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  1. Epistemic Intuitions in Fake-Barn Thought Experiments.David Colaço, Wesley Buckwalter, Stephen Stich & Edouard Machery - 2014 - Episteme 11 (2):199-212.
    In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether non-philosophers share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-barn cases do count as knowledge is negatively correlated with (...)
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  • (1 other version)Folk Moral Relativism.Hagop Sarkissian, John Park, David Tien, Jennifer Cole Wright & Joshua Knobe - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (4):482-505.
    It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions considering individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. The authors hypothesize that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend (...)
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  • Dissolving the moral-conventional distinction.David C. Sackris - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology.
    One way in which philosophers have often sought to distinguish moral judgments from non-moral judgments is by using the “moral-conventional” distinction. I seek to raise serious questions about the significance of the moral-conventional distinction, at least for philosophers interested in moral judgment. I survey recent developments in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science that have led many to the conclusion that moral judgment is not a distinctive kind of judgment or the result of a specific, identifiable cognitive process. (...)
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  • Some Socratic Modesty: A Reconsideration of Recent Empirical Work on Moral Judgment.David Sackris & Michael T. Dale - 2024 - Journal of Value Inquiry 1:1-23.
    One way to interpret the work of Joshua Greene (2001; 2008; 2014) is that the wave of empirical research into moral decision-making is a way for us to become more confident in our ability to gain moral knowledge. We argue that empirical research into moral judgment has shown (both survey-based and brain-based) that the grounds of moral judgment are opaque on several dimensions. We argue that we cannot firmly grasp what the morally relevant/irrelevant features of a decision context are, understand (...)
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  • Metaethical intuitions in lay concepts of normative uncertainty.Maximilian Theisen - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Even if we know all relevant descriptive facts about an act, we can still be uncertain about its moral acceptability. Most literature on how to act under such normative uncertainty operates on moral realism, the metaethical view that there are objective moral facts. Lay people largely report anti-realist intuitions, which poses the question of how these intuitions affect their interpretation and handling of normative uncertainty. Results from two quasi-experimental studies (total N = 365) revealed that most people did not interpret (...)
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  • The disunity of moral judgment: Implications for the study of psychopathy.David Sackris - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 1.
    Since the 18th century, one of the key features of diagnosed psychopaths has been “moral colorblindness” or an inability to form moral judgments. However, attempts at experimentally verifying this moral incapacity have been largely unsuccessful. After reviewing the centrality of “moral colorblindness” to the study and diagnosis of psychopathy, I argue that the reason that researchers have been unable to verify that diagnosed psychopaths have an inability to make moral judgments is because their research is premised on the assumption that (...)
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  • Moral Progress, Knowledge and Error: Do People Believe in Moral Objectivity?Thomas Pölzler, Lieuwe Zijlstra & Jacob Dijkstra - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    A prevalent assumption in metaethics is that people believe in moral objectivity. If this assumption were true then people should believe in the possibility of objective moral progress, objective moral knowledge, and objective moral error. We developed surveys to investigate whether these predictions hold. Our results suggest that, neither abstractly nor concretely, people dominantly believe in the possibility of objective moral progress, knowledge and error. They attribute less objectivity to these phenomena than in the case of science and no more, (...)
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  • Empirical evidence for moral Bayesianism.Haim Cohen, Ittay Nissan-Rozen & Anat Maril - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology 37 (4):801-830.
    Many philosophers in the field of meta-ethics believe that rational degrees of confidence in moral judgments should have a probabilistic structure, in the same way as do rational degrees of belief. The current paper examines this position, termed “moral Bayesianism,” from an empirical point of view. To this end, we assessed the extent to which degrees of moral judgments obey the third axiom of the probability calculus, ifP(A∩B)=0thenP(A∪B)=P(A)+P(B), known as finite additivity, as compared to degrees of beliefs on the one (...)
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  • De gustibus est disputandum: An empirical investigation of the folk concept of aesthetic taste.Constant Bonard, Florian Cova & Steve Humbert-Droz - 2022 - In Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou & Dan Zeman (eds.), Perspectives on Taste: Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics, and Experimental Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 77-108.
