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Jonathan Livengood (Pitt, HPS) and I have been investigating Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich’s (2004) findings of cross-cultural and intra-cultural variation in intuitions about Kripke’s Gödel case. The paper ("The Case of the Divergent Descriptions: An Experimental Investigation of Semantics, Cross-cultural Style") can be found here and is briefly summarized below.

Abstract: In two fascinating articles, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich (2004; forthcoming) use experimental methods to raise a specter of doubt about reliance on intuitions in developing theories of reference which are then deployed in philosophical arguments outside the philosophy of language. Machery et al. ran a cross-cultural survey asking Western and East Asian subjects about a famous case from the philosophical literature on reference (Kripke’s Gödel example). They found significant variation in subjects’ intuitions about that case. While there have been a number of theoretical responses to this work, there have not yet been any experimental responses. This paper fills that gap. We noticed an ambiguity in the question Machery et al. posed in their original experiment; we then ran three studies to test the impact of this ambiguity on subjects’ responses. We found that the ambiguity accounts for much of the variation found in their original experiment. We argue that in the light of our data, Machery et al.’s argument is no longer convincing.

To quickly summarize our main findings: Across three studies we found that if Machery et al.’s original test question is slightly modified to emphasize the speaker’s perspective (John’s perspective), the percentage of (B) answers goes down; on the other hand, if you slightly modify the question to emphasize the narrator’s perspective, the percentage of (B) answers goes up. That percentage goes up even more with further clarifications of the question to better emphasize the narrator’s perspective. The results are shown graphically below (the studies on the left were between subjects, the study on the right within subjects).

As always, comments are both welcome and appreciated!

[Cross-posted at My Mind is Made Up.]

I just wanted to briefly follow up on a promissory note that I issued in one of the comment threads last week.  At the time, I stated that I would post something soon about some of the criticisms that were put forward at the recent SPP workshop.  I still plan to do so.  For now, both Brian Scholl and Ron Mallon have kindly agreed to share their presentations with the readers of the blog.  Once I have the presentations from each of them, I will post them along with links to some of the papers by Sosa that contain critical commentary on the methods we use and the conclusions we try to draw.  Michael Devitt also provided some critical remarks at the very end of the workshop that I will briefly (and likely incompetently!) summarize for the purposes of discussion.  In the meantime, hold fast!  I haven't forgotten the importance of collectively thinking more carefully about some of the issues that arose.  Hopefully, once everyone has had the opportunity to read through the salient material/remarks, we can have a productive discussion concerning the upsides and downsides of experimental philosophy!  For now, have fun participating in Eddy's thread on intuitions!

I am doing a directed reading this summer on experimental philosophy (co-taught with my colleague Andrea Scarantino) and yesterday we spent a long time debating what intuitions are, since this is clearly an important question for [experimental] philosophers.  I'll post some of the ideas we discussed, and what we have found in the literature later (we'll be discussing it more in another session).  But first I wanted to ask people three sets of questions:

1. How do you conceive of intuitions?  And, if you wish to add more:  given your conception of intuitions, how do you think they relate to theories (implicit vs. explicit) and concepts?  Do you define these things in terms of their content or the process that generates them or both?  Is there a difference between philosophical intuitions and other intuitions?  Between philosophers' intuitions and folk intuitions? What do you take the evidential status of intuitions to be? etc. (Yeah, I know this is too much, but at a minimum, we're trying to find a concise, useful definition of the sorts of intuitions philosophers talk about.)

2. What are the best pieces to read to gain information about the above questions? 
The main pieces I know of are:
A nice new Goldman piece in Grazer Philosophische 2007 "Philosophical Intuitions: Their Target, Their Source, and Their Epistemic Status"
The essays in DePaul and Ramsey's Rethinking Intuitions (I've found most of these essays very useful)
Hinikka's "The Emperor's New Intuitions" (JPhil 1999)
Some other pieces by Bealer, Sosa, Weinberg, Kornblith that I don't feel like looking up right now, and Jackson's From Metaphysics to Ethics has some relevant stuff.  I have not read Joel Pust's book Intuitions as Evidence, so someone tell us if it is essential reading.
And please tell us what else is out there.

3. Has anyone taught a course on experimental philosophy yet?  If so, it'd be nice if people could share what they've taught.  I know Stich has taught such a course and his syllabus is online, but I think others have as well.  I suspect the pieces in the new Knobe and Nichols volume would be a good start, but what else?  And, related to the previous question, what sorts of background pieces would work best? 

