How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by (...) empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

Recent evidence suggests that if a deterministic description of the events leading up to a morally questionable action is couched in mechanistic, reductionistic, concrete and/or emotionally salient terms, people are more inclined toward compatibilism than when those descriptions use non-mechanistic, non-reductionistic, abstract and/or emotionally neutral terms. To explain these results, it has been suggested that descriptions of the first kind are processed by a concrete cognitive system, while those of the second kind are processed by an abstract cognitive system. The (...) current paper reports the results of three studies exploring whether or not considerations about possible future consequences of holding an agent responsible at a present time affect people’s judgments of responsibility. The results obtained suggest first that the concrete system does not produce compatibilist judgments of responsibility unconditionally, even when facing appropriately mechanistic, reductionistic, emotionally loaded and concretely worded deterministic scenarios. Second, these results suggest that considerations about possible future consequences for innocent third parties that may follow as a result of holding an agent responsible affect people’s judgment as to whether or not the agent is responsible for what she did. Finally, it is proposed that these results compliment extant evidence on the so-called “Side-effect effect”, as they suggest that emotional reactions toward possible future side effects influence people’s judgment of responsibility. The impact of these results for philosophy and moral psychology is discussed. (shrink)

Whether you believe free will exists has profound effects on your behaviour, across different levels of processing, from simple motor action to social cognition. It is therefore important to understand which specific lay theories are held in the general public and why. Past research largely focused on investigating free will beliefs, but largely ignored a second key aspect: free will attitudes. Attitudes are often independently predictive of behaviour, relative to beliefs, yet we currently know very little about FWAs in the (...) general public. One key issue is whether such attitudes are subject to biased, socially desirable responding. The vast majority of the general public strongly believes in the existence of free will, which might create cultural pressure to value free will positively as well. In this registered report, we used a very large, open available dataset measuring implicit and explicit attitudes towards free will and determinism to address this issue. Our results indicate that both explicit and implicit attitudes towards free will are more positive than attitudes towards determinism. We also show that people experience cultural pressure to value free will, and to devalue determinism. Yet, we found no strong evidence that this cultural pressure affected either implicit or explicit attitudes in this dataset. (shrink)

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)

The debate over whether free will and determinism are compatible is controversial, and produces wide scholarly discussion. This paper argues that recent studies in experimental philosophy suggest that people are in fact “natural compatibilists”. To support this claim, it surveys the experimental literature bearing directly or indirectly upon this issue, before pointing to three possible limitations of this claim. However, notwithstanding these limitations, the investigation concludes that the existing empirical evidence seems to support the view that most people have compatibilist (...) intuitions. (shrink)

Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample (...) – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward. (shrink)

‘Frankfurt-style cases’ (FSCs) are widely considered as having refuted the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) by presenting cases in which an agent is morally responsible even if he could not have done otherwise. However, Neil Levy (J Philos 105:223–239, 2008) has recently argued that FSCs fail because we are not entitled to suppose that the agent is morally responsible, given that the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener is enough to make an agent lose responsibility-grounding abilities. Here, I distinguish two (...) kinds of Frankfurt counter-arguments against the PAP: the direct and the indirect counter-arguments. I then argue that Levy’s argument, if valid, can shed doubt on the indirect argument but leaves the direct argument untouched. I conclude that FSCs can still do their job, even if we grant that the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener can modify an agent’s abilities. (shrink)

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

People who judge that a wrongdoer’s behaviour is determined are disposed, in certain cases, to judge that the wrongdoer cannot be responsible for his behaviour. Some try to explain this phenomenon by arguing that people are intuitive incompatibilists about determinism and moral responsibility. However, Peter Strawson argues that we excuse determined wrongdoers because judging that someone is determined puts us into a psychological state – ‘the objective stance’ – which prevents us from holding them responsible, not because we think that (...) determined wrongdoers cannot be responsible. Two studies were completed to test the claim that the objective stance prevents us from judging wrongdoers responsible. Implicit association measures revealed that participants primed in the objective stance appraised a wrongdoer more positively, but as no less blameworthy, than those neutrally primed. These findings raise doubts about Strawson’s explanation of our tendency to excuse determined wrongdoers. (shrink)

