Discussion of (Informal) Experimental Philosophy at TAR
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The first On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC) is here now. There are seven papers with commentary posted for this week, to be followed by 8-9 papers per week the next three weeks. I hope the philosophical blogging community will help make this event a success by participating a spreading the word, especially to grad students and undergrads who may learn a lot by reading some of these papers and comments. Thanks!
John Doris, Joshua Knobe and Robert Woolfolk’s (hereafter DKW) new paper on responsibility has been posted over at the Garden of Forking Paths. Most of the experimental work will be familiar to regular readers; the point of the paper is to argue for a particular view about responsibility on the basis of this work. DKW argue that philosophical approaches to responsibility are usually committed to two claims: invariantism and conservatism. Invariantism is the view that there is a single set of responsibility attribution criteria; conservatism is the view that the correct theory of moral responsibility will systematize folk attributions of responsibility reasonably well, so that folk attributions constrain, relatively tightly, the correct attribution criteria. DKW argue, on the basis of the experimental evidence, that in fact invariantism and conservatism conflict: folk attributions of responsibility are variantist.
DKW amass a large amount of evidence for the claim that folk morality is variantist. First, they argue, folk morality is neither compatibilist nor incompatibilist, but both at once: the folk have compatibilist intuitions with regard to concrete cases, but incompatibilist responses at a more theoretical level. Second, folk attributions of responsibility are sensitive not only to the psychological relations between agents and acts, but also to the valence of the action and the seriousness of its consequences. Thus, for instance, the folk hold people responsible for producing foreseen side effects when these outcomes are negative, but not when they positive, and they hold agents more responsible for negligent actions that produce seriously bad outcomes than for the same negligent actions when they produce trivially bad outcomes (in all, DKW identify four asymmetries in responsibility attribution).
Now, we can take issue with the details of the experimental paradigms in one or other of these experiments (as a matter of fact, I do). But it is very likely that DKW are right: there really is a lot of variation in folk attributions of responsibility. If that’s right, we can’t have both invariantism and conservatism. DKW argue that we must either become invariantist revisionists, or variantist conservatives (I note that there is a third option available – variantist revisionism – but it seems rather unattractive). They argue that we ought to plump for the latter.
As I think they will admit, their suggestion is a little too underdeveloped to be properly assessable. Indeed, it faces a dilemma, of which they’re well aware: on the one hand, too much variation, in the absence of a principle explaining and justifying the variation, and the resulting mess will better motivate scepticism than variantist conservatism; on the other hand, too much unification by principles and the result will be an invariantism. The success of their theory depends upon finding a middle way between these horns.
Here I want very briefly to raise a methodological issue. Conservative variantism is a possible view just in case conservatism is a possible view: that is, that folk attributions are stable enough for us to be able to say how the folk would respond to this or that case. But is conservatism possible? I’m worried that it isn’t: that in fact DKW only think it is because the studies they cite have limited their attention to a narrow range of questions.
I’m too lazy to check, but I suspect that these studies used a between-subjects design. Why? Because a within-subjects design would yield different results: subjects would become aware of a prima facie inconsistency between their responses, and would therefore be motivated to make them internally inconsistent. If that’s correct (and it is an empirical hypothesis) then how subjects judge these cases depends upon the nature of the study design. So the methodological question is this: what is the rationale for limiting ourselves to the between-subjects design when we want to uncover how the folk attribute responsibility? A within-subjects design doesn’t obviously contaminate judgments. If I’m right that both kinds of ways of probing folk morality are valid, and that they yield different responses, then conservatism isn’t on the table at all. And if that’s right, then the evidence DKW cite is evidence for revisionism or for scepticism.
Copied from language log (which for some reason has no permalinks):
Arizona knows
What does it mean to KNOW something anyway? The US Supreme Court is currently trying to deal with this as it considers the appeal of Clark v. Arizona, No. 05-5966. The Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction of a 17 year-old named Eric M. Clark, who shot and killed a Flagstaff policeman in 2000 (see here). He was found incompetent to stand trial and after three years of treatment in a mental hospital, he could no longer have an insanity defense because of the odd statutes in the state of Arizona that bar the defense from using evidence of diminished capacity. This state only allows a defendant to plead "guilty except insane," apparently ignoring the fact that Clark was so mentally disturbed that he thought he was shooting a space alien. At trial he was found guilty of INTENTIONALLY killing a law officer and now that he has recovered his sanity, he has to pay for the crime that he didn't KNOW that he committed.
