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  1. Quantum Dreams.Brian Wachter - manuscript
    The correlation between quantum phenomena and information is explored using relational quantum mechanics (RQM) and quantum monism as potential frameworks for understanding informational reality's emergence from the merely physical. Emphasizing a top-down approach, the paper advocates applying knowledge of quantum components to our classical world. It highlights the contributions of researchers such as Rovelli, Wheeler, and Everett, who have made strides in this direction. -/- The paper elucidates the duality of quantum states as counterintuitive when applied to physical objects but (...)
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  2. The Average Isn’t Normal: The History and Cognitive Science of an Everyday Scientific Practice.Henry Cowles & Joshua Knobe - forthcoming - In Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind, Volume 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Within contemporary science, it is common practice to compare data points to the average, i.e., to the statistical mean. Because this practice is so familiar, it might at first appear not to be the sort of thing that requires explanation. But recent research in cognitive science and in the history of science gives us reason to adopt the opposite perspective. Cognitive science research on the ways people ordinarily make sense of the world suggests that, instead of using a purely statistical (...)
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  3. Health, Disease, and the Medicalization of Low Sexual Desire: A Vignette-Based Experimental Study.Somogy Varga, Andrew J. Latham & Jacob Stegenga - forthcoming - Ergo.
    Debates about the genuine disease status of controversial diseases rely on intuitions about a range of factors. Adopting tools from experimental philosophy, this paper explores some of the factors that influence judgments about whether low sexual desire should be considered a disease and whether it should be medically treated. Drawing in part on some assumptions underpinning a divide in the literature between viewing low sexual desire as a genuine disease and seeing it as improperly medicalized, we investigate whether health and (...)
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  4. Great Minds do not Think Alike: Philosophers’ Views Predicted by Reflection, Education, Personality, and Other Demographic Differences.Nick Byrd - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (Cultural Variation in Cognition):647-684.
    Prior research found correlations between reflection test performance and philosophical tendencies among laypeople. In two large studies (total N = 1299)—one pre-registered—many of these correlations were replicated in a sample that included both laypeople and philosophers. For example, reflection test performance predicted preferring atheism over theism and instrumental harm over harm avoidance on the trolley problem. However, most reflection-philosophy correlations were undetected when controlling for other factors such as numeracy, preferences for open-minded thinking, personality, philosophical training, age, and gender. Nonetheless, (...)
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  5. What is the folk concept of life?Kevin Reuter & Claus Beisbart - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):486-507.
    This paper details the content and structure of the folk concept of life, and discusses its relevance for scientific research on life. In four empirical studies, we investigate which features of life are considered salient, universal, central, and necessary. Functionings, such as nutrition and reproduction, but not material composition, turn out to be salient features commonly associated with living beings (Study 1). By contrast, being made of cells is considered a universal feature of living species (Study 2), a central aspect (...)
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  6. Experiments on causal exclusion.Thomas Blanchard, Dylan Murray & Tania Lombrozo - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (5):1067-1089.
    Intuitions play an important role in the debate on the causal status of high‐level properties. For instance, Kim has claimed that his “exclusion argument” relies on “a perfectly intuitive … understanding of the causal relation.” We report the results of three experiments examining whether laypeople really have the relevant intuitions. We find little support for Kim's view and the principles on which it relies. Instead, we find that laypeople are willing to count both a multiply realized property and its realizers (...)
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  7. The genetic technologies questionnaire: lay judgments about genetic technologies align with ethical theory, are coherent, and predict behaviour.Svenja Küchenhoff, Johannes Doerflinger & Nora Heinzelmann - 2022 - BMC Medical Ethics 23 (54):1-14.
    -/- Policy regulations of ethically controversial genetic technologies should, on the one hand, be based on ethical principles. On the other hand, they should be socially acceptable to ensure implementation. In addition, they should align with ethical theory. Yet to date we lack a reliable and valid scale to measure the relevant ethical judgements in laypeople. We target this lacuna. -/- We developed a scale based on ethical principles to elicit lay judgments: the Genetic Technologies Questionnaire (GTQ). In two pilot (...)
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  8. Can Thought Experiments Solve Problems of Personal Identity?Lukas J. Meier - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-23.
    Good physical experiments conform to the basic methodological standards of experimental design: they are objective, reliable, and valid. But is this also true of thought experiments? Especially problems of personal identity have engendered hypothetical scenarios that are very distant from the actual world. These imagined situations have been conspicuously ineffective at resolving conflicting intuitions and deciding between the different accounts of personal identity. Using prominent examples from the literature, I argue that this is due to many of these thought experiments (...)
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  9. Theoretical Virtues in Scientific Practice: An Empirical Study.Moti Mizrahi - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (4):879-902.
