English: In this paper I indicate why I consider 'experimental philosophy' to be good news, though not as good as it could be, and not as all that new. I'll argue that there is no need to restrict experimental philosophy to eliciting intuitions through questionnaires. I'll indicate that good examples of experimental philosophy already exist in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Neuroscience. Dutch: Hieronder wil ik proberen aan te geven waarom ik de experimentele filosofie weliswaar als goed nieuws beschouw, maar niet (...) half zo goed als zou kunnen, en ook niet als echt nieuw. Qua filosofische experimenten beperkt de XF-beweging zich vooralsnog onnodig door haar focus op het eliciteren van intuïties, terwijl er reeds lang diverse goede voorbeelden van XF bestaan op het gebied van de kunstmatige intelligentie en de cognitieve neurowetenschap. (shrink)

Vigorous debate over the moral propriety of cognitive enhancement exists, but the views of the public have been largely absent from the discussion. To address this gap in our knowledge, four experiments were carried out with contrastive vignettes in order to obtain quantitative data on public attitudes towards cognitive enhancement. The data collected suggest that the public is sensitive to and capable of understanding the four cardinal concerns identified by neuroethicists, and tend to cautiously accept cognitive enhancement even as they (...) recognize its potential perils. The public is biopolitically moderate, endorses both meritocratic principles and the intrinsic value of hard work, and appears to be sensitive to the salient moral issues raised in the debate. Taken together, these data suggest that public attitudes toward enhancement are sufficiently sophisticated to merit inclusion in policy deliberations, especially if we seek to align public sentiment and policy. (shrink)

In one of the earlier influential papers in the field of experimental philosophy titled Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions published in 2001, Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich reported that respondents answered Gettier type questions differently depending on their ethnic background as well as socioeconomic status. There is currently a debate going on, on the significance of the results of Weinberg et al. (2001) and its implications for philosophical methodology in general and epistemology in specific. Despite the debates, however, (...) to our knowledge, there has not been a replication attempt of the experiments of the original paper. We collected data from four different sources (two on-line and two in-person) to replicate the experiments. Despite several different data sets and in various cases larger sample sizes and hence greater power to detect differences, we failed to detect significant differences between the above-mentioned ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Our results suggest that epistemic intuitions are more robust across ethnic and socioeconomic groups than Weinberg et al. (2001) indicates. Given our data, we believe that the notion of differences in epistemic intuitions among different ethnic and socioeconomic groups that follows from Weinberg et al. (2001) needs to be corrected. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is often presented as a new movement that avoids many of the difficulties that face traditional philosophy. This article distinguishes two views of experimental philosophy: a narrow view in which philosophers conduct empirical investigations of intuitions, and a broad view which says that experimental philosophy is just the colocation in the same body of (i) philosophical naturalism and (ii) the actual practice of cognitive science. These two positions are rarely clearly distinguished in the literature about experimental philosophy, both (...) pro and con. The article argues, first, that the broader view is the only plausible one; discussions of experimental philosophy should recognize that the narrow view is a caricature of experimental philosophy as it is currently done. It then shows both how objections to experimental philosophy are transformed and how positive recommendations can be provided by adopting a broad conception of experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Moral particularism, on some interpretations, is committed to a shapeless thesis: the moral is shapeless with respect to the natural. (Call this version of moral particularism ‘shapeless moral particularism’). In more detail, the shapeless thesis is that the actions a moral concept or predicate can be correctly applied to have no natural commonality (or shape) amongst them. Jackson et al. (Ethical particularism and patterns, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) argue, however, that the shapeless thesis violates the platitude ‘predication supervenes on (...) nature’—predicates or concepts apply because of how things are, and therefore ought to be rejected. I defend shapeless moral particularism by arguing that Jackson et al’s contention is less compelling than it firstly appears. My defense is limited in the sense that it does not prove shapeless moral particularism to be right and it leaves open the possibility that shapeless moral particularism might attract criticisms different from the ones advanced by Jackson et al. But at the very least, I hope to say enough to undermine Jackson et al’s powerful attack against it. The plan of this paper is as follows. Section 1 glosses the view of moral particularism and why it is taken to be essentially committed to the shapeless thesis. Section 2 examines a Wittgensteinian argument for the shapeless thesis. I shall argue that the Canberrans’ counter-arguments against it on grounds of disjunctive commonality and conceptual competence do not succeed. Section 3 explicates Canberrans’ predication supervenience argument against the shapeless thesis. Section 4 offers my criticisms of the Canberrans’ predication supervenience argument. In view of the above discussions, in Sect. 5, I conclude that there is no compelling argument (from the Canberrans) to believe that the shapeless thesis fails (as I have argued in Sect. 4). In fact, there is some good reason for us to believe it (as I have argued in Sect. 2). If so, I contend that moral particularism, when construed as essentially committed to the shapeless thesis, still remains as a live option. (shrink)