I just stumbled upon this job listing at CalTech for the upcoming year, and was very pleased to see that they were looking for "Any area of philosophy informed by the empirical or mathematical sciences (e.g., philosophy of science, philosophy of psychology, empirical ethics, political philosophy, experimental philosophy). "  Is this the first job ad to officially & explicitly list experimental philosophy as a possible part of the AOS?

There is now a new web page devoted to Experimental Philosophy at the Bristol University Philosophy Department website, at http://www.bris.ac.uk/philosophy/projects/exp_phil.  I'll be adding links to other x-phi websites and to questionnaires, including one I'm working on myself at the moment, so let me know if you'd like me to include anything?  Thanks.

It has been busy here as of late!  Needless to say, I am delighted so many people have been visiting the blog and participating in the threads.  Three more contributors have recently come on board, so I thought it would only be appropriate to welcome them to the community:

Adam Arico
Anne Jacobson
Jason Shepard (undergraduate at the University of South Alabama--the host of this conference)

*I wasn't always good about formerly welcoming new contributors in the past, so here's a shout out to all the old school crew of contributors who I neglected!  Their names are lurking in the ever growing (70!) list of contributors.  As always, if you know of anyone who should be on the list or who might be interested, just tell them to drop me a line.

Many of you have probably read Appiah’s delightful little book Experiments in Ethics (and if you have not, you should!). Many experiments done by experimental philosophers are discussed in the book. I have recently written a short critical discussion of this book for Neuroethics “The bleak implications of moral psychology.” This might be of interest to many readers of this blog.

Comments are welcome as usual.

The paper can be downloaded below.

Edouard

Download Machery.doc

In Naming and Necessity, Kripke famously proposed against descriptivism that the reference of proper names was fixed by a causal-historical process. He asked his readers to imagine that the incompleteness of arithmetic was not proved by the man originally called “Gödel,” but by someone called “Schmidt.” Readers were then invited to share the intuition that contemporary speakers of English refer to the man originally called “Gödel” and not to the man originally called “Schmidt” when they use the word “Gödel,” although they associate “Gödel” with the description “the man who invented the incompleteness of arithmetic.”

In a well-known article, Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Steve Stich (2004) have provided some evidence that East Asians and Americans tend to have different intuitions about the Gödel case and have argued that this finding casts some doubt on the use of intuitions to establish theories of reference (this is an early example of the Rutgers plan).

Many people have replied to this article, including, e.g., Kirk Ludwig and Genoveva Marti. Recently, Michael Devitt joined the fray with a very interesting article posted on this blog.

But Kripke remained silent. Until recently.

During the Q&A period of his lecture at the inauguration of the Kripke Center, Kripke was asked what he thought of Machery et al.’s study. He delivered a fatal blow to their argument. Judge by yourself: The full sound clip can be found there and a shorter sound clip with one of the punchlines can be found there.

Because the recording is poor, I add a transcript of some highlights of his answer:

“Are they claiming that students in Honk-Kong agree with what I denounced? It is very difficult for me to take this seriously [laughs] (…) People used to feel superior to Orientals [sic]; now, they don’t, maybe they should again [laughs] (…) There must be some validity in testing people’s intuitions, I think (…) if we find really that some culture believe that… I wouldn’t know what to say; I hope they were not too influenced by philosophers [laughs] (…) this case seems to me to be intuitively such a clear one that it is hard for me to imagine that it should be experimentally overthrown. (…). All right, I don’t know what to do with this (…) Some things seem to be too preposterous … there must be some sort of confusion in them (…).”

Thanks to Brian Leiter for pointing us towards this interesting post about experimental philosophy over at Savage Minds.  Check it out!

I just wanted to take a brief moment to welcome some of the new cyber-faces that have recently been added to the experimental philosophy mix.  It's worth pointing out that there are several other pending invitations as well.  As always, if you would like to be more formally connected with the community, just send me an email or post a comment in the threads.  We are always happy to have new voices.  On that note, here are the latest additions (links can be found in the side-bar):

Adina Roskies
Blake Myers
Bryony Pierce
Dushan Wegner
Kate Devitt
Nicole Hassoun
Kathryn Norlock
Tiziana Zalla
Valerie Tiberius
Wesley Buckwalter

I am particularly interested in getting undergraduates into the fold, so if you have some potentially interested students, have them drop me a line!

p.s. If you are listed as a contributor, but there is no link associated with your name in the side-bar, get with the program and create a homepage and send me the link :)

If you're in or around New York, you should certainly plan to go to the book release of the Knobe and Nichols OUP Experimental Philosophy anthology tomorrow night at Union Hall.  Not only will Joshua's very talented wife Alina Simone be providing her powerful indie rock fare, but Joshua's friend Eugene Mirman will be providing some laughs as well.  Plus, it will give you the chance to spend some time with two of the nicest blokes in the x-phi community while supporting the release of an exciting volume about the work we do.  See here for more details! 