    It is a common view among philosophers of science that theoretical virtues (also known as epistemic or cognitive values), such as simplicity and consistency, play an important role in scientific practice. In this article, I set out to study the role that theoretical virtues play in scientific practice empirically. I apply the methods of data science, such as text mining and corpus analysis, to study large corpora of scientific texts in order to uncover patterns of usage. These patterns of usage, (...)
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  10. What Is the Basic Unit of Scientific Progress? A Quantitative, Corpus-Based Study.Moti Mizrahi - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 53 (4):441-458.
    This paper presents the results of an empirical study following up on Mizrahi (2021). Using the same methods of text mining and corpus analysis used by Mizrahi (2021), we test empirically a philosophical account of scientific progress that Mizrahi (2021) left out of his empirical study, namely, the so-called functional-internalist account of scientific progress according to which the aim or goal or scientific research is to solve problems. In general, our results do not lend much empirical evidence in support of (...)
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  11. Philosophical reasoning about science: a quantitative, digital study.Moti Mizrahi & Michael Adam Dickinson - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2).
    In this paper, we set out to investigate the following question: if science relies heavily on induction, does philosophy of science rely heavily on induction as well? Using data mining and text analysis methods, we study a large corpus of philosophical texts mined from the JSTOR database (n = 14,199) in order to answer this question empirically. If philosophy of science relies heavily on induction, just as science supposedly does, then we would expect to find significantly more inductive arguments than (...)
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  12. Experimental Philosophy of Technology.Steven R. Kraaijeveld - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology 34:993-1012.
    Experimental philosophy is a relatively recent discipline that employs experimental methods to investigate the intuitions, concepts, and assumptions behind traditional philosophical arguments, problems, and theories. While experimental philosophy initially served to interrogate the role that intuitions play in philosophy, it has since branched out to bring empirical methods to bear on problems within a variety of traditional areas of philosophy—including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. To date, no connection has been made between developments in experimental philosophy (...)
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  13. Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study.Moti Mizrahi - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2375-2394.
    The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate over the nature of scientific progress in philosophy of science by taking a quantitative, corpus-based approach. By employing the methods of data science and corpus linguistics, the following philosophical accounts of scientific progress are tested empirically: the semantic account of scientific progress, the epistemic account of scientific progress, and the noetic account of scientific progress. Overall, the results of this quantitative, corpus-based study lend some empirical support to the epistemic (...)
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  14. Do Political Attitudes Matter for Epistemic Decisions of Scientists?Vlasta Sikimić, Tijana Nikitović, Miljan Vasić & Vanja Subotić - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (4):775-801.
    The epistemic attitudes of scientists, such as epistemic tolerance and authoritarianism, play important roles in the discourse about rivaling theories. Epistemic tolerance stands for the mental attitude of an epistemic agent, e.g., a scientist, who is open to opposing views, while epistemic authoritarianism represents the tendency to uncritically accept views of authorities. Another relevant epistemic factor when it comes to the epistemic decisions of scientists is the skepticism towards the scientific method. However, the question is whether these epistemic attitudes are (...)
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  15. Scientific Realism in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Seven Sciences and History and Philosophy of Science.James R. Beebe & Finnur Dellsén - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (2):336-364.
    We report the results of a study that investigated the views of researchers working in seven scientific disciplines and in history and philosophy of science in regard to four hypothesized dimensions of scientific realism. Among other things, we found that natural scientists tended to express more strongly realist views than social scientists, that history and philosophy of science scholars tended to express more antirealist views than natural scientists, that van Fraassen’s characterization of scientific realism failed to cluster with more standard (...)
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  16. The Case Study Method in Philosophy of Science: An Empirical Study.Moti Mizrahi - 2020 - Perspectives on Science 28 (1):63-88.
    There is an ongoing methodological debate in philosophy of science concerning the use of case studies as evidence for and/or against theories about science. In this paper, I aim to make a contribution to this debate by taking an empirical approach. I present the results of a systematic survey of the PhilSci-Archive, which suggest that a sizeable proportion of papers in philosophy of science contain appeals to case studies, as indicated by the occurrence of the indicator words “case study” and/or (...)
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  17. Experimental philosophy of medicine and the concepts of health and disease.Walter Veit - 2020 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics:1-18.
    If one had to identify the biggest change within the philosophical tradition in the twenty-first century, it would certainly be the rapid rise of experimental philosophy to address differences in intuitions about concepts. It is, therefore, surprising that the philosophy of medicine has so far not drawn on the tools of experimental philosophy in the context of a particular conceptual debate that has overshadowed all others in the field: the long-standing dispute between so-called naturalists and normativists about the concepts of (...)
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  18. Objectivity in the Natural Sciences from the X-Phi Point of View.Petr Jedlička & Jitka Paitlová - 2019 - Teorie Vědy / Theory of Science 41 (2):229-258.