David Enoch has recently proposed that the deliberative indispensability of irreducibly normative facts suffices to support their inclusion in our ontology, even if they are not necessary for the explanation of any observable phenomena. He challenges dissenters to point to a relevant asymmetry between explanation and deliberation that shows why explanatory indispensability, but not deliberative indispensability, is a legitimate guide to ontology. In this paper, I aim to do just that. Given that an entity figures in the actual explanation of (...) some phenomenon, it is not an open question whether that entity exists. Thus, if you can manage to find actual explanations, you can find answers to ontological questions. In contrast, even if some entity is indispensable to deliberation, it still might not exist. For example, even if some form of libertarian free will is deliberatively indispensable, we still might not have libertarian free will. So even if you manage to discover the indispensable commitments of deliberation, there is still more work to do to get to the bottom of things. That additional work is explanatory work, and so deliberative indispensability is not an independent guide to what there is. (shrink)

For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. (...) In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for moral responsibility than participants who were asked about moral responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments—and only when the descriptions had moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and moral responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed. (shrink)

Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of (...) participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism. (shrink)

Shaun Nichols has recently argued that while the folk notion of free will is associated with error, a question still remains whether the concept of free will should be eliminated or preserved. He maintains that like other eliminativist arguments in philosophy, arguments that free will is an illusion seem to depend on substantive assumptions about reference. According to free will eliminativists, people have deeply mistaken beliefs about free will and this entails that free will does not exist. However, an alternative (...) reaction is that free will does exist, we just have some deeply mistaken beliefs about it. According to Nichols, all such debates boil down to whether or not the erroneous folk term in question successfully refers or not. Since Nichols adopts the view that reference is systematically ambiguous, he maintains that in some contexts it’s appropriate to take a restrictivist view about whether a term embedded in a false theory refers, while in other contexts it’s appropriate to take a liberal view about whether a token of the very same term refers. This, according to Nichols, affords the possibility of saying that the sentence “free will exists” is false in some contexts and true in others. In this paper I argue that even if we grant Nichols his pluralistic approach to reference, there is still good reason to prefer eliminativism to preservationism with regard to free will. My argument focuses on one important difference between the concept of “free will” and other theoretical terms embedded in false theories—i.e., the role that the phenomenology of free agency plays in reference fixing. (shrink)

I will ask the conditional question: if folk attributions of "know" are not sensitive to the stakes and/or the salience of error, does this cast doubt on contextualism or subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI)? I argue that if it should turn out that folk attributions of knowledge are insensitive to such factors, then this undermines contextualism, but not SSI. That is not to say that SSI is invulnerable to empirical work of any kind. Rather, I defend the more modest claim that leading (...) versions of SSI are not undermined by one particular kind of experimental result, namely the recent suggestion that knowledge attributions are insensitive to the stakes. (shrink)

What is the nature of human well-being? This paper joins the ancient debate by rejuvenating an ancient claim that is quite unfashionable among moral philosophers today, namely, the Aristotelian claim that moral virtue is (non-instrumentally) necessary for human well-being. Call it the Aristotelian Virtue Condition (AVC). This view can be revived for contemporary debate by a state-of-the-art approach that we might call constructivist experimental philosophy, which takes as its goal the achievement of a reasonable constructivist account of well-being and takes (...) the investigation of actual folk intuitions as the central means to achieving that goal. The paper motivates this approach and challenges the commonplace philosophical rejection of AVC by arguing (1) that folk intuitions should count as evidence in the debate, especially if we aim at a constructivist account of well-being, (2) that folk intuitions can be accurately elicited through a thought experiment (the “Crib Test”), and (3) that there is some reason (subject to experimental confirmation) for thinking that folk intuitions, thus elicited, support AVC. Aristotelian ethics, and indeed the entire virtue ethics tradition, has come under fire recently by empirically informed philosophers who question the empirical adequacy of the postulation of robust character traits, but regardless of how that debate turns out, other parts of this tradition might be empirically supported rather than undermined. This paper sketches a promising, empirically informed way of supporting Aristotelian views of well-being. (shrink)

