共筆部落格

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.]

The University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics invites applications for its Visiting Faculty Fellowships. For the academic year 2009-10, two fellowships will be awarded to outstanding scholars and teachers interested in writing and conducting research about ethics during a year in residence at the University of Toronto.

Further details are available here: http://www.ethics.utoronto.ca/index.php?id=5

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? 

Theme: The Ethics of the Family
Where: Towson University, Maryland
When: November 14-16, 2008
More info: http://www.rit.edu/cla/ethics/seac/conferences.html

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.

The "recognitional view" of practical rationality - as I shall use the term - is the view that all requirements of practical rationality are justified by the fact that it is reasonable to expect one's conforming to these requirements to lead to one's practical reasoning's getting things right to a higher degree than one's violating these requirements. If R is a requirement of practical rationality, then it must be reasonable to expect the results of one's conforming to R to be better - specifically, to involve one's practical reasoning's "getting things right" to a higher degree - than the results of one's violating R.

Can this recognitional view explain what justify the requirements of instrumental rationality (i.e., roughly, the requirement that we should take appropriate means to our ends)?  As I shall argue, it can.  Once we have a plausible view of what it is for one to "get things right" in one's practical reasoning, this recognitional view will have no difficulty explaining the requirements of instrumental rationality.

The crucial point is that to "get things right" in one's practical reasoning, it is not enough for one to make fine decisions or choices.  Good intentions are not enough.  One's practical reasoning must also lead to one's acting as one should act (all things considered), through one's executing the decisions or intentions that one has made.  It is part of the point of practical reasoning, on this view, to get things done  - specifically, not just to get any old things done, but to get the right sort of things done.

In short, let us say that one has "got things right" in one's practical reasoning about how to act in a given situation S if and only if:

1. one will actually execute all the intentions (if any) that one has about how to act in situation S; and
2. one will thereby act as one should act in S.

So, given this account of what it is to "get things right" in one's practical reasoning, your practical reasoning about how to act in the relevant situation has not "got things right" if you intend A but fail to execute that intention.  (Of course, if intending A is a thoroughly bad intention, then your practical reasoning has also not got things right if you intend A and succeed in executing this intention; in this case, the only way for your practical reasoning to "get things right" in every way is for you not to intend A at all.)

Now let us put this conception of what it is for one's practical reasoning to "get things right" together with our "recognitional conception" of practical rationality.  This leads to the following picture of practical rationality: The (possibly empty) set of intentions that you have about how to act in a given situation S is rational if and only if it is reasonable for you to expect that (1) you will execute all of these intentions (if any) in S, and that (2) you will act as you should in S.

According to this approach, then, practical rationality requires that one should not form any intention if it is not reasonable for one to expect that one will execute that intention. E.g., suppose that all my evidence indicates that if I intend A, I will just give in to temptation and abandon my intention at the last moment.  So if I intend A, it will be unreasonable for me to expect that I will execute this intention. Thus, it is a requirement of practical rationality that I should not intend A, when it is unreasonable for me to expect that I will execute this intention. (It is clear that this approach can also explain why it is irrational to have inconsistent intentions.)

Now, suppose that you intend to achieve an end E, and you also know that if you do not take means M, you will not achieve end E.  Suppose that you also know that you will not take means M unless you intend means M.  Then if you do not intend means M, it will be unreasonable for you to expect that you will execute all the intentions that you have - in particular, it will be unreasonable for you expect that you will execute your intention to achieve end E.  So, it seems, you will be violating a requirement of rationality.

In this way, the recognitional view can explain the basic requirement of instrumental rationality - the wide-scope requirement that you should be such that whenever you intend E, and know that you will not achieve E unless you both have and execute the intention to take the means M, then you will also intend the means M.

So far, this only explains why rationality requires that you intend the known necessary means to your ends.  But what if there are no means that you know to be strictly necessary for the end?  It seems plausible that in this case, instrumental rationality requires that you intend what you believe to be the best available means to your end (or at least what you believe to be one of the optimal available means to your end).  The recognitional view can explain this too - at least given the assumption that it is unreasonable for anyone to believe that it can count as "acting as one should" to achieve an end through the use of suboptimal means.