Much of experimental philosophy consists of surveying 'folk' intuitions about philosophically relevant issues. Are the results of these surveys evidence that the relevant folk intuitions cannot be predicted from the ‘armchair’? We found that a solid majority of philosophers could predict even results claimed to be 'surprising'. But, we argue, this does not mean that such experiments have no role at all in philosophy.

Do laypeople think that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Recently, philosophers and psychologists trying to answer this question have found contradictory results: while some experiments reveal people to have compatibilist intuitions, others suggest that people could in fact be incompatibilist. To account for this contradictory answers, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have advanced a ‘performance error model’ according to which people are genuine incompatibilist that are sometimes biased to give compatibilist answers by emotional reactions. To test for this hypothesis, we (...) investigated intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility in patients suffering from behavioural frontotemporal dementia. Patients suffering from bvFTD have impoverished emotional reaction. Thus, the ‘performance error model’ should predict that bvFTD patients will give less compatibilist answers. However, we found that bvFTD patients give answers quite similar to subjects in control group and were mostly compatibilist. Thus, we conclude that the ‘performance error model’ should be abandoned in favour of other available model that best fit our data. (shrink)

Awareness is a two-place determinable relation some determinates of which are seeing, hearing, etc. Abstract objects are items such as universals and functions, which contrast with concrete objects such as solids and liquids. It is uncontroversial that we are sometimes aware of concrete objects. In this paper I explore the more controversial topic of awareness of abstract objects. I distinguish two questions. First, the Existence Question: are there any experiences that make their subjects aware of abstract objects? Second, the Grounding (...) Question: if an experience makes its subject aware of an abstract object, in virtue of what does it do so? I defend the view that intuitions, specifically mathematical intuitions, sometimes make their subjects aware of abstract objects. In defending this view, I develop an account of the ground of intuitive awareness. (shrink)

An overview of contemporary debates and topics in epistemology.

Philosophical and empirical moral psychologists claim that emotions are both necessary and sufficient for moral judgment. The aim of this paper is to assess the evidence in favor of both claims and to show how a moderate rationalist position about moral judgment can be defended nonetheless. The experimental evidence for both the necessity- and the sufficiency-thesis concerning the connection between emotional reactions and moral judgment is presented. I argue that a rationalist about moral judgment can be happy to accept the (...) necessity-thesis. My argument draws on the idea that emotions play the same role for moral judgment that perceptions play for ordinary judgments about the external world. I develop a rationalist interpretation of the sufficiency-thesis and show that it can successfully account for the available empirical evidence. The general idea is that the rationalist can accept the claim that emotional reactions are sufficient for moral judgment just in case a subject’s emotional reaction towards an action in question causes the judgment in a way that can be reflectively endorsed under conditions of full information and rationality. This idea is spelled out in some detail and it is argued that a moral agent is entitled to her endorsement if the way she arrives at her judgment reliably leads to correct moral beliefs, and that this reliability can be established if the subject’s emotional reaction picks up on the morally relevant aspects of the situation. (shrink)

Suppose that Ann says, “Keith knows that the bank will be open tomorrow.” Her audience may well agree. Her knowledge ascription may seem true. But now suppose that Ben—in a different context—also says “Keith knows that the bank will be open tomorrow.” His audience may well disagree. His knowledge ascription may seem false. Indeed, a number of philosophers have claimed that people’s intuitions about knowledge ascriptions are context sensitive, in the sense that the very same knowledge ascription can seem true (...) in one conversational context but false in another. This purported fact about people’s intuitions serves as one of the main pieces of evidence for epistemic contextualism. (shrink)