Neuroscience is increasingly used to infer the cognitive capacities of offenders from the activity and volume of different brain regions, with the resultant findings receiving great interest in the public eye. This field experiment tested the effects of public engagement in neuroscience on attitudes towards offenders. Brainstorm is a play about teenage brain development. Either before or after watching this play, 728 participants responded to four questions about the age of criminal responsibility, and the moral responsibility and dangerousness of a (...) hypothetical young or adult offender. After watching the play, participants perceived the young offender as less likely to reoffend than the adult offender and the young, but not adult, offender as less morally responsible for his actions, especially on the first offence. Therefore, public engagement in the newest arrival to the criminological scene – neuroscience – may shift support for different youth justice responses. (shrink)

Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of (...) surprising factors, sometimes prompting apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibility. (shrink)

The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy’s (“x-phi”) early arguments, debates, and conceptual frameworks, that may have worn well in its early days, fit with the diverse range of projects undertaken by experimental philosophers. Our aim is to propose a novel taxonomy for x-phi that identifies four paths from empirical findings to philosophical consequences, which we call the “fourfold route.” We show how this taxonomy can be fruitfully applied even at what one might have taken to be the (...) furthest edges of possible applications of x-phi in metaphysics and formal philosophy. Ultimately, the fourfold route helps us understand a different kind of empirical fact: the development of x-phi itself. (shrink)

Can a player be held morally responsible for the choices that she makes within a videogame? Do the moral choices that the player makes reflect in any way on the player’s actual moral sensibilities? Many videogames offer players the options to make numerous choices within the game, including moral choices. But the scope of these choices is quite limited. I attempt to analyze these issues by drawing on philosophical debates about the nature of free will. Many philosophers worry that, if (...) our actions are predetermined, then we cannot be held morally responsible for them. However, Harry Frankfurt’s compatibilist account of free will suggests that an agent can be held morally responsible for actions that she wills, even if the agent is not free to act otherwise. Using Frankfurt’s analysis, I suggest that videogames represent deterministic worlds in which players lack the ability to freely choose what they do, and yet players can be held morally responsible for some of their actions, specifically those actions that the player wants to do. Finally, I offer some speculative comments on how these considerations might impact our understanding of the player’s moral psychology as it relates to the ethics of imagined fictional events. (shrink)

A deterministic perspective, believing choices are a function of hereditary and environmental factors, could theoretically impact perceived moral responsibility and lead to decreased blame in judging others. However, little consistent support has been found relating individual differences in deterministic attitudes to blame/tolerance for others. Perhaps, though, providing information regarding past background hardships affecting an individual's current lifestyle could potentially mediate harsh moralistic judgments of that individual. In the two studies reported here, we further explored the relation of free will/determinism scales (...) to attitudes toward others as well as the effect of manipulating background information on the assignment of blame. As in previous research, little support was found for the relation of deterministic attitudes to tolerance toward others. However, judgments following manipulated information about hypothetical target persons supported the conclusion that target individuals are blamed less and given more sympathy if more information related to previous hardships is provided. In addition, in the second study perceived similarity to a target individual was associated with decreased blame/greater sympathy for a target with alcohol abuse problems. (shrink)

In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue that (...) Feltz and Millan’s error-theory rests on a conceptual confusion: it is perfectly acceptable for a certain brand of compatibilist to judge free will and fatalism to be compatible, as long as fatalism does not prevent agents from being the source of their actions. We then present the results of two studies showing that laypeople’s intuitions are best understood as following a certain brand of source compatibilism rather than a “free-will-no-matter-what” strategy. (shrink)

Do philosophers use intuitions? Should philosophers use intuitions? Can philosophical methods (where intuitions are concerned) be improved upon? In order to answer these questions we need to have some idea of how we should go about answering them. I defend a way of going about methodology of intuitions: a metamethodology. I claim the following: (i) we should approach methodological questions about intuitions with a thin conception of intuitions in mind; (ii) we should carve intuitions finely; and, (iii) we should carve (...) to a grain to which we are sensitive in our everyday philosophising. The reason is that, unless we do so, we don’t get what we want from philosophical methodology. I argue that what we want is information that will aid us in formulating practical advice concerning how to do philosophy responsibly/well/better. (shrink)