The M'Naghten rules, followed by most states, say that insane persons do not KNOW the nature and quality of the criminal act and that they don't KNOW that they are doing anything wrong. But these rules appear to be unimportant in Arizona. Now that Clark has been deemed sane, he still has to account for what he did six years ago, when he wasn't. The state's lawyer tried to explain this saying, "the state has discretion to define insanity as it sees fit." He went on to say that based on the evidence in the bench trial, Clark KNEW he was killing a police officer and that he PLANNED the crime in advance. When Chief Justice Roberts asked him about what was so different about barring mental illness as evidence of intent but not barring other evidence, such as failure to be able to understand English, the state's lawyer replied that this question is too complex to ask a judge to decide. It's hard to decide where to begin with this kind of reasoning.
So how do we KNOW that somebody KNOWS something? One might say, "Since I just washed my car, I KNOW it is going to rain," or "I suspect that it will rain," or "I figure it's going to rain." You can't really KNOW it though. When a person really KNOWS something, three steps seem to obtain:
1. One believes it to be true.
2. One has good reason to believe it to be true.
3. There is a substantial probability that it is true.
Everyone agreed that Clark was so deluded that he believed the officer was a space alien (1). A sane person would have good reason to believe it was a policeman (2) and that his uniform or something else would provide probability of this (3). But it's hard to understand how a mentally ill person who believed the victim was a space alien would even get to steps 2 and 3. When the police stopped his car because his loud radio was creating a nuissance, Clark claimed he was trying to drown out the voices in his head. Despite this, the court claimed that Clark INTENTIONALLY PLANNED the murder. Now we somehow add intentionality to knowing.
The court's admission that Clark was "guilty except insane" is tantamount to admitting that he was, indeed, insane. The intentions and plans of insane people are even more difficult to infer than the plans and intentions of sane people. Except in Arizona, where the courts seem to have managed to figure out how to KNOW what people KNOW, PLAN, and INTEND -- even insane people. Amazing. 48 other states do not treat insanity in this way. I wouldn't want Arizona to write my dictionary.
It looks like Arizona could use a large dose of sociolinguistic audience context. Clark clearly intended to shoot a space alien but he had no reason to believe he would have done this if he didn't have a twisted sense of reality. In his mind, he shot a space invader, not a policeman. Arizona could also do with a dose of term clarification. Maybe the state can define insanity how ever it wants, but that sounds a lot like Humpty Dumpty's way to define words: "words mean what I want them to mean, nothing else, nothing more." By judging Clark "guilty except insane" (itself a mind-boggling expression), Arizona falls into the same category of the four states that have totally abolished the insanity defense: Kansas, Utah, Idaho, and (regretfully) Montana. It would probably be better for Arizona to abolish the insanity defense than to pretend that it can KNOW what people are thinking, especially when they are insane.
Last weekend at the SSPP I had the opportunity to comment upon and think about a very interesting paper by Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander, and Jonathan Weinberg (all from Indiana University) entitled “The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions: Running Hot and Cold On True Temp"--which is yet another installation in a series of papers aiming to call the role of intuitions in philosophy into question (see, for instance, Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich 2001 or Nichols, Stich, and Weinberg 2003). I really enjoyed reading the paper--all of the papers I just mentioned can be found here-- but it led me to think about a very strange development among the rank and file experimental types (all ten of us!).
On the one hand, experimental philosophers working in epistemology and the philosophy of language (Stich, Weinberg, Nichols, Machery, Mallon, Swain, and Alexander) rely on cross-cultural and socio-economic differences in folk intuitions as a way of trying to cast doubt on the role of intuitions in philosophy more generally. One of the primary goals of people working in these areas is to take philosophers such as George Bealer to task for giving so much evidentiary weight to our intuitions. On the other hand, experimental philosophers working in action theory and free will (Knobe, Nadelhoffer, Nahmias,and Nichols) have been trying to establish the relevance of folk intuitions to certain areas of philosophical discourse.