    Past research on folk aesthetics has suggested that most people are subjectivists when it comes to aesthetic judgment. However, most people also make a distinction between good and bad aesthetic taste. To understand the extent to which these two observations conflict with one another, we need a better understanding of people's everyday concept of aesthetic taste. In this paper, we present the results of a study in which participants drawn from a representative sample of the US population were asked whether (...)
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  • (1 other version)Experimental philosophy of aesthetics.Florian Cova - 2023 - In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
    In this chapter, I present a comprehensive review of the literature on experimental philosophy of aesthetics.
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  • Further exploration of anti-realist intuitions about aesthetic judgment.James Andow - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (5):621-661.
    Experimental philosophy of aesthetics has explored to what extent ordinary people are committed to aesthetic realism. Extant work has focused on attitudes to normativism – a key commitment of realist positions in aesthetics – the claim that aesthetic judgments/statements have correctness conditions, invariant between subjects, such that there is a fact of the matter in cases of aesthetic disagreement. The emerging picture is that ordinary people strongly and almost universally reject normativism and thus there is no strong realist tendency in (...)
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  • From rational self-interest to liberalism: a hole in Cofnas’s debunking explanation of moral progress.Marcus Arvan - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3067-3086.
    Michael Huemer argues that cross-cultural convergence toward liberal moral values is evidence of objective moral progress, and by extension, evidence for moral realism. Nathan Cofnas claims to debunk Huemer’s argument by contending that convergence toward liberal moral values can be better explained by ‘two related non-truth-tracking processes’: self-interest and its long-term tendency to result in social conditions conducive to greater empathy. This article argues that although Cofnas successfully debunks Huemer’s convergence argument for one influential form of moral realism – Robust (...)
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  • Should morality be abolished? An empirical challenge to the argument from intolerance.Jennifer Cole Wright & Thomas Pölzler - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (3):350-385.
    Moral abolitionists claim that morality ought to be abolished. According to one of their most prominent arguments, this is because making moral judgments renders people significantly less tolerant toward anyone who holds divergent views. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that morality’s tolerance-decreasing effect only occurs if people are realists about moral issues, i.e., they interpret these issues as objectively grounded. We found support for this hypothesis (Studies 1 and 2). Yet, it also turned out that the intolerance associated (...)
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  • Famine, Affluence, and Amorality.David Sackris - 2021 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (2):(A1)5-29.
    I argue that the debate concerning the nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such moral judgments are inherently motivating or whether moral judgments can be made in the absence of motivation, may be founded on a faulty assumption: that moral judgments form a distinct kind that must have some shared, essential features in regards to motivation to act. I argue that there is little reason to suppose that first-person moral judgments form a homogenous class in this respect by considering (...)
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  • The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy.Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.) - 2023 - Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
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  • The nature of disagreement: matters of taste and environs.Jeremy Wyatt - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10739-10767.
    Predicates of personal taste have attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers of language and linguists. In the intricate debates over PPT, arguably the most central consideration has been which analysis of PPT can best account for the possibility of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste. I argue that two models of such disagreement—the relativist and absolutist models—are empirically inadequate. In their stead, I develop a model of faultless taste disagreement which represents it as involving a novel incompatibility (...)
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  • De gustibus est disputandum: An empirical investigation of the folk concept of aesthetic taste.Bonard Constant Charles, Florian Cova & Steve Humbert-Droz - 2022 - In Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou & Dan Zeman (eds.), Perspectives on Taste: Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics, and Experimental Philosophy. Routledge.
    Past research on folk aesthetics has suggested that most people are subjectivists when it comes to aesthetic judgment. However, most people also make a distinction between good and bad aesthetic taste. To understand the extent to which these two observations conflict with one another, we need a better understanding of people's everyday concept of aesthetic taste. In this paper, we present the results of a study in which participants drawn from a representative sample of the US population were asked whether (...)
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  • The meta-wisdom of crowds.Justin Sytsma, Ryan Muldoon & Shaun Nichols - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11051-11074.