Suppose that you intend end E, but you do not intend to achieve end E through what you believe to be optimal means: instead, you either have no intention about which means to use; or else you intend to achieve E by using what you yourself believe to be suboptimal means. Then it will be unreasonable for you to believe that your practical reasoning will "get things right": either it will be unreasonable for you to expect that you will execute your intention to achieve end E, or it will be unreasonable for you to expect that you will act as you should in that situation - since it is unreasonable for you to believe that achieving end E through the use of suboptimal means can be an instance of acting as you should in this situation.

In general, this approach can explain why it can sometimes be irrational not to form any intentions at all about how to act in a situation S (say, if one sits around dithering while disaster strikes).  In these cases, although it is reasonable for one to believe that one will execute all the intentions that one has about how to act in that situation (viz., no intentions at all), it is not reasonable for one to believe that one will act as one should in that situation.  In such cases, it is only if one forms some intentions about how to act that it can be reasonable for one to believe that one will act as one should.

At the same time, this approach does not imply that it cannot sometimes be quite rational to form no intentions at all.  Suppose that you reasonably believe that you will act as you should act in situation S even if you form no intention at all about how to act in that situation.  Then it is quite reasonable for you to believe that you will execute all the intentions that you have with respect to that situation (viz., no intentions at all), and that you will thereby act well.  So in cases of this kind, it can be quite rational not to form any intentions at all.

In this way, I think that this recognitional view of practical rationality looks like a promising approach to explaining the requirements of instrumental rationality.

Note: The argument that I have given here is an expanded version of the argument that I gave very briefly, towards the end of my paper "Choosing Rationally and Choosing Correctly". I hope to refine and expand this argument in greater detail and precision before long.

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.

We are pleased to announce the addition of two new contributors to PEA Soup: Clayton Littlejohn and Jason Raibley. Clayton is a Lecturer at Southern Methodist University. He specializes in epistemology, ethical theory, and philosophy of mind, and he has papers forthcoming in the Philosophical Quarterly and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Jason is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University Long Beach. He specializes in ethics and recently co-edited (along with Richard Feldman, Kris McDaniel, and Michael J. Zimmerman) a festschrift for his graduate advisor, Fred Feldman: The Good, the Right, Life and Death. It’s great to have these two young, talented philosophers aboard.

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

Don Marquis' well-known argument for the immorality of abortion claims that aborting a fetus is wrong for the same reason that killing a grown adult is wrong: Both deprive individuals of their future (or the value thereof).  The critical literature on Marquis' argument is vast and the criticisms directed at the argument are diverse.  Some critics raise metaphysical worries about diachronic identity; others claim that consciousness, reflective awareness etc. are necessary in order for an individual to be wrongfully killed; others ask whether, in light of rival moral claims such as the rights of mothers, etc. the wrongness of abortion really does follow from its being bad to deprive the fetus of its future; others wonder whether Marquis' argument has odd implications concerning contraception and cloning, and so on.

As best I can tell though, there's been relatively little direct criticism of the claim that the fetus has a 'future like ours.'  Although this is perhaps the central premise of Marquis' argument, he too devotes little attention to how exactly the fetus' future is like that of a grown adult.

Below the fold, I'll outline some doubts I have about Marquis' claim that the fetus has a future like ours.  These are very preliminary thoughts and could be totally off base.  Second, since the literature on Marquis' argument is quite extensive, I'd appreciate folks directing me to sources that investigate some of the concerns I have about Marquis' argument.