Neuroscientific claims have a significant impact on traditional philosophy. This essay, focusing on the field of moral neuroscience, discusses how and why philosophy can contribute to neuroscientific progress. First, viewing the interactions between moral neuroscience and moral philosophy, it becomes clear that moral philosophy can and does contribute to moral neuroscience in two ways: as explanandum and as explanans. Next, it is shown that moral philosophy is well suited to contribute to moral neuroscience in both of these two ways in (...) the context of the problem of ecological validity. Philosophy can play the role of an agent for ecological validity, since traditional philosophy shapes and reflects part of our social reality. Finally, based on these arguments, I tentatively sketch how a Kantian account of moral incentive can play this role. (shrink)

What are intuitions? According to doxastic views, they are doxastic attitudes or dispositions, such as judgments or inclinations to make judgments. According to perceptualist views, they are—like perceptual experiences—pre-doxastic experiences that—unlike perceptual experiences—represent abstract matters as being a certain way. In this paper I argue against doxasticism and in favor of perceptualism. I describe two features that militate against doxasticist views of perception itself: perception is belief-independent and perception is presentational. Then I argue that intuitions also have both features. The (...) upshot is that intuitions are importantly similar to perceptual experiences, and so should not be identified with doxastic attitudes or dispositions. I consider a popular argument from the introspective absence of sui generis intuition experiences in favor of doxasticism. I develop a conception of intuition experiences that helps to defuse this argument. (shrink)

During the 1960s and 1970s, institutionalists and behavioralists in the discipline of political science argued over the legitimacy of the institutional approach to political inquiry. In the discipline of philosophy, a similar debate concerning institutions has never taken place. Yet, a growing number of philosophers are now working out the institutional implications of political ideas in what has become known as “non-ideal theory.” My thesis is two-fold: (1) pragmatism and institutionalism are compatible and (2) non-ideal theorists, following the example of (...) pragmatists, can avoid a similar debate as took place between institutionalists and behavioralists by divulging their assumptions about institutions. (shrink)

Jesse Prinz’s The Emotional Construction of Morals is among the most significant of illuminations of human morality to appear in recent years. This embarrassment of riches presents the space-starved commentator with a dilemma: survey the book’s extraordinary sweep, and slight the textured argumentation, or engage a fraction of the argumentation, and slight the sweep. I’ll fall on the second horn, and focus mostly on Chapter 7, ‘The Genealogy of Morals’. Like Prinz , 1 I think that genealogical arguments have not, (...) despite their frequent appearance, received enough self-conscious discussion in ethical theorizing; I’ll try to extend Prinz’s amelioration of this neglect, by making some recurring themes explicit. In so doing, I indulge myself in a bit of therapy. I’ve always regarded genealogical arguments with certain ambivalence: genealogies frequently make a beguiling first impression, but just as often, when one gets to know them, their appeal turns out to be superficial. In articulating the contrasting uses to which genealogical arguments might be put, I hope to distinguish uses that deliver real substance from uses where the promise is not realized in the practice.Genealogical arguments are indelibly associated with Nietzsche, so it is unsurprising that Prinz in this chapter parts company with Hume, his usual muse, 2 and takes up, somewhat ambivalently , a Nietzschean torch. I won’t fret the historical details, nor will I trouble myself over where Nietzsche ends and Prinz begins; I’ll simply raise some general issues about genealogy and ethics. 3The Nietzschean insight, according to Prinz , is that ‘the values we currently cherish have a history’ and this history ‘may not be pretty’. Notoriously, Nietzsche was a bit grumpy about Christianity, and he supposed that tracing morality through the dark and labyrinthine history of the Church would unmask the attendant values …. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently suggested that the role of intuitions in the epistemology of armchair philosophy has been exaggerated. This suggestion is rehearsed and endorsed. What bearing does the rejection of the centrality of intuition in armchair philosophy have on experimentalist critiques of the latter? I distinguish two very different kinds of experimentalist critique: one critique requires the centrality of intuition; the other does not.