    It is well-known that people will adjust their first-order beliefs based on observations of others. We explore how such adjustments interact with second-order beliefs regarding universalism and relativism in a population. Across a range of simulations, we show that populations where individuals have a tendency toward universalism converge more quickly in coordination problems, and generate higher total payoffs, than do populations where individuals have a tendency toward relativism. Thus, in contexts where coordination is important, belief in universalism is advantageous. However, (...)
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  • Morality as an Evolutionary Exaptation.Marcus Arvan - 2021 - In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library. Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 89-109.
    The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and transmission (...)
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  • The irrationality of folk metaethics.Ross Colebrook - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology:1-37.
    Many philosophers and psychologists have thought that people untutored in philosophy are moral realists. On this view, when people make moral judgments, they interpret their judgments as tracking universal, objective moral facts. But studies of folk metaethics have demonstrated that people have a mix of metaethical attitudes. Sometimes people think of their moral judgments as purely expressive, or as tracking subjective or relative moral facts, or perhaps no facts at all. This paper surveys the evidence for folk metaethical pluralism and (...)
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  • Ethical Mooreanism.Jonathan Fuqua - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6943-6965.
    In this paper I lay out, argue for, and defend ethical Mooreanism. In essence, the view says that some moral propositions are Moorean propositions and thus are epistemically superior to the conjunctions of the premises of skeptical arguments to the contrary. In Sect. 1 I explain Mooreanism and then ethical Mooreanism. In Sect. 2 I argue for ethical Mooreanism by noting a number of important epistemic parities that hold between certain moral truths and standard Moorean facts. In Sect. 3 I (...)
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  • The Normative Stance.Marcus Arvan - 2021 - Philosophical Forum 52 (1):79-89.
    The Duhem-Quine thesis famously holds that a single hypothesis cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed in isolation, but instead only in conjunction with other background hypotheses. This article argues that this has important and underappreciated implications for metaethics. Section 1 argues that if one begins metaethics firmly wedded to a naturalistic worldview—due (e.g.) to methodological/epistemic considerations—then normativity will appear to be reducible to a set of social-psycho-semantic behaviors that I call the ‘normative stance.’ Contra Hume and Bedke (2012), I argue that (...)
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  • Beyond objectivism: new methods for studying metaethical intuitions.Taylor Davis - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (1):125-153.
    Moral realists often assume that folk intuitions are predominantly realist, and they argue that this places the burden of proof on antirealists. More broadly, appeals to intuition in metaethics typically assume that folk judgments are generally consistent across individuals, such that they are at least predominantly something, if not realist. A substantial body of empirical work on moral objectivism has investigated these assumptions, but findings remain inconclusive due to methodological limitations. Objectivist judgments classify individuals into broad categories of realism and (...)
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  • An Empirical Argument against Moral Non-Cognitivism.Thomas Pölzler & Jen Wright - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    According to non-cognitivism, moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. This paper presents an empirical argument against this view. We begin by showing that non-cognitivism entails the prediction that after some reflection competent ordinary speakers’ semantic intuitions favor that moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. At first sight, this prediction may seem to have been confirmed by previous research on folk metaethics. However, a number of methodological worries (...)
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  • Misunderstanding Metaethics: Difficulties Measuring Folk Objectivism and Relativism.Lance S. Bush & David Moss - 2020 - Diametros 17 (64):6-21.
    Recent research on the metaethical beliefs of ordinary people appears to show that they are metaethical pluralists that adopt different metaethical standards for different moral judgments. Yet the methods used to evaluate folk metaethical belief rely on the assumption that participants interpret what they are asked in metaethical terms. We argue that most participants do not interpret questions designed to elicit metaethical beliefs in metaethical terms, or at least not in the way researchers intend. As a result, existing methods are (...)
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  • The Empirical Case for Folk Indexical Moral Relativism.James R. Beebe - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy 4.
    Recent empirical work on folk moral objectivism has attempted to examine the extent to which folk morality presumes that moral judgments are objectively true or false. Some researchers report findings that they take to indicate folk commitment to objectivism (Goodwin & Darley, 2008, 2010, 2012; Nichols & Folds-Bennett, 2003; Wainryb et al., 2004), while others report findings that may reveal a more variable commitment to objectivism (Beebe, 2014; Beebe et al., 2015; Beebe & Sackris, 2016; Sarkissian, et al., 2011; Wright, (...)