I am currently writing a paper that tries to flesh out why these two seemingly disparate strands of experimental philosophy have developed and what sense to make of the divide. Minimally, I think that the fact that such a division exists--which I argue is fueled in part by the different data sets--should serve as a caution for experimental types wanting to make sweeping claims about the relevance of the data on folk intuitions to philosophy more generally. After all, even if there are, for instance, cross-cultural differences concerning folk intuitions about epistemology, it does not follow that similar differences exist in other domains (e.g., action theory or free will). I would post a rough draft of the paper, but it is still a bit too inchoate. I will post a copy as soon as it starts taking shape. In the meantime, I thought I would see what sense everyone else makes of this issue. After all, experimental philosophers are all working together under a very small roof--so, it's odd to see such a drastic difference in our respective opinions concerning what lessons we are supposed to be learning from the data we collect. Any thoughts?
The program is now tentatively set for the first annual Online Philosophy Conference (OPC). I hope you will find that it offers an impressive line-up of excellent philosophers presenting cutting-edge work in many different areas of contemporary philosophy. We offer this conference as a way for you to engage these philosophers and this work from the comfort of your own home, office, coffee shop, park ... anywhere but the cold confines of a hotel conference room.
We need you to spread the word, especially among your undergraduate and graduate students who may not have the opportunity to attend such a conference in person and see philosophers presenting their work and responding to the comments and questions of their audience. Please consider sending an email to your students (or relevant listserv) and your colleagues to publicize this event. Given that the OPC is open to anyone in the world with access to the internet, it could be the largest philosophy conference in history. It's success will depend entirely upon how many people participate. So, anything you can do to help promote the conference would be greatly appreciated.
The plan is to post a set of papers (usually 8), along with commentary, each week in May, linked from the conference website: http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/
We've tried to offer a diverse line-up each week. "Attend" whichever "talks" look interesting to you and post comments or questions as you please (comments will be moderated for relevance, appropriateness, and length). The authors will be encouraged to respond to the commentator's remarks and to the thread of questions and comments at several points during the week, though they cannot be expected to address every question and comment.
So, OPC will fill the month of May with exciting (and free) philosophical action. We hope you will be part of it.
The tentative schedule is as follows:
Week One:
Sunday April 30th:
1. Mary Coleman (Bard College), “Holistic Directions of Fit and Smith’s Teleological Argument,” with commentary by Michael Smith (Princeton).
2. Julia Driver (Dartmouth), “Luck,” with commentary by Hans Maes (The University of Kent).
3. Noa Latham (University of Calgary), “Fundamental Laws,” with commentary by Cei Maslen (Victoria University).
4. Alfred Mele (Florida State University), “Practical Mistakes and Intentional Actions,” with commentary by Jing Zhu (Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of the Sciences) & Andrei Buckareff (Franklin and Marshall).
5. Steve Stich (Rutgers) and Daniel Kelley (Rutgers), “Two Theories about the Cognitive Architecture Underlying Morality,” with commentary by Michael Cholbi & Peter Ross (Cal State Polytechnic).
6. Kit Wellman (Washington-St. Louis), “Immigration and Freedom of Association,” with commentary by Fernando Teson (Florida State University—Law).
7. Jessica Wilson (University of Toronto), “Non-reductive Physicalism and Degrees of Freedom,” with commentary by Michael Strevens (New York University).
8. Outstanding Undergraduate Paper: Andrew Bailey (Biola University), “Some Unsound Arguments for Incompatibilism,” with commentary by John Martin Fischer (University of California-Riverside).
Week Two:
Sunday May 7th:
1. David Chalmers (Australian National University), “Probability and Propositions,” with commentary by David Braun (University of Rochester).
2. John Fischer (University of California-Riverside) “Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt: A Reply to Vihvelin,” with commentary by Kadri Vihvelin (University of Southern California).