Many philosophers would, in theory, agree that the methods and tools of philosophy ought to be supplemented by those of other academic disciplines. In practice, however, the sociological data suggest that most philosophers fail to engage or collaborate with other academics, and this article argues that this is problematic for philosophy as a discipline. In relation to the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, the article highlights how experimental philosophers can benefit the field, but only insofar as they draw from the distinctive (...) methods of philosophy and overcome the charge of “amateur psychology” by more consistently collaborating with the scientists they seek to emulate. It concludes that philosophers ought to collaborate with other academics in order to gain an experience‐based understanding of the methods of other disciplines in addition to an understanding of the content of these disciplines. (shrink)

Our interest in this paper is to drive a wedge of contention between two different programs that fall under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”. In particular, we argue that experimental philosophy’s “negative program” presents almost as significant a challenge to its “positive program” as it does to more traditional analytic philosophy.

Recently, there has been an increased interest in folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility from both philosophers and psychologists. We aim to extend our understanding of folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility using an individual differences approach. Building off previous research suggesting that there are systematic differences in folks’ philosophically relevant intuitions, we present new data indicating that the personality trait extraversion predicts, to a significant extent, those who have compatibilist versus incompatibilist intuitions. We argue that identifying groups (...) of people who have specific and diverse intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility offers the possibility for theoretical advancement in philosophy and psychology, and may in part explain why some perennial philosophical debates have proven intractable. (shrink)

We discuss recent work in experimental philosophy on free will and moral responsibility and then present a new study. Our results suggest an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. Most laypersons who take determinism to preclude free will and moral responsibility apparently do so because they mistakenly interpret determinism to involve fatalism or “bypassing” of agents’ relevant mental states. People who do not misunderstand determinism in this way tend to see it as compatible with free will and responsibility. We discuss why (...) these results pose a challenge to incompatibilists. (shrink)

In two experiments, we demonstrate that intentional action intuitions vary as a function of whether one brings about or observes an event. In experiment 1a (N?=?38), participants were less likely to judge that they intended (M?=?2.53, 7 point scale) or intentionally (M?=?2.67) brought about a harmful event compared to intention (M?=?4.16) and intentionality (M?=?4.11) judgments made about somebody else. Experiments 1b and 1c confirmed and extended this pattern of actor-observer differences. Experiment 2 suggested that these actor-observer differences are not likely (...) to occur when participants are asked to ?imagine? being an actor. We argue that these results challenge the substantial philosophical and empirical reliance on hypothetical thought examples about intentional action. Our data offer new and necessary methodological avenues for understanding folk intentional action intuitions. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers have disagreed about whether "the folk" are intuitively incompatibilists or compatibilists, and they have disagreed about the role of abstraction in generating such intuitions. New experimental evidence using Construal Level Theory is presented. The experiments support the views that the folk are intuitively both incompatibilists and compatibilists, and that abstract mental representations do shift intuitions, but not in a univocal way.

The terms ‘compatibilism’ and ‘incompatibilism’ were introduced in the mid-20th century to name conflicting views about the logical relationship between the thesis of determinism and the thesis that someone has free will. These technical terms were originally introduced within a specific research paradigm, the classical analytic paradigm. This paradigm is now in its final stages of degeneration and few free-will theorists still work within it (i.e. using its methods, granting its substantive background assumptions, etc.). This chapter discusses how the ambiguity (...) of the terms ‘incompatibilism’ and ‘compatibilism’ took root and why it matters to the contempory debate. I explain why the ambiguity of these anachronistic terms, though relatively innocuous when they were first introduced, is now encouraging theorists to tolerate and perpetuate serious philosophical errors (e.g. to conflate relations as different in kind and importance as correlation and causation, to knowingly promote invalid arguments, and to equivoate on jargon in ways that keep the free-will debate mired in psuedo-stalemates). I also suggest a new paradigm for anyone looking for relief from the confusion and deadlock created by the use of inadequate classical narratives and jargon. -/- A selection from the publication is available to download here. For full version, please gmail me, username: kristin.mickelson.42 -/- . (shrink)

"We wish this volume to be a sure companion to the study of free will, broadly construed to include action theory, moral and legal responsibility, and cohort studies feathering off into adjacent fields in the liberal arts and sciences. In addition to general coverage of the discipline, this volume attempts a more challenging and complementary accompaniment to many familiar narratives about free will. In order to map out some directions such accompaniment will take, in this introduction we anchor the thirty (...) contributions to this volume in some common history from which they arise, and attempt to indicate where future work in free will and moral responsibility will–and has already begun to–depart from that history." -Excerpt from Introduction. ... ... To read full introduction, (1) download attached file or (2) follow wiley_dot_com link below, click "Read An Excerpt", then click :Excerpt 3:(pdf)". (shrink)

This book aims to show that recent developments in neuroscience permit a defense of free will. Through language, human beings can escape strict biological determinism.