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  • Lay beliefs in moral expertise.Susanne M. Schmittat & Pascal Burgmer - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (2):283-308.
    ABSTRACTCompared to expertise in other domains, moral expertise remains a controversial topic. The current research employs a folk-psychological approach to explore which characteristics laypeople...
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  • Anti-Realist Pluralism: a New Approach to Folk Metaethics.Thomas Pölzler & Jennifer Cole Wright - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (1):53-82.
    Many metaethicists agree that as ordinary people experience morality as a realm of objective truths, we have a prima facie reason to believe that it actually is such a realm. Recently, worries have been raised about the validity of the extant psychological research on this argument’s empirical hypothesis. Our aim is to advance this research, taking these worries into account. First, we propose a new experimental design for measuring folk intuitions about moral objectivity that may serve as an inspiration for (...)
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  • Empirical research on folk moral objectivism.Thomas Pölzler & Jennifer Cole Wright - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (5).
    Lay persons may have intuitions about morality's objectivity. What do these intuitions look like? And what are their causes and consequences? In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have begun to investigate these questions empirically. This article presents and assesses the resulting area of research as well as its potential philosophical implications. First, we introduce the methods of empirical research on folk moral objectivism. Second, we provide an overview of the findings that have so far been made. Third, we (...)
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  • The meta-ethical significance of experiments about folk moral objectivism.Jeroen Hopster - 2019 - Philosophical Psychology 32 (6):831-852.
    The meta-ethical commitments of folk respondents – specifically their commitment to the objectivity of moral claims – have recently become subject to empirical scrutiny. Experimental findings suggest that people are meta-ethical pluralists: There is both inter- and intrapersonal variation with regard to people’s objectivist commitments. What meta-ethical implications, if any, do these findings have? I point out that current research does not directly address traditional meta-ethical questions: The methods used and distinctions drawn by experimenters do not perfectly match those of (...)
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  • “Many people are saying…”: Applying the lessons of naïve skepticism to the fight against fake news and other “total bullshit”.Jake Wright - 2020 - Postdigital Science and Education 2 (1):113-131.
    ‘Fake news’ has become an increasingly common refrain in public discourse, though the term itself has several uses, at least one of which constitutes Frankfurtian bullshit. After examining what sorts of fake news appeals do and do not count as bullshit, I discuss strategies for overcoming our openness to such bullshit. I do so by drawing a parallel between openness to bullshit and naïve skepticism—one’s willingness to reject the concept of truth on unsupported or ill-considered grounds—and suggest that this parallel (...)
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  • Moral objectivism and a punishing God.Hagop Sarkissian & Mark Phelan - 2019 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 80:1-7.
    Many moral philosophers have assumed that ordinary folk embrace moral objectivism. But, if so, why do folk embrace objectivism? One possibility is the pervasive connection between religion and morality in ordinary life. Some theorists contend that God is viewed as a divine guarantor of right and wrong, rendering morality universal and absolute. But is belief in God per se sufficient for moral objectivism? In this paper, we present original research exploring the connections between metaethics and particular conceptions of God among (...)
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  • (1 other version)Aspects of folk morality: Objectivism and relativism.Hagop Sarkissian - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 212-224.
    Most moral philosophers work under the assumption that ordinary folk morality is committed to objectivism—that ordinary folk view morality in absolute terms. This datum serves to constrain and shape philosophical metaethics, since those working in this field feel compelled to make sense of it. In this chapter, I discuss why philosophers take on this commitment. I also outline the relevant experimental research exploring whether, and to what extent, ordinary folk think of morality in absolute terms. Finally, I turn toward a (...)
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  • The truth, but not yet: Avoiding naïve skepticism via explicit communication of metadisciplinary aims.Jake Wright - 2019 - Teaching in Higher Education 24 (3):361-377.
    Introductory students regularly endorse naïve skepticism—unsupported or uncritical doubt about the existence and universality of truth—for a variety of reasons. Though some of the reasons for students’ skepticism can be traced back to the student—for example, a desire to avoid engaging with controversial material or a desire to avoid offense—naïve skepticism is also the result of how introductory courses are taught, deemphasizing truth to promote students’ abilities to develop basic disciplinary skills. While this strategy has a number of pedagogical benefits, (...)