The Experimental Philosophy (“X-Phi”) movement applies the methodology of empirical sciences – most commonly empirical psychology – to traditional philosophical questions. In its radical, “negative” form, X-Phi uses the resulting empirical data to cast doubt on the reliability of common philosophical methods, arguing for radical reform of philosophical methodology.In this paper I develop two connected methodological worries about this second enterprise. The first concerns the data elicited by questionnaires and other empirical survey methods; recent work in political science suggests that (...) such surveys frequently do not elicit the participants’ candid judgements, but rather their expressions of certain attitudes and identifications. This possibility stymies the arguments from experimental data to a radical overhaul of philosophical methodology. The second builds on recent work by L.A. Paul and Kieran Healy concerning social science methodology, applying it to the use of those methods in X-Phi. It concerns experimental design where the treatment investigated is a “transformative” one; since a philosophical education is plausibly one such treatment, doubt is cast on any claim that apparent differences between the judgements of philosophers and ordinary folk has implications for philosophical methodology. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to determine the role of intuitions in Gettier cases. Critics of the Method of Cases argue that arguments developed within this method contain a premise that is justified by its intuitiveness; they also argue that intuitions are unreliable sources of evidence. By contrast, Max Deutsch argues that this critique is unsound since intuitions do not serve as evidence for premises. In Gettier cases, an intuitive premise is justified by other arguments called G-Grounds. I propose (...) a different view on the role of intuition in Gettier cases. I introduce a distinction between concept-revision arguments and concept-application arguments. On the basis of this distinction and Craig's and Spicer's distinction between intuitions of intension and intuitions of extension, I show that (1) intuitions of extension do not serve as evidence for any G-Grounds; (2) intuitions of intension do play an evidential role for all G-Grounds, but (3) in the case of G-Grounds which are used as concept-application arguments, they are a poor source of evidence, while (4) in the case of G-Grounds used as concept-revision arguments, they could be a reliable source of evidence if they are intuitions of intension of a speaker immersed in philosophical discourse. (shrink)

The blossoming literature on genealogy in recent years has come as somewhat of a pleasant surprise to the historically inclined among us. It has not, however, come without its difficulties. As I see it, the literature on genealogy is guilty of two conflations, what I call the “debunking/problematizing conflation” and the “problematizing/rationalizing conflation.” Both are the result of the inadequate typological maps currently used to organize the literature. As a result, what makes many genealogies philosophically interesting often remains obscure. In (...) response, I propose a new two-dimensional typology that avoids these conflations and outfits us with a richer conceptual vocabulary with which to understand and organize the genealogies which populate the literature. By identifying a second dimension of analysis which has thus far gone untheorized, my typology enables us to elucidate the various normative objectives and objects of investigation structuring a literature which is more diverse than previously acknowledged. We can thus get a clearer understanding of the problems those genealogies face, of their critical potential, and of their implications for our conception of critique. (shrink)

Bedürfnisse sind etwas, das uns als Menschen grundlegend bestimmt. Der vorliegende Band fasst eine Reihe von Vignettenstudien zusammen, in denen untersucht wird, welche Rolle Bedürfnisse im Umgang mit Problemen der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit spielen. Während sie in Diskussionen zur Verteilungsgerechtigkeit häufig eher unterrepräsentiert sind, wird hier gezeigt, dass sie eine fundamentale Bedeutung im Denken der Menschen haben. Es wird unter anderem deutlich, dass unparteiischen Beobachter*innen graduelle Gerechtigkeitseinschätzungen von Verteilungssituationen vornehmen, die davon abhängig sind, wie umfangreich die beobachteten Parteien mit einem Gut ausgestattet (...) sind. Wenn außerdem bekannt ist, wie hoch deren Bedarf an jenem Gut ist, finden die Einschätzungen relativ zu diesem Referenzpunkt statt. Außerdem werden in der Rolle von unparteiischen Entscheider*innen hypothetische Verteilungsentscheidungen getroffen, die den Bedarf, die Leistung sowie die Verantwortung der betroffenen Parteien berücksichtigen. Hierbei wird der Bedarf einer Partei auch dann zumindest teilweise kompensiert, wenn diese weniger zu der zur Verfügung stehenden Gütermenge beigetragen hat, als sie selbst benötigt. Die Bereitschaft, den Bedarf einer Partei teilweise zu kompensieren, sinkt jedoch, wenn sie dafür verantwortlich ist, mehr als andere zu benötigen oder weniger als andere beigetragen zu haben. Und sowohl in der Rolle von unparteiischen Beobachter*innen als auch in der Rolle von unparteiischen Entscheider*innen wird zwischen unterschiedlichen Bedarfsarten unterschieden, deren Erfüllung verschiedene Wichtigkeit beigemessen wird. (shrink)