    Objectivity, as one of the key attributes of science, has become an indispensable part of its ethos and a central theme of the philosophy of science. As such, it has been a subject of philosophical reflection by a number of authors. In our project – in which both philosophers of science and scientists participate – we examine the concept of objectivity in the natural sciences with the tools of experimental philosophy. We aim to identify specific operational dimensions of objectivity, those (...)
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  19. Using corpus linguistics to investigate mathematical explanation.Juan Pablo Mejía Ramos, Lara Alcock, Kristen Lew, Paolo Rago, Chris Sangwin & Matthew Inglis - 2019 - In Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis (eds.), Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 239–263.
    In this chapter we use methods of corpus linguistics to investigate the ways in which mathematicians describe their work as explanatory in their research papers. We analyse use of the words explain/explanation (and various related words and expressions) in a large corpus of texts containing research papers in mathematics and in physical sciences, comparing this with their use in corpora of general, day-to-day English. We find that although mathematicians do use this family of words, such use is considerably less prevalent (...)
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  20. Show me the numbers: a quantitative portrait of the attitudes, experiences, and values of philosophers of science regarding broadly engaged work.Kathryn Plaisance, Alexander V. Graham, John McLevey & Jay Michaud - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4603-4633.
    Philosophers of science are increasingly arguing for the importance of doing scientifically- and socially-engaged work, suggesting that we need to reduce barriers to extra-disciplinary engagement and broaden our impact. Yet, we currently lack empirical data to inform these discussions, leaving a number of important questions unanswered. How common is it for philosophers of science to engage other communities, and in what ways are they engaging? What barriers are most prevalent when it comes to broadly disseminating one’s work or collaborating with (...)
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  21. Introduction: Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science.Richard Samuels & Daniel Wilkenfeld - 2019 - In Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science. pp. 1-12.
    In this chapter we explain what experimental philosophy of science is, how it relates to the philosophy of science, and STS more broadly, and what sorts of contributions is can make to ongoing research in the philosophy of science.
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  22. Everyday Scientific Imagination: A Qualitative Study of the Uses, Norms, and Pedagogy of Imagination in Science.Michael Stuart - 2019 - Science & Education 28 (6-7):711-730.
    Imagination is necessary for scientific practice, yet there are no in vivo sociological studies on the ways that imagination is taught, thought of, or evaluated by scientists. This article begins to remedy this by presenting the results of a qualitative study performed on two systems biology laboratories. I found that the more advanced a participant was in their scientific career, the more they valued imagination. Further, positive attitudes toward imagination were primarily due to the perceived role of imagination in problem-solving. (...)
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  23. Hypothesis Testing: How We Foresee Falsification in Competitive Games.Michelle Cowley-Cunningham - 2017 - Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing.
    Each day people are presented with circumstances that may require speculation. Scientists may ponder questions such as why a star is born or how rainbows are made, psychologists may ask social questions such as why people are prejudiced, and military strategists may imagine what the consequences of their actions might be. Speculations may lead to the generation of putative explanations called hypotheses. But it is by checking if hypotheses accurately reflect the encountered facts that lead to sensible behaviour demonstrating a (...)
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  24. Introduction to Psychological Criminology: Jury Verdicts and Jury Research Methodology.Michelle B. Cowley-Cunningham - 2017 - Legal Anthropology eJournal, Archives of Vols. 1-3, 2016-18 Vol. 2, Issues 248: December 20,.
    This summary note series outlines legal empirical approaches to the study of juries and jury decision-making behaviour for undergraduate students of sociology, criminology and legal systems, and forensic psychology. The note series is divided into two lectures. The first lecture attends to the background relevant to the historical rise of juries and socio-legal methodologies used to understand jury behaviour. The second lecture attends to questions surrounding jury competence, classic studies illustrative of juror bias, and a critical comparison of juries to (...)
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  25. Hypothesis Falsification in the 2-4-6 Number Sequence Test: Introducing Imaginary Counterparts.Michelle B. Cowley-Cunningham - 2015 - Philosophy of Mind eJournal 8 (41).
    Two main cognitive theories predict that people find refuting evidence that falsifies their theorising difficult, if not impossible to consider, even though such reasoning may be pivotal to grounding their everyday thoughts in reality (i.e., Poletiek, 1996; Klayman & Ha, 1987). In the classic 2-4-6 number sequence task devised by psychologists to test such reasoning skills in a simulated environment – people fail the test more often than not. In the 2-4-6 task participants try to discover what rule the number (...)
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  26. Assessing the “Empirical Philosophy of Mathematics”.Markus Pantsar - 2015 - Discipline Filosofiche:111-130.
    Abstract In the new millennium there have been important empirical developments in the philosophy of mathematics. One of these is the so-called “Empirical Philosophy of Mathematics”(EPM) of Buldt, Löwe, Müller and Müller-Hill, which aims to complement the methodology of the philosophy of mathematics with empirical work. Among other things, this includes surveys of mathematicians, which EPM believes to give philosophically important results. In this paper I take a critical look at the sociological part of EPM as a case study of (...)