3. Brie Gertler (University of Virginia), “A Fregean Argument against Externalism,” with commentary by Sanford Goldberg (University of Kentucky).
4. Benj Hellie (University of Toronto) “That Which Makes the Sensation of Blue a Mental Fact,” with commentary by Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin).
5. Thomas Hurka (University of Toronto), “Value and Friendship: A More Subtle View,” with commentary by David McNaughton (Florida State University).
6. Uriah Kriegel (University of Arizona), “Another Look at the Manifest Image,” with commentary by Owen Flanagan (Duke University).
7. Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander, and Jonathan Weinberg (Univ. of Indiana) “The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions,” with commentary by Adam Feltz (Florida State University).
8. Amie Thomasson (University of Miami), “Answerable and Unanswerable Questions,” with commentary by Jason Turner (Rutgers University).
Week Three:
Sunday May 14th:
1. Justin Fischer (University of Arizona), "Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis,” with commentary by Frank Jackson (Australian National University).
2. Joshua Gert (Florida State University), “Irrationality and Harm,” with commentary by Jussi Suikkanen (University of Reading).
3. Joshua Knobe (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Erica Roedder (New York University), “The Concept of Valuing: Experimental Studies,” with commentary by Antti Kauppinen (University of Helsinki).
4. Jonathan Kvanvig (University of Missouri-Columbia), “Coherentism and Justified Inconsistent Beliefs,” with commentary by Michael Bishop (Northern Illinois University).
5. Neil Levy (University of Melbourne), “Why Frankfurt Style Cases Don’t Help (Much),” with commentary by Kevin Timpe (University of San Diego).
6. Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin), “Externalist Intentionalism and Optimal Conditions: A Comment on Byrne and Tye,” commentator to be announced.
7. Graham Priest & Neil Thomason (both from University of Melbourne), “Lakatos, Paradox, and Paraconsistency,” with commentary by Stuart Shapiro (Ohio State University).
8. Manuel Vargas (University of San Francisco), “Building a Better Beast,” with commentary by Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University).
Week Four:
Sunday May 21st:
1. Thom Brooks (Newcastle University), “On Retributivism,” with commentator to be announced.
2. Tyler Doggett (University of Vermont) & Andy Egan (University of Michigan & ANU), "Imagination, Desire, Affect and Action,” with commentary by Tamar Gendler (Yale University).
3. R.A. Duff (University of Stirling), “Virtue Jurisprudence,” with commentary by Lawrence Solum (University of Illinois—Law).
4. Elizabeth Harman (Princeton University), "The Mistake in "I'll Be Glad I Did It" Reasoning: The Significance of Future Desires,” with commentary by Brook Sadler (University of South Florida).
5. Terence Horgan (University of Arizona), “Materialism: Matters of Definition, Defense, and Deconstruction,” with commentary by Thomas Polger (University of Cincinnati).
6. Susanna Siegel (Harvard University), “The Perception of Causation,” with commentary by Sarah McGrath (Holy Cross).
7. Sharon Street (New York University), “Evolution and the Schizophrenia of Quasi-Realism About Normativity,” with commentary by David Enoch (Hebrew University).
8. Jason Turner (Rutgers University), “On How Things Are,” with commentary by David Manley (University of Southern California).
9. Brian Weatherson (Cornell University), “Conditionals and Relativism,” with commentary by Gillian Russell (Washington—St. Louis).
Here is a quote from Arne Naess's Intepretation and Preciseness (1953) with which many here will likely be sympathetic--although the last sentence is precisely the kind of claim that causes critics of experimental philosophy to fret:
"In contemporary philosophical literature questions are raised and answered which admittedly are empirical. Why not try to test the answers by procedures used in contemporary science? That is one way philosophy can be mother science. But one cannot expect professional psychologists and physicists or others to do the job--they have their own favorite questions. The philosophically inclined may carry it out himself. After some empirical work a new discipline with scientific status may evolve. The philosopher may then change his subject--science takes over."