The fetus has a future, a future that resembles mine in numerous ways.  But is it like mine in the ways that, for instance, might make it wrong (or at least bad) to kill me? Killing me deprives me of a future with a moderately determinate shape.  After all, each of the possible futures that killing me would deprive me of are not equally likely.  Some futures — like future F1, where I publish a few papers, get promoted, and see my kids graduate from college — are pretty likely.  Other futures — like future F2, in which I win the Nobel Prize and am selected for a manned mission to establish a university on Mars — are pretty unlikely.  In fact, I'd venture to say, that of all my possible futures, there are a relatively small number (1/10 of 1%, maybe) that, because they are my likely futures, are such that if all their probabilities were added together, would come close to 1.  F1 is in this set.  Conversely, there's a much larger number of improbable futures (99%+ , say) the probability of each of which is so close to 0 that even all of these added together wouldn't be much more than 0. F2 is in this set.  The two sets don't exhaust all my possible futures, but my possible futures tend to cluster toward the ends of a continuum stretching from the highly probable to the highly improbable.

Of course, killing me deprives me of all my futures and of whatever actual future I would have had.  But I don't care about all of my possible futures equally, and in fact, not all of my futures are equally valuable to me.  This has implications concerning what makes it wrong to kill me.  What makes it wrong to kill me, at least in part, is that my future has a relatively determinate shape, and it is my being deprived of the specific elements of my future that makes depriving me of my life wrong.  Suppose that F1 is my future.  I am deprived of the value not of some generic universal — my future — but of the various goods that comprise that future (my professional accomplishments, etc.), and because these individual goods are fairly probable, my being deprived of them is a serious loss to me. Furthermore, I am also deprived of the futures that are nearby F1 in probability and I care about those too, since I recognize those are viable alternatives to F1.  Suppose that in F1 I retire at my current university, but in F1a, I retire at another local university similar to my current one. I have reason to care about the loss of F1a, perhaps not as much as the loss of F1 but about the same amount.

In contrast, suppose that some nemesis of mine works very hard to deprive of one of my very unlikely futures, like F2.  He writes letters to the Nobel Prize committee disparaging me, actively campaigns against my joining the Mars U. faculty, etc.  Should I care if he succeeds in depriving me of F2?  Not really, precisely because that future is so remote and improbable to begin with.  And this is true of many, many of my possible futures.  Losing them is of little, if any, value to me.

The fetus, however, has a future of much less determinate shape.  Obviously, not all of a fetus' possible futures are equally likely.  A fetus has a genetic code, a set of parents, a sociocultural environment, etc., all of which constrain its possible futures. But in comparison to my futures — where a small number cluster toward the probable and a much larger number cluster toward the very improbable — a fetus' futures are more evenly distributed between these two poles.  As time passes, choices are made, events occur, etc., a person's possible futures move toward these poles, some becoming more probable, some much less so.  As a result, my possible futures tend to gravitate toward the highly probable or highly improbable.  The fetus, on the other hand, has many more futures like my F2 and probably no futures with the probability of my F1. This makes it less clear what future(s) we deprive the fetus of when we kill it.  Yet if my earlier reflections are correct, what makes it wrong to deprive someone of their future is partially explained by the determinate shape of that future.  That is, the loss of one's future is not the loss of whatever one's future might amount to, but of the various specific goods that constitute the future. But the less specific or determinate these goods are, the less value they have to those who might lose them.  Yes, the fetus is deprived of all its futures, including whatever would turn out to be its actual one.  But it's deprived of a set of alternative futures that are more or less equally likely, and hence, the fetus cannot be said to have a future like mine in the sense necessary to support the symmetry expressed in Marquis' claim.  So the fetus does not have a future like mine in the sense in which the deprivation of a grown adult's future explains what makes it wrong to kill such an adult.

Three final caveats:

1. There's obviously much more that goes into what makes it wrong or bad to kill a person than the determinacy of its future.  The quality of its future life definitely matters, as does its duration, but I'm only trying to indicate one respect in which the fetus' future (and its value) importantly differs from a grown adult's future (and its value).
2. I don't mean to show that depriving the fetus of its future is not bad at all — that there's no sense in which killing the fetus deprives it of anything valuable.  My only claim is that killing the fetus can't be as bad as killing a grown adult, which is problematic given that Marquis thinks that his being able to give a unified account of what's wrong with killing adults and of what's wrong with killing fetuses is a theoretical advantage of his position.
3. And of course, this doesn't show that it's permissible to kill the fetus, only that if it's impermissible to do so, an appeal to its having a future like ours won't demonstrate that.

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.