to say!

Josh Knobe on Edge.org

Edge.org has posted a video by Joshua Knobe about experimental philosophy and the notion of the self.  So, take a thirty minute break this weekend to check it out!  They'll be posting another video in a few days by David Pizarro as well.  

Here is the abstract: 

I'm going to be talking today about some recent work in the field of experimental philosophy. But before I talk about what this actual recent work has discovered I want to say something briefly about what this field is. What is the field of experimental philosophy? Experimental philosophy is a relatively new field—one that just cropped up around the past ten years or so, and it's an interdisciplinary field, uniting ideas from philosophy and psychology. In particular, what experimental philosophers tend to do is to go after questions that are traditionally associated with philosophy but to go after them using the methods that have been traditionally associated with psychology.

David Chalmers responding to Herman Cappelen on Intuitions

Readers may be interested in this new paper by David Chalmers responding to Herman Cappelen's argument in Philosophy Without Intuitions that contemporary analytic philosophers don't rely on intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories.

Prereflectively at least, it might have seemed really obvious that philosophers do rely on intuitions. So it had been suggested previously that one simple way to challenge Cappelen's argument would be to defend a specialized theory of intuition. But part of Chalmers' argument here is that there is a minimal way to understand the notion and subsequent use of intuition that both does justice to the way philosophers typically use the term, as well as vindicates this general sense in which it may have seemed so obvious that philosophers do rely on intuitions. 

The minimal sense involves characterizing intuitive claims as claims with broadly non-inferential justification (or simply, justification that does not derive from "inferential, perceptual, introspective, memorial, or testimonial justification"). Then, and with respect to their use, Chalmers emphasises their dialectical justificatory status, or the use of intuitions in how a subject supports a claim to someone else. Putting all this together, "What is distinctive about appeals to intuition" Chalmers writes, "is that intuitive claims are taken to have a dialectical justification that is broadly noninferential. That is, they are taken to be dialectically justified (for all parties) in a way that does not depend on an inferential, perceptual, memorial, introspective, or testimonial dialectical justification".

So is this minimal sense reflective of the typical philosophical self-conception, in a way that perhaps made the original claim about intuitions seem so plausible? If so, it really seems like the minimal sense would also open intuitions to several of the kinds of worries that experimental philosophers have been raising...

Mele's Interview with 3:AM

Yet another interesting and illuminating interview by 3:AM's Richard Marshall.  This time, Al Mele talks about free will, self-deception, neuroscience, experimental philosophy and a number of other themes.  Check it out!

Online Consciousness Conference 2012

Readers of the blog may be interested in a number of papers from this year's Online Consciousness Conference. 

In addition to this year's keynote on the The Biological Cost of Consciousness by Bernard Baars, also check Peter Carruthers, Logan Fletcher, and J. Brendan Ritch's work in Evolving Self-Consciousness, arguing that evolutionary origins of  self-consciousness depend on the prior evolution of a mindreading system.

And also, in Does the S&M Robot Feel Guilty? Mark Phelan, Justin Sytsma and I, continue our earlier discussion (from this blog) on valence, function, and the folk dichotomy of phenomenal states.  Justin has provided some new experimental data on this topic since then that people interested in this question will want to check out.

Comments are open Feb 17-March 2, so be sure to head on over to OC4 and join in!

Frege Lectures by Stich

Daniel Cohnitz asked me to pass along the following:

Videos of the 2010 "Gottlob Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy", delivered by Stephen Stich (Rutgers) on "Experimental Philosophy and the Bankruptcy of 'The Great Tradition'" are now online. You'll find them on the Frege Lectures website

http://daniel.cohnitz.de/index.php?Gottlob-Frege-Lectures-in-Theoretical-Philosophy-20101

or via this direct link:

http://www.cohnitz.net/Frege/Stich2010/

A draft of the paper presented in lecture 3 is online here:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1683066

X-Phi Online and in the Media

Here are three things readers of this blog may find of interest (if you haven't already seen them):

1. Jesse Prinz was recently interviewed as part of the University of Chicago's Elucidations series of podcasts.  
2. Joshua Knobe recently wrote a piece about experimental philosophy for the NYT's Opinionator/The Stone series.
3. Finally, Philosophy TV has an discussion between Tamar Gendler and Eric Schwitzgebel about the distinction between aliefs and beliefs--with a nice foray into the troubling literature on IAT.

Happy viewing and reading!

Mele on Big Think

There is an interesting and illuminating talk posted on Big Think by our own Al Mele.  In addition to talking about free will and weakness of will, he also talks about experimental philosophy.  So, you should drop by to check it out! 

X-Phi Goes International

I thought that some readers of the blog might be interested in the number of x-phi things currently going on around the world.

• The conference How and Why Economists and Philosophers Do Experiments is set for March 27th & 28th at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan.
• As posted below, there's a workshop in experimental philosophy in Wrocław, Poland May 21st - 23rd at the Institute of Philosophy. 
• In Varna, Bulgaria, there's an experimental philosophy conference June 4th - 6th at the Varna International Philosophical School. 
• A conference on moral judgments and intentional action has been planned for July 5th & 6th at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
• There's a new experimental philosophy site in Portuguese, and there have been rumors of a Portuguese translation of Experimental Philosophy eds. Knobe & Nichols. 
• There's also an experimental philosophy page up at the University of Bristol in England.
• And there have been a number of x-phi projects coming out of the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris.

Levin on X-Phi

I just found this critical notice by Janet Levin, which came out in the October issue of Analysis:

http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/extract/69/4/761

She discusses nearly every chapter in the collection by Knobe and Nichols, Experimental Philosophy, and ultimately argues that:

the results of the most methodologically sound and philosophically relevant studies discussed in this volume could have been obtained from the armchair, and thus that experimental philosophy may not present a serious challenge to the traditional methods of analytic philosophy. (p. 761)

However, I think this statement of her conclusion is a bit misleading. Sometimes she does, as this quote indicates, simply want to reject the revisionist claim that x-phi should replace the armchair entirely (or pretty much entirely).  But at other times she seems to be targeting the more modest claim that x-phi is a more promising methodology for some projects in philosophy. For example, she says "it seems that traditional analytic methods may well suffice for identifying the judgements that provide the right sorts of data for philosophical theories" (p. 767). Here she's not just saying x-phi doesn't undermine the armchair entirely; she's suggesting the armchair is as good as x-phi at gathering the relevant information about our concepts and so on.

Anywho, I thought readers of this blog might like to take a look at her piece if they haven't already.