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  • Folk Platitudes as the Explananda of Philosophical Metaethics: Are They Accurate? And Do They Help or Hinder Inquiry?Hagop Sarkissian - 2017 - Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3):565-575.
    The field of metaethics, the branch of moral philosophy that examines the nature and status of morality, is rich in theoretical diversity. Nonetheless, a majority of professional philosophers embrace a subset of theories that affirm the existence of objective moral facts. I suggest that this may be related to the very method that philosophers use to construct metaethical theories. This method involves analyzing how ordinary people think and argue about morality. Analysis of ordinary moral discourse is meant to reveal common (...)
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  • How to Measure Moral Realism.Thomas Pölzler - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (3):647-670.
    In recent years an increasing number of psychologists have begun to explore the prevalence, causes and effects of ordinary people’s intuitions about moral realism. Many of these studies have lacked in construct validity, i.e., they have failed to measure moral realism. My aim in this paper accordingly is to motivate and guide methodological improvements. In analysis of prominent existing measures, I develop general recommendations for overcoming ten prima facie serious worries about research on folk moral realism. G1 and G2 require (...)
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  • Moral Skepticism: An Introduction and Overview.Diego E. Machuca - 2017 - In Diego E. Machuca (ed.), Moral Skepticism: New Essays. New York: Routledge. pp. 1-31.
    In this introductory chapter, I not only present the essays that make up this volume but also I offer an extensive critical overview of moral skepticism with the hope that it will turn out to be useful particularly to the uninitiated reader. I first provide a taxonomy of varieties of moral skepticism, then discuss the main arguments advanced in their favor, and finally summarize the ten essays here collected, which deal with one or more of those skeptical stances and arguments.
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  • The objectivity of truth, a core truism?Robert Barnard & Joseph Ulatowski - 2017 - Synthese 198 (2):717-733.
    A typical guiding principle of an account of truth is: “truth is objective,” or, to be clear, judging whether an assertion is true or false depends upon how things are in the world rather than how someone or some community believes it to be. Accordingly, whenever a claim is objectively true, its truth conditions ought not depend upon the context in which it is uttered or the utterer making the claim. Part of our ongoing empirical studies surveying people’s responses to (...)
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  • Experimental Philosophy, Folk Metaethics and Qualitative Methods.David Moss - 2017 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 36 (3):185-203.
    The file associated with this record is under embargo while permission to archive is sought from the publisher. The full text may be available through the publisher links provided above.
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  • Revisiting Folk Moral Realism.Thomas Pölzler - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2):455-476.
    Moral realists believe that there are objective moral truths. According to one of the most prominent arguments in favour of this view, ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming, and we have therefore prima facie reason to believe that realism is true. Some proponents of this argument have claimed that the hypothesis that ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming is supported by psychological research on folk metaethics. While most recent research has been thought to contradict this claim, four prominent earlier studies (...)
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  • The tale of a moderate normative skeptic.Brendan Cline - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (1):141-161.
    While Richard Joyce’s moral skepticism might seem to be an extreme metaethical view, it is actually far more moderate than it might first appear. By articulating four challenges facing his approach to moral skepticism, I argue that Joyce’s moderation is, in fact, a theoretical liability. First, the fact that Joyce is not skeptical about normativity in general makes it possible to develop close approximations to morality, lending support to moderate moral revisionism over moral error theory. Second, Joyce relies on strong, (...)
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  • The Empirical Study of Folk Metaethics.James Beebe - 2015 - Etyka 15:11-28.
    In this paper, I review recent attempts by experimental philosophers and psychologists to study folk metaethics empirically and discuss some of the difficulties that researchers face when trying to construct the right kind of research materials and interpreting the results that they obtain. At first glance, the findings obtained so far do not look good for the thesis that people are everywhere moral realists about every moral issue. However, because of difficulties in interpreting these results, I argue that better research (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Experimental Philosophy.Joshua Knobe, Wesley Buckwalter, Shaun Nichols, Philip Robbins, Hagop Sarkissian & Tamler Sommers - 2012 - Annual Review of Psychology 63 (1):81-99.