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  27. Improving Epistemological Beliefs and Moral Judgment Through an STS-Based Science Ethics Education Program.Hyemin Han & Changwoo Jeong - 2014 - Science and Engineering Ethics 20 (1):197-220.
    This study develops a Science–Technology–Society (STS)-based science ethics education program for high school students majoring in or planning to major in science and engineering. Our education program includes the fields of philosophy, history, sociology and ethics of science and technology, and other STS-related theories. We expected our STS-based science ethics education program to promote students’ epistemological beliefs and moral judgment development. These psychological constructs are needed to properly solve complicated moral and social dilemmas in the fields of science and engineering. (...)
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  28. Intelligibility is Necessary for Scientific Explanation, but Accuracy May Not Be.Mike Braverman, John Clevenger, Ian Harmon, Andrew Higgins, Zachary Horne, Joseph Spino & Jonathan Waskan - 2012 - In Naomi Miyake, David Peebles & Richard Cooper (eds.), Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society.
    Many philosophers of science believe that empirical psychology can contribute little to the philosophical investigation of explanations. They take this to be shown by the fact that certain explanations fail to elicit any relevant psychological events (e.g., familiarity, insight, intelligibility, etc.). We report results from a study suggesting that, at least among those with extensive science training, a capacity to render an event intelligible is considered a requirement for explanation. We also investigate for whom explanations must be capable of rendering (...)
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  29. Naive Fizyka: Esej w ontologii.Roberto Casati & Barry Smith - 2012 - Science Blog.
    W dziełach Arystotelesa, lub z medievals, jak również w pismach późniejszych zdroworozsądkowe filozofów, takich jak Thomas Reid czy GE Moore’a, możemy znaleźć rodzinę różnych prób uporania się ze strukturami rozsądku i wspólnego -sense świat, który jest nam dany w normalnym, doświadczenie pre-teoretycznym. Będziemy argumentować, co wynika, że ​​teoria takich struktur stanowi ważny i dotychczas niedoceniany związek między wczesnym psychologii Gestalt z jednej strony, oraz współczesnych osiągnięć w filozofii i sztucznej inteligencji badań na innych.
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  30. A Survey of Effects of STS Education on the University Students' Moral Development and Epistemological Beliefs: Using DIT and EBI.Hyemin Han - 2006 - Journal of Ethics Education Studies 9:201-217.
    The purpose of this study is to assess effects of STS(Science and Technology Studies) education in natural science colleges and engineering colleges. STS is an interdisciplinary study includes ethics, history, sociology, policy of science and technology; its main purpose is elaborating students' social perspectives on science and technology. In Korea, however, there is few studies related to STS education to improve its educational effects. Therefore, this study will do exploratory investigation effects of STS education in moral development and epistemological beliefs (...)
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  31. Tracing Truth Through Conceptual Scaling: Mapping People’s Understanding of Abstract Concepts.Lukas S. Huber, David-Elias Künstle & Kevin Reuter - manuscript
    Traditionally, the investigation of truth has been anchored in a priori reasoning. Cognitive science deviates from this tradition by adding empirical data on how people understand and use concepts. Building on psychophysics and machine learning methods, we introduce conceptual scaling, an approach to map people's understanding of abstract concepts. This approach, allows computing participant-specific conceptual maps from obtained ordinal comparison data, thereby quantifying perceived similarities among abstract concepts. Using this approach, we investigated individual's alignment with philosophical theories on truth and (...)
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  32. The Average Isn’t Normal.Joshua Knobe & Henry Cowles - manuscript
    Within contemporary science, it is common practice to compare data points to the _average_, i.e., to the statistical mean. Because this practice is so familiar, it might at first appear not to be the sort of thing that requires explanation. But recent research in cognitive science gives us reason to adopt the opposite perspective. Research on the cognitive processes involved in people’s ordinary efforts to make sense of the world suggests that, instead of using a purely statistical notion of the (...)
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  33. All in the Family: The History and Philosophy of Experimental Philosophy: What’s Happening in Philosophy (WHiP)-The Philosophers, September 2022.Jeff Hawley - unknown
    Experimental philosophy (x-phi) is all the rage. But shouldn't all philosophy be experimental? Jeff Hawley looks at the views of three philosophers on the role and value of x-phi. This month’s PhilosophyNews 'WHiP: The Philosophers' focuses on a chapter from The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy edited by A. Bauer and S. Kornmesser (forthcoming). 'All in the Family: The History and Philosophy of Experimental Philosophy' by Justin Sytsma, Joseph Ulatowski, and Chad Gonnerman digs into the history of various philosophers who (...)
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