This paper reports the first study in the literature that adopts a bibliometric approach to systematically explore the scholarship in the young and fast‐growing research field of experimental philosophy. Based on a corpus of 1,248 publications in experimental philosophy from the past two decades retrieved from the PhilPapers website, the study examined the publication trend, the influential experimental philosophers, the impactful works, the popular publication venues, and the major research themes in this subarea of philosophy. It found, first, an overall (...) growing trend in publications in experimental philosophy, encompassing four developmental stages. Second, it found that significant changes in topics of interest have taken place, with some gaining increasing attention, others seemingly going out of fashion, and still others remaining popular constantly. Third, the study identified lists of leading philosophers, frequently cited publications, and popular journals helpful for researchers and newcomers to get a quick start in learning about the field. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds, Édouard Machery argues that the results of experimental philosophy should lead us to abandon much of traditional philosophical practice. In its place Machery defends naturalized conceptual analysis as a more modest and pragmatic alternative to standard analytic philosophy. This paper argues that Machery overstates the metaphilosophical significance of x-phi’s results. We can and should keep many of the insights and good methodological habits that come with x-phi. However, if one is not already convinced (...) of pragmatism or naturalism, the discoveries of x-phi are unlikely to make too much difference to one’s metaphilosophical position. (shrink)

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 (...) not adhering to the methodological standards that guide experimental design in nearly all other disciplines. I also show how empirically unwarranted background assumptions about human physiology render some of the hypothetical scenarios that are employed in the debate about personal identity highly misleading. (shrink)

Experimental Philosophy (X-Phi) is now a fully-fledged methodological project with applications in almost all areas of analytic philosophy, including, as of recently, aesthetics. Another methodological project which has been attracting attention in the last few years is conceptual engineering (CE). Its areas of implementation are now diverse, but as was the case initially with experimental philosophy, aesthetics has unfortunately been left out (or perhaps aestheticians have failed to pay attention to CE) until now. In this paper, I argue that if (...) conceptual engineers are interested in expanding their project to the field of aesthetics, which would greatly benefit the field, then they should rely on the existing experimental work of aestheticians. Experimental philosophers have only recently started to join forces with conceptual engineers in various fields, as well as to explore the methodological implications of such an alliance. This paper goes a step further by not only arguing that CE has potential in aesthetics, but that the way to realize this potential is to piggyback, so to speak, on the work of experimental aestheticians. In other words, instead of building a CE project in aesthetics from the ground up, this paper describes the support that CE can and should derive from current experimental aesthetics, thereby making the former’s development more efficiently realizable. Furthermore, I argue that doing so would also be beneficial to experimental aesthetics. Currently, the integration of X-Phi to the wider field of aesthetics is losing ground because certain objections—notably, the objection that X-Phi cannot be of relevance to normative questions—have not been properly refuted. By pairing up with a normative programme like CE, though, experimental aestheticians should finally be able to put these objections to rest. (shrink)

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 (...) health and disease. In this paper, I defend and advocate the use of empirical methods to inform and advance this and other debates within the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

Philosophy is a reflective activity. So perhaps it is unsurprising that many philosophers have claimed that reflection plays an important role in shaping and even improving our philosophical thinking. This hypothesis seems plausible given that training in philosophy has correlated with better performance on tests of reflection and reflective reasoning has correlated with demonstrably better judgments in a variety of domains. This article reviews the hypothesized roles of reflection in philosophical thinking as well as the empirical evidence for these roles. (...) This reveals that although there are fairly reliable links between reflection and philosophical judgment among both laypeople and philosophers, the role of reflection in philosophical thinking may nonetheless depend in part on other factors, some of which have yet to be determined. So progress in research on reflection in philosophy may require further innovation in experimental methods and psychometric validation of philosophical measures. (shrink)