I've been running an experiment that examines the folk’s judgments about how ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ pertain to moral facts. I used Josh Knobe’s “environmental harm scenario,” and I found that the majority of people tend to think that the chairman KNEW that harming the environment was wrong, but far fewer think that he BELIEVED that harming the environment was wrong. This is quite interesting, given that belief is generally thought to be required for knowledge.
Here’s how I ran the experiment:
I presented 35 subjects with the “environmental harm scenario.” There were then two questions that followed the scenario. The first question was the same for all subjects. It read:
(1) Did the chairman intentionally harm the environment?
a.    Yes
b.    No

There were then two possibilities for the second question.  17 subjects were given the first possibility:
(2) Did the chairman know that harming the environment was wrong?
a.    Yes
b.    No

The other 18 were given the second possibility:
(2) Did the chairman believe that harming the environment was wrong?
a. Yes
b. No

94% of the subjects that were given the first possibility answered that the chairman KNEW that harming the environment was wrong, whereas only 39% of the subjects that were given the second possibility answered that the chairman BELIEVED that harming the environment was wrong.

Any thoughts as to why this might be the case?

-Blake

I just wanted to say congratulations to Dr. Knobe and Dr. Nichols for their new book, Experimental Philosophy (on the sidebar).  I just got my copy and I am especially excited to read their introductory manifesto and the section on the future for experimental philosophy.  I hope more undergraduate classes on experimental philosophy will pop up because of this book!

First, let me say that as a reader of the blog and previous student of one of the contributors, it’s a thrill to write here for the first time.  Thanks to Josh Knobe and Thomas Nadelhoffer for the encouragement and invitation to post.

Currently I have been running a series of experiments at SUNY-Buffalo investigating and testing for the various claims made in connection with the epistemic contextualist literature.  However in the midst of these probes, I have come across some surprising results connected to the work on intentionality.  Given a reemergence of discussion here and elsewhere on explaining the side-effect effect, I was eager to share them.  While a full paper is still forthcoming, the very preliminary data seems to show that the classic Knobe Effect asymmetry between help and harm conditions also maintained for knowledge! 

A quick snapshot: In a classroom setting, participants were given one of the two probes, HELP or HARM:

The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, ‘We are thinking of starting a new program. We are sure that it will help us increase profits, and it will also help/harm the environment.’ The chairman of the board answered, ‘I don’t care at all about helping/harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.’ They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was helped/harmed.

Did the chairman know that the new program would help/harm the environment?

Participants were asked to specify their level of agreement regarding the Chairman’s knowledge.  The data was collected on a Likert scale, and a one-way ANOVA reveals that, (F(1, 747)= 102.53, P< .0005), there is a significant difference between these two groups.

I am eager to know what everyone thinks about this experiment, and curious to hear about the conclusions to draw from it.  After his talk in Montreal last week at UQAM, I joked with Josh that the fact that the original response asymmetry for ‘intends’ persisted when participants were asked something as radical as what the chairman knows, is good evidence that the same phenomenon will carry on for almost anything we ask of the chairman.  Of course, another take on the data is that in a very odd way, the results seem to support a contextualist pattern of knowledge attribution, that the truth conditions for a sentence of the kind “p knows that q” really are somehow relative to the context in which that utterance is made.  Yet the extent to which this bears on the variantist debate, or to what degree a contextualist pattern of folk knowledge attribution can actually explain the Knobe Effect is still largely uncertain.

Comments are welcome!   -Wesley

An article about experimental philosophy (as well as the new Knobe & Nichols x-phi anthology) came out today in Science Daily.  Check it out here.

In an attempt to solve the problem of how to make our collective surveys more accessible to people who might be interested in taking them, I have used Wordpress to create this blog.  I haven't linked to any studies just yet, but I will do so over the weekend.  In the event that you have a url for a survey, just send me an email with the link and I will post it on the blog.  Just make sure to tell me how it ought to be categorized. If you happen to have a Wordpress account (which would be ideal), just send me your info and I will add you as a contributor to the blog so you can post things directly without having me as a (reluctant!) monkey in the middle.  Hopefully, this helps those of you trying to figure out how to drum up participants on-line.  If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know.