The compatibilism debate revolves around the question whether moral responsibility and free will are compatible with determinism. Prima facie, this seems to be a substantial issue. But according to the triviality objection, the disagreement is merely verbal: compatibilists and incompatibilists, it is maintained, are talking past each other, since they use the terms “free will” and “moral responsibility” in different senses. In this paper I argue, first, that the triviality objection is indeed a formidable one and that the standard replies (...) to it are unconvincing. This, however, does not mean that the objection succeeds. Starting with the debate about moral responsibility, I attempt to show that there is an account of moral responsibility which enables us to defend the compatibilism debate against the charge of triviality—namely, the normative conception of moral responsibility. If “moral responsibility” is defined in normative terms, then we cannot distinguish between a compatibilist and an incompatibilist sense of “moral responsibility”, because such a disambiguation would be inconsistent with the essential action-guiding force of normative expressions. Finally, I examine how the normative conception of moral responsibility can help us to defend the free will debate against the triviality objection and draw some general conclusions. (shrink)

Manipulation arguments that start from the intuition that manipulated agents are neither free nor morally responsible then conclude to that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. The Zygote argument is a special case of Manipulation argument in which the manipulation intervenes at the very conception of the agent. In this paper, I argue that the Zygote argument fails because (i) very few people share the basic intuitions the argument rests on, and (ii) even those who share this (...) intuition do so for reasons that are unrelated to determinism. Rather, I argue that intuitions about the Zygote argument (and Manipulation arguments in general) are driven by people's intuitions about the deep self, as shown by the fact that intuitions about manipulated agents depend on the moral value of the agent's behavior. (shrink)

Much of the recent movement organized under the heading “Experimental Philosophy” has been concerned with the empirical study of responses to thought experiments drawn from the literature on philosophical analysis. I consider what bearing these studies have on the traditional projects in which thought experiments have been used in philosophy. This will help to answer the question what the relation is between Experimental Philosophy and philosophy, whether it is an “exciting new style of [philosophical] research”, “a new interdisciplinary field that (...) uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy” (Knobe et al. 2012), or whether its relation to philosophy consists, as some have suggested, in no more than the word ‘philosophy’ appearing in its title, or whether the truth lies somewhere in between these two views. I first distinguishes different strands in Experimental Philosophy, negative and positive x-phi, and x-phi pursuing philosophy as opposed to x-phi as cognitive science. Next I review some ways in which Experimental Philosophy has been criticized. Finally, I consider what would have to be true for Experimental Philosophy to have one or another sort of relevance to philosophy, whether the assumptions required are true, how we could know it, and the ideal limits of the usefulness Experimental Philosophy to philosophy. I conclude x-phi cannot in principle be a replacement for traditional first person approaches because it yields the wrong kind of knowledge and that it can nonetheless be a practical aid in conducting philosophical thought experiments. n. (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)

Das Buch verschafft einen Überblick über die neuere Willensfreiheitsdebatte, wobei es auch die Konsequenzen der Hirnforschung für das Freiheitsproblem erörtert. Ferner entwickelt der Autor eine eigene Position, die er 'fähigkeitsbasierten Libertarismus' nennt. Er widerspricht dem breiten philosophischen Konsens, dass jedenfalls eine Art von Freiheit mit einem naturwissenschaftlichen Weltbild unverträglich sei, nämlich die Fähigkeit, sich unter gegebenen Bedingungen so oder anders zu entscheiden. Im Buch wird argumentiert, dass der libertarischen Freiheitsauffassung, die wir im Alltag alle teilen, bei näherer Betrachtung keine Tatschen (...) entgegenstehen, sondern nur philosophische Doktrinen. Zwar können wir durch unser Handeln keine Naturgesetze abändern und sind auch keine ersten Beweger, aber für ein So-oder-Anderskönnen bedarf es dessen nicht. (shrink)