Antti Kaupinnen recently emailed me the following link to a paper published in 1959 in The Journal of Philosophy entitled "An Attack Upon Revelation in Semantics" that overviews some very interesting work done in the early 1950's by the "Oslo Group" under the rubric of "empirical semantics." Is anyone else familiar with the work done by the Oslo Group? Apparently in a groundbreaking book entitled An Inquiry Into the Freedom of Decision, Harald Ofstad relied on "inter-disciplinary research in philosophy, sociology, social psychology, and depth psychology" to shed light on the variety of ways people ordinarily talk about free will. As the author of the aforementioned article--Cambell Crockett--says, "this voluminous work...is a determined effort to apply empirical scientific procedures to a traditional philosophical problem--i.e., the problem of freedom of the will." If you have access to JSTOR, you should read the article--which is only ten pages long. It appears that we have been scooped! If anyone has read Ofstad's groundbreaking work, please fill the rest of us in. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.
The recent article in Slate has, unsurprisingly, generated a fair amount of commentary across the philosophical blogosphere. We already have a bit of discussion of David Velleman's complaints against it on this post here. That discussion also got picked up in a post by Joshua Knobe over on the 'garden of forking paths' blog.
The legendary hilzoy of Obsidian Wings has posted a typically thoughtful discussion (which I became aware of thanks to her kindly telling us in a comment on the earlier thread), and from there I was able to harvest (from her commentator Bob McManus) several other links to discussions, which I'll list here. I do note that she seems to have gotten the same interpretation that Velleman did, that experimental philosophers are particularly touting their new "discoveries" of the cases themselves and/or philosophical theories based on them. I don't know what in the Slate article gave that false impression, but I do believe that it's an unfortunate misreading of our actual intentions & ambitions.
Harvard-philosophy-concentrator-turned-liberal-media-dude Matthew Yglesias offers some thoughts, and there are some interesting moves in the discussion thread until it turns into primarily a discussion of basketball.
(The Slate article also got linked to by Weatherson, but not with any discussion.)
If people find other blogs talking about the article, post a comment here & I'll add it to the list.
UPDATE: A little googling found the following:
Felix Salmon, who I am not antecedently familiar with, offers an outsider's perspective on the article.
We also have conservative journalist/pundit Ross Douthat weighing in.
Bioethicist Art Caplan just offers a link, but there's a bit of discussion (mostly negative) in his comments.
UPDATE: I rather doubt that anyone here needs to be told this, but for the sake of completeness: there is a big post up on Brian Leiter's blog, with a bunch of us x-phi types explaining a few aspects of how we understand our research, and with a bit of discussion (including a response by Velleman) as well.
UPDATE: Gualtiero Piccinini, my neighbor to the west-and-just-a-little-bit-south, has put forward some views on the matter on his "Brain" blog.
In a recent Notre Dame Philosophical Review of James A. Harris's Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy, reviewer Sean Greenberg writes:
What is distinctive of eighteenth-century British philosophy, according to Harris, is that it is experimental philosophy, "philosophy which aims to be true to the facts of experience" (p. 2). Eighteenth-century readers saw An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as having introduced the experimental method that Newton had pioneered for the study of matter into the study of the mind, and Harris traces the methodology of British eighteenth-century accounts of freedom to Locke. Although Harris recognizes Newton's significance for eighteenth-century British philosophy -- he draws attention to the way in which Hume, Hartley, Priestley, and Reid all refer to Newton in support of their own approaches to mind and human freedom (pp. 64-65, 156-157, 172-173, 195) -- he particularly emphasizes Locke's methodological significance for eighteenth-century British philosophy, and he begins his narrative by examining Locke's account of freedom. Harris suggests that the substantial revisions which that account of freedom underwent over the course of the various editions of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding reflect "renewed attention to the experience of choice" (pp. 12, 20) on Locke's part. Although Locke's successors retained a commitment to the experimental method in their discussions of freedom, manifest in the importance they attributed to conscious experience (p. 10), which they cite as evidence for their different accounts of freedom, they found Locke's account of freedom itself unsatisfactory: William Molyneux objected that it "seems so wonderfully fine spun . . . that at last the Great Question of Liberty and Necessity seems to vanish" (p. 26).
The full review can be found here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=5901
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