    Experimental philosophy is a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy. The present review focuses on research in experimental philosophy on four central questions. First, why is it that people's moral judgments appear to influence their intuitions about seemingly nonmoral questions? Second, do people think that moral questions have objective answers, or do they see morality as fundamentally relative? Third, do people believe in free will, and do they see free (...)
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  • (1 other version)Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics.Florian Cova, Amanda Garcia & Shen-yi Liao - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (12):927-939.
    In the past decade, experimental philosophy---the attempt at making progress on philosophical problems using empirical methods---has thrived in a wide range of domains. However, only in recent years has aesthetics succeeded in drawing the attention of experimental philosophers. The present paper constitutes the first survey of these works and of the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy of aesthetics'. We present both recent experimental works by philosophers on topics such as the ontology of aesthetics, aesthetic epistemology, aesthetic concepts, and imagination, as (...)
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  • Signaling (in)tolerance: Social evaluation and metaethical relativism and objectivism.David Moss, Andres Montealegre, Lance S. Bush, Lucius Caviola & David Pizarro - 2025 - Cognition 254 (C):105984.
    Prior work has established that laypeople do not consistently treat moral questions as being objectively true or as merely true relative to different perspectives. Rather, these metaethical judgments vary dramatically across moral issues and in response to different social influences. We offer a potential explanation by examining how objectivists and relativists are evaluated in different contexts. We provide evidence for a novel account of metaethical judgments as signaling tolerance or intolerance of disagreement. The social implications of signaling tolerance or intolerance (...)
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  • Norms, not moral norms: The boundaries of morality do not matter.Taylor Davis & Daniel Kelly - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41.
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  • Absolutely tasty: an examination of predicates of personal taste and faultless disagreement.Jeremy Wyatt - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (3):252-280.
    Debates about the semantics and pragmatics of predicates of personal taste have largely centered on contextualist and relativist proposals. In this paper, I argue in favor of an alternative, absolutist analysis of PPT. Theorists such as Max Kölbel and Peter Lasersohn have argued that we should dismiss absolutism due to its inability to accommodate the possibility of faultless disagreement involving PPT. My aim in the paper is to show how the absolutist can in fact accommodate this possibility by drawing on (...)
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  • Implicit Metaethical Intuitions: Validating and Employing a New IAT Procedure.Johannes M. J. Wagner, Thomas Pölzler & Jennifer C. Wright - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (1):1-31.
    Philosophical arguments often assume that the folk tends towards moral objectivism. Although recent psychological studies have indicated that lay persons’ attitudes to morality are best characterized in terms of non-objectivism-leaning pluralism, it has been maintained that the folk may be committed to moral objectivism _implicitly_. Since the studies conducted so far almost exclusively assessed subjects’ metaethical attitudes via explicit cognitions, the strength of this rebuttal remains unclear. The current study attempts to test the folk’s implicit metaethical commitments. We present results (...)
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  • Kinds of norms.Elizabeth O'Neill - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (5):e12416.
    This article provides an overview of recent, empirically supported categorization schemes that have been proposed to distinguish different kinds of norms. Amongst these are the moral–conventional distinction and divisions within moral norms such as those proposed by moral foundations theory. I identify several dimensions along which norms have been and could usefully be categorized. I discuss some of the most prominent norm categorization proposals and the aims of these existing categorization schemes. I propose that we take a pluralistic approach toward (...)
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  • Assessor Teaching and the Evolution of Human Morality.Laureano Castro, Miguel Ángel Castro-Nogueira, Morris Villarroel & Miguel Ángel Toro - 2021 - Biological Theory 16 (1):5-15.
    We consider the evolutionary scheme of morality proposed by Tomasello to defend the idea that the ability to orient the learning of offspring using signs of approval/disapproval could be a decisive and necessary step in the evolution of human morality. Those basic forms of intentional evaluative feedback, something we have called assessor teaching, allow parents to transmit their accumulated experience to their children, both about the behaviors that should be learned as well as how they should be copied. The rationale (...)
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