From the day on which humans are born they need things. Some of these needs seem “basic,” such as our needs for food, water or shelter. Everybody has these needs. We cannot escape them. We also cannot escape the serious harm that arises when these needs remain unsatisfied. It is thus no wonder that in thinking about what we ought to do some researchers have suggested to first and foremost focus on people's basic needs. Such need‐based theories must answer three (...) main questions: What are basic needs? What are their implications for normative questions? And how can these needs and their satisfaction be measured? Proponents must also defend these theories against objections, such as against the objections that the theories are paternalistic, materialistic, and passivity‐promoting. Depending on their goals and contexts (distributive justice, sustainable development, human rights, etc.), appeals to basic needs may take various different forms. (shrink)

Is there progress in philosophy? If so, how much? Philosophers have recently argued for a wide range of answers to these questions, from the view that there is no progress whatsoever to the view that philosophy has provided answers to all the big philosophical questions. However, these views are difficult to compare and evaluate, because they rest on very different assumptions about the conditions under which philosophy would make progress. This paper looks to the comparatively mature debate about scientific progress (...) for inspiration on how to formulate four distinct accounts of philosophical progress, in terms of truthlikeness, problem-solving, knowledge, and understanding. Equally importantly, the paper outlines a common framework for how to understand and evaluate these accounts. We distill a series of lessons from this exercise, to help pave the way for a more fruitful discussion about philosophical progress in the future. (shrink)

There is a longstanding debate in philosophy concerning the relationship between intention and intentional action. According to the Single Phenomenon View, while one need not intend to A in order to A intentionally, one nevertheless needs to have an A-relevant intention. This view has recently come under criticism by those who think that one can A intentionally without any relevant intention at all. On this view, neither distal nor proximal intentions are necessary for intentional action. In this paper we present (...) the results of two studies that explore folk ascriptions of proximal intentions and intentional actions in garden-variety, non-moral cases. Our findings suggest a very tight relationship between the two. We argue that the results from these two studies cohere with the Single Phenomenon View and give theorists who reject this view on conceptual grounds reason to worry. (shrink)

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 (...) and philosophy of technology. In this paper, I develop and defend a research program for an experimental philosophy of technology. (shrink)

In answering normative questions, researchers sometimes appeal to the concept of basic needs. Their guiding idea is that our first priority should be to ensure that everybody is able to meet these needs—to have enough in terms of food, water, shelter, and so on. This article provides an opinionated overview of basic needs in normative contexts. Any basic needs theory must answer three questions: (1) What are basic needs? (2) To what extent do basic needs generate reasons for action and (...) how are these reasons to be understood? (3) How are basic needs and their satisfaction to be measured? I address these questions in turn. Then I also briefly discuss the theoretical potential of appealing to basic needs in normative contexts. It turns out that future research in this area could benefit from a higher degree of interdisciplinarity and methodological reflection, and that, generally speaking, basic needs theories are more promising than they have often been claimed to be. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to shed light on some challenging questions regarding public health and medical ethics that the Turkish healthcare system has recently been forced to confront. In recent years, terrorists in eastern Turkey have launched increasingly destructive attacks, including numerous attempts to undermine the social order by targeting not only government agencies but also the healthcare system. In this study, 54 terrorist incidents specifically targeting the Turkish healthcare system and healthcare professionals were analyzed and divided into (...) 6 categories according to the type of attack. Each category was evaluated in terms of the relevant ethical issues, with regard to both public health and medical ethics. This study shows that terrorist activity may lead to numerous breaches of public health and clinical ethics rules. Therefore, healthcare policy must involve special precautions to minimize breaches of public health and medical ethics in the face of terrorist attacks. (shrink)

Machery’s book is an effort to show how experimental philosophy can be valuable without the perephenelia of intuitions. I argue that the effort fails.