Cheers,
Thomas

Jonathan Livengood (Pitt, HPS) and I are currently running an on-line study (the fourth in a sequence) following up on Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich's work on Kripke's Gödel case.  We are currently looking for more subjects (philosophers welcome, but we are primarily interested in non-philosophers).  Any help in passing this link along to potential subjects is greatly appreciated!

The study can be found at:  http://www.temptthefates.com/justin/reference/

For the past year, a group of us has been kicking around the idea of creating a Society for Experimental Philosophy.  The idea would be to have meetings at the three APA events each year.  The main goal would be to provide undergraduates, grad students, and junior philosophers/psychologists with a vehicle for  presenting their work at the APA and sharing their recent projects with a wider audience.  Each meeting would likely have a keynote speaker as well.  Given the recent success of the  pre-SPP workshop on experimental philosophy--at least in terms of attendance (see here for a discussion of an obvious shortcoming)--I think now more than ever that creating this kind of forum would be a really healthy way to (a) share our ideas with an audience who might otherwise be unfamiliar with our work and, (b) encourage more people to start playing an active role in our growing and thriving scholarly community. 

I am posting this to see whether people think this is a good idea.  Since we don't want to jump through the requisite hoops needed to get this thing off the ground unless people are going to be willing and able to play along, I wanted to check your respective temperatures before we get the ball rolling.  So, what do ya'll think?  Would anyone be interested in helping us organize meetings, create a homepage, etc.?  If so, now is the time to let your interests be known!

At the end of the pre-SPP experimental philosophy workshop, Rob Wilson correctly suggested that we needed to think more carefully about why so few women have been active in the field so far.  I, for one, have given this some thought as well since it is odd to me that more women philosophers aren't interested in being part of the kind of experimental projects we undertake.  Of course, there is admittedly a problem with determining who gets to count as a "philosopher" in this context, since two of the most visible women who self-identify with experimental philosophy have appointments in psychology departments despite having training in philosophy (Jen Wright and Liane Young).  But be that as it may, it is nevertheless disappointing--however one decides to carve out the territory--that our growing field hasn't done a better job attracting a more diverse pool of participants. 

One possibility is that going into experimental philosophy is professionally dangerous given the hostility directed at the movement by many in the profession.  As such, it is a risky enterprise--which may thereby provide women (who are already disadvantaged in philosophy) with an additional disincentive.  This would also explain why psychologists may feel more comfortable doing experimental philosophical work.  After all, the kind of work we do is certainly not controversial in psychological circles!

That being said, I am ultimately less interested in why we aren't a more diverse crew--both in terms of gender and race--than I am in what we could do to improve on what is a real shortcoming of the field.  Given how collaborative, constructive, and interdisciplinary the x-phi community is, there is no excuse for our sharing the same gender and racial imbalances that plague philosophy as a whole.  So, what's the solution?  That 's a problem for us to work on solving together.

For starters, I officially invite any women who are interested in being part of this blog to send me an email--regardless of whether they have worked on experimental projects in the past.  As those of you who have contacted me before know, I am always more than happy to invite interested parties to play along.  All you need to do is ask.  Second, I encourage faculty to make a concerted effort to get women graduate and undergraduate students to be part of their experimental projects.  Not only does this provide students with the chance to get conference presentations and publications, but it also ties them into the broader closely knit network of experimental philosophers--all of which will help students both get into better grad programs (in the case of undergrads) and find better jobs (in the case of grad students). Finally, and most importantly, I invite all of you to open up dialog about experimental philosophy with  women colleagues in your home departments.  After all, there is a lot of interesting experimental philosophical work yet to be done and many fields that are ripe for inquiry remain untapped.  And it is high time that we actively try to ensure that as many voices and ideas make it into the experimental mix as possible. 

*There is a related post over at Feminist Philosophers (see here). 

Something on the lighter side for the summer.

I'm reading Mary Roach's new book, Bonk (not nearly as good as her earlier Stiff).  In a chapter on the relation between female orgasm and fertility, Roach discusses the work of the 18th century Italian Lazzaro Spallanzani, who was evidently something of a pioneer  in animal insemination.  Spallanzani impregnated a dog with a syringe, an act which eventually led to the birth of three "lively welps."  After detailing his methodology, Spallanzani had this to say:

Thus did I succeed in fecundating this quadraped; and I can truly say that I have never received greater pleasure upon any occasion since I have cultivated experimental philosophy [emphasis added].

I thought some of you might enjoy the reference.  Perhaps the earliest reference to x-phi?