According to one view of alethic modality, to say that something is necessary is to say that we must take that thing to be true according to rules of thinking or linguistic rules. In other words, alethic modality is reduced to deontic modality with respect to thoughts or language. This view has been argued to have many philosophical advantages over the traditional view that takes alethic modality to describe something in the world. In this paper, I argue that the deontic (...) view also enjoys a wide range of empirical supports from linguistics and psychology. (shrink)

Neuroscientists have located brain activity that prepares or encodes action plans before agents are aware of intending to act. On the basis of these findings and broader agency research, activity in these regions has been proposed as the neural realizers of practical intention. My aim in this paper is to evaluate the case for taking these neural states to be neural representations of intention. I draw on work in philosophy of action on the role and nature of practical intentions to (...) construct a framework of the functional profile of intentions fit for empirical investigation. With this framework, I turn to the broader empirical neuroscience literature on agency to assess these proposed neural representations of intention. I argue that while these neural states in some respects satisfy the functions of intention in planning agency prospective of action, their fit with the role of intention in action execution is not well supported. I close by offering a sketch of which experimental task features could aid in the search for the neural realizer of intention in action. (shrink)

This article summarizes the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to the distinctiveness of semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism, and (3) whether moderate revisionism is committed to realism about (...) moral responsibility. (shrink)

This article summarizes and extends the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to libertarianism based on the moral costs of its current epistemic status, (3) an objection to the distinctiveness (...) of semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism and (4) whether moderate revisionism is committed to realism about moral responsibility. (shrink)

Metasemantic security arguments aim to show, on metasemantic grounds, that even if we were to discover that determinism is true, that wouldn't give us reason to think that people never act freely. Flew's [1955] Paradigm Case Argument is one such argument; Heller's [1996] Putnamian argument is another. In this paper I introduce a third which uses a metasemantic picture on which meanings are settled as though by an ideal interpreter. Metasemantic security arguments are widely thought discredited by van Inwagen's [1983] (...) Martian Manipulation objection. I argue that van Inwagen's objection, if right, can be parodied to undercut metasemantic arguments which aim to show that deliverances of physics do not tell us that no objects are solid. A diagnosis of where the parody objection breaks down against the pro-solidity argument is then used to resist the objection as applied to the Ideal Interpreter Argument. I go on to defend the argument from the charge that it relies on a ham-fisted version of interpretivism. (shrink)

Compatibilism is the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Natural compatibilism is the view that in ordinary social cognition, people are compatibilists. Researchers have recently debated whether natural compatibilism is true. This paper presents six experiments (N = 909) that advance this debate. The results provide the best evidence to date for natural compatibilism, avoiding the main methodological problems faced by previous work supporting the view. In response to simple scenarios about familiar activities, people judged that agents had (...) moral responsibilities to perform actions that they were unable to perform (Experiment 1), were morally responsible for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 2), were to blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiments 3-4), deserved blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 5), and should suffer consequences for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 6). These findings advance our understanding of moral psychology and philosophical debates that depend partly on patterns in commonsense morality. (shrink)

Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with acting freely and being morally responsible. Incompatibilism is the opposite view. It is often claimed that compatibilism or incompatibilism is a natural part of ordinary social cognition. That is, it is often claimed that patterns in our everyday social judgments reveal an implicit commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibilism. This paper reports five experiments designed to identify such patterns. The results support a nuanced hybrid account: The central tendencies in ordinary social (...) cognition are compatibilism about moral responsibility, compatibilism about positive moral accountability, neither compatibilism nor incompatibilism about negative moral accountability, compatibilism about choice for actions with positive outcomes, and incompatibilism about choice for actions with negative or neutral outcomes. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely’s recent claim that “the personality trait extraversion predicts people’s intuitions about the relationship of determinism to free will and moral responsibility”. We will first present some criticisms of their work before briefly examining the results of a recent study of our own. We argue that while Feltz and Cokely have their finger on the pulse of an interesting and important issue, they have not established a robust and stable connection between (...) extraversion and compatibilist-friendly intuitions. (shrink)