Philosophical enquiry stands to benefit from the inclusion of methods from the digital humanities to study language use. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities have the potential to contribute to both conceptual analysis and intuition-based enquiry, two important approaches in contemporary philosophy. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities can also provide valuable metaphilosophical insights into the nature of philosophical methods themselves. The use of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy should be expected to (...) follow a similar trajectory to another attempt to introduce empirical methods in philosophy. Experimental philosophers use empirical methods from the cognitive sciences to bear on philosophical questions. At first, we should expect the main contribution of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy to be at the metaphilosophical level. Then, given the right impetus and support, we are optimistic that methods from the digital humanities can make important and sustained contributions to first-order philosophical enquiry. This chapter gives two case studies of recent studies in which methods from the digital humanities are used to address metaphilosophical questions about the use of the word ‘intuition’ and the methods of philosophy and physics. It gives three examples of contemporary first-order philosophical debates to which methods fromthe digital humanities could make an important contribution in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. The chapter discusses some methodological challenges and limitations which are of particular importance when considering the application of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy, including concerns about the demographic representativeness of widely available corpora. (shrink)

Philosophical debates about the metaphysics of time typically revolve around two contrasting views of time. On the A-theory, time is something that itself undergoes change, as captured by the idea of the passage of time; on the B-theory, all there is to time is events standing in before/after or simultaneity relations to each other, and these temporal relations are unchanging. Philosophers typically regard the A-theory as being supported by our experience of time, and they take it that the B-theory clashes (...) with how we experience time and therefore faces the burden of having to explain away that clash. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether these intuitions about the experience of time are shared by the general public. We asked directly for people’s subjective reports of their experience of time—in particular, whether they believe themselves to have a phenomenology as of time’s passing—and we probed their understanding of what time’s passage in fact is. We find that a majority of participants do share the aforementioned intuitions, but interestingly a minority do not. (shrink)

This paper defends a challenge, inspired by arguments drawn from contemporary ordinary language philosophy and grounded in experimental data, to certain forms of standard philosophical practice. The challenge is inspired by contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as practicing “ordinary language philosophy”. Contemporary ordinary language philosophy can be divided into constructive and critical approaches. The critical approach to contemporary ordinary language philosophy has been forcefully developed by Avner Baz, who attempts to show that a substantial chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally (...) misguided. I describe Baz’s project and argue that while there is reason to be skeptical of its radical conclusion, it conveys an important truth about discontinuities between ordinary uses of philosophically significant expressions (“know”, e.g.) and their use in philosophical thought experiments. I discuss some evidence from experimental psychology and behavioral economics indicating that there is a risk of overlooking important aspects of meaning or misinterpreting experimental results by focusing only on abstract experimental scenarios, rather than employing more diverse and more ecologically valid experimental designs. I conclude by presenting a revised version of the critical argument from ordinary language. (shrink)

Few philosophers today embrace quantitative hedonism, which states that a person’s well-being depends only on the amount of her experienced happiness and suffering. Despite recent attempts to rehabilitate it, most philosophers still consider it untenable. The most influential arguments levelled against it by Mill, Moore, Nozick and Kagan purport to demonstrate that well-being must depend on more than only the amount of experienced happiness and suffering. I argue in this paper that quantitative hedonism can rebut these arguments by pointing out (...) a shared systematic flaw in their argumentative structure. In particular, I argue that they are based on thought experiments that invoke either structurally unreliable intuitions or intuitions that are not in tension to the tenets of quantitative hedonism. While this does not rehabilitate the theory by itself, it shows that the classical arguments against quantitative hedonism provide far less evidence against it than commonly thought. (shrink)

In “Intentional action and side-effects in ordinary language” (2003), Joshua Knobe reported an asymmetry in test subjects’ responses to a question about intentionality: subjects are more likely to judge that a side effect of an agent’s intended action is intentional if they think the side effect is morally bad than if they think it is morally good. This result has been taken to suggest that the concept of intentionality is an inherently moral concept. In this paper, we draw attention to (...) the fact that Knobe’s original interpretation of the results is based on an abstract rendering of the central scenario that is significantly different from the vignettes presented to the survey participants. In particular, the experimental vignettes involve temporal and social dimensions; they portray sequences of social actions involving an agent and an interlocutor, rather than a lone agent making a momentary decision in light of certain attitudes. Through textual analyses of a set of vignettes used to study the Knobe effect, drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology, we show that there are many differences between the experimental conditions besides the moral valence of the side effect. In light of our textual analyses, we discuss vignette methodology in experimental philosophy and suggest an alternative interpretation of Knobe’s original experimental results. We also argue that experimental philosophy could benefit from considering research on naturally occurring social interaction as an alternative source of empirical findings for discussions of folk-psychological concepts. (shrink)

We suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that (...) this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them. (shrink)

Can experimental philosophy help us answer central questions about the nature of moral responsibility, such as the question of whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Specifically, can folk judgments in line with a particular answer to that question provide support for that answer. Based on reasoning familiar from Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, such support could be had if individual judges track the truth of the matter independently and with some modest reliability: such reliability quickly aggregates as the number of judges (...) goes up. In this chapter, however, I argue, partly based on empirical evidence, that although non-specialist judgments might on average be more likely than not to get things right, their individual likelihoods fail to aggregate because they do not track truth with sufficient independence. (shrink)

Background: Recent literature on addiction and judgments about the characteristics of agents has focused on the implications of adopting a ‘brain disease’ versus ‘moral weakness’ model of addiction. Typically, such judgments have to do with what capacities an agent has (e.g., the ability to abstain from substance use). Much less work, however, has been conducted on the relationship between addiction and judgments about an agent’s identity, including whether or to what extent an individual is seen as the same person after (...) becoming addicted. Methods: We conducted a series of vignette-based experiments (total N = 3,620) to assess lay attitudes concerning addiction and identity persistence, systematically manipulating key characteristics of agents and their drug of addiction. Conclusions: In Study 1, we found that US participants judged an agent who became addicted to drugs as being closer to ‘a completely different person’ than ‘completely the same person’ as the agent who existed prior to the addiction. In Studies 2-6, we investigated the intuitive basis for this result, finding that lay judgments of altered identity as a consequence of drug use and addiction are driven primarily by perceived negative changes in the moral character of drug users, who are seen as having deviated from their good true selves. (shrink)

The following method is popular in some areas of philosophy and linguistics when trying to describe the semantics of a given sentence Φ. Present ordinary speakers with scenarios that involve an utterance of Φ, ask them whether these utterances are felicitous or infelicitous and then construct a semantics that assigns the truth-value True to felicitous utterances of Φ and the truth-value False to infelicitous utterances of Φ. The author makes five observations about this intuition-based approach to semantics; their upshot is (...) that it should be revised in favour of a more nuanced method. The author suggests that this method should be based on corpus linguistics and makes some tentative remarks about what it might look like and which questions we need to address in order to develop it. (shrink)

Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.

Both advocates and critics of experimental philosophy often describe it in narrow terms as being the empirical study of people’s intuitions about philosophical cases. This conception corresponds with a narrow origin story for the field—it grew out of a dissatisfaction with the uncritical use of philosophers’ own intuitions as evidence for philosophical claims. In contrast, a growing number of experimental philosophers have explicitly embraced a broad conception of the sub-discipline, which treats it as simply the use of empirical methods to (...) inform philosophical problems. And this conception has a corresponding broad origin story—the field grew out of a recognition that philosophers often make empirical claims and that empirical claims call for empirical support. In this paper, I argue that the broad conception should be accepted, offering support for the broad origin story. (shrink)

Bernard Wills (2018) joins Christopher Brown (2017, 2018) in criticizing my defense of Weak Scientism (Mizrahi 2017a, 2017b, 2018a). Unfortunately, it seems that Wills did not read my latest defense of Weak Scientism carefully, nor does he cite any of the other papers in my exchange with Brown.

The standard view of pains among philosophers today holds that their existence consists in being experienced, such that there can be no unfelt pains or pain hallucinations. The typical line of support offered for this view is that it corresponds with the ordinary or commonsense conception of pain. Despite this, a growing body of evidence from experimental philosophers indicates that the ordinary understanding of pain stands in contrast to the standard view among philosophers. In this paper, we will survey this (...) literature and add to it, detailing the results of seven new studies on the ordinary understanding of pain using both corpus analysis and questionnaire methods. (shrink)

The epistemic value of seemings is increasingly debated. Such debates are hindered, however, by a lack of consensus about the nature of seemings. There are four prominent conceptions in the literature, and the plausibility of principles such as phenomenal conservatism, which assign a prominent epistemic role to seemings, varies greatly from one conception to another. It is therefore crucial that we identify the correct conception of seemings. I argue that seemings are best understood as sui generis mental states with propositional (...) content and a distinct phenomenal character. Rival conceptions are shown to succumb to numerous difficulties. (shrink)