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  1. Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language.J. Knobe - 2003 - Analysis 63 (3):190-194.
    There has been a long-standing dispute in the philosophical literature about the conditions under which a behavior counts as 'intentional.' Much of the debate turns on questions about the use of certain words and phrases in ordinary language. The present paper investigates these questions empirically, using experimental techniques to investigate people's use of the relevant words and phrases. g.
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  • Intention, intentional action and moral considerations.J. Knobe - 2004 - Analysis 64 (2):181-187.
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  • An Experimental Investigation of Emotions and Reasoning in the Trolley Problem.Alessandro Lanteri, Chiara Chelini & Salvatore Rizzello - 2008 - Journal of Business Ethics 83 (4):789-804.
    Elaborating on the notions that humans possess different modalities of decision-making and that these are often influenced by moral considerations, we conducted an experimental investigation of the Trolley Problem. We presented the participants with two standard scenarios (‹lever’ and ‹stranger’) either in the usual or in reversed order. We observe that responses to the lever scenario, which result from (moral) reasoning, are affected by our manipulation; whereas responses to the stranger scenario, triggered by moral emotions, are unaffected. Furthermore, when asked (...)
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  • Beliefs and moral Valence affect intentionality attributions: The case of side effects.Sandra Pellizzoni, Vittorio Girotto & Luca Surian - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):201-209.
    Do moral appraisals shape judgments of intentionality? A traditional view is that individuals first evaluate whether an action has been carried out intentionally. Then they use this evaluation as input for their moral judgments. Recent studies, however, have shown that individuals’ moral appraisals can also influence their intentionality attributions. They attribute intentionality to the negative side effect of a given action, but not to the positive side effect of the same action. In three experiments, we show that this asymmetry is (...)
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  • Survey-Driven Romanticism.Simon Cullen - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):275-296.
    Despite well-established results in survey methodology, many experimental philosophers have not asked whether and in what way conclusions about folk intuitions follow from people’s responses to their surveys. Rather, they appear to have proceeded on the assumption that intuitions can be simply read off from survey responses. Survey research, however, is fraught with difficulties. I review some of the relevant literature—particularly focusing on the conversational pragmatic aspects of survey research—and consider its application to common experimental philosophy surveys. I argue for (...)
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  • The Epistemic Side-Effect Effect.James R. Beebe & Wesley Buckwalter - 2010 - Mind and Language 25 (4):474-498.
    Knobe (2003a, 2003b, 2004b) and others have demonstrated the surprising fact that the valence of a side-effect action can affect intuitions about whether that action was performed intentionally. Here we report the results of an experiment that extends these findings by testing for an analogous effect regarding knowledge attributions. Our results suggest that subjects are less likely to find that an agent knows an action will bring about a side-effect when the effect is good than when it is bad. It (...)
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  • Intentional action : two-and-a-half folk concepts?Fiery Cushman & Alfred Mele - 2008 - In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 171.
    What are the criteria people use when they judge that other people did something intentionally? This question has motivated a large and growing literature both in philosophy and in psychology. It has become a topic of particular concern to the nascent field of experimental philosophy, which uses empirical techniques to understand folk concepts. We present new data that hint at some of the underly- ing psychological complexities of folk ascriptions of intentional action and at dis- tinctions both between diverse concepts (...)
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  • An experimental philosophy manifesto.Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols - 2008 - In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 3--14.
    It used to be a commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people’s moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn’t particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or political science. Philosophers were concerned, in a very general way, with questions about how..
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  • Intention, plans, and practical reason.Michael Bratman - 1987 - Cambridge: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    What happens to our conception of mind and rational agency when we take seriously future-directed intentions and plans and their roles as inputs into further practical reasoning? The author's initial efforts in responding to this question resulted in a series of papers that he wrote during the early 1980s. In this book, Bratman develops further some of the main themes of these essays and also explores a variety of related ideas and issues. He develops a planning theory of intention. Intentions (...)
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  • The instability of philosophical intuitions: Running hot and cold on truetemp.Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander & Jonathan M. Weinberg - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1):138-155.
    A growing body of empirical literature challenges philosophers’ reliance on intuitions as evidence based on the fact that intuitions vary according to factors such as cultural and educational background, and socio-economic status. Our research extends this challenge, investigating Lehrer’s appeal to the Truetemp Case as evidence against reliabilism. We found that intuitions in response to this case vary according to whether, and which, other thought experiments are considered first. Our results show that compared to subjects who receive the Truetemp Case (...)
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  • The Knobe effect: A brief overview.Adam Feltz - 2007 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 28 (3-4):265-277.
    Joshua Knobe (2003a) has discovered that the perceived goodness or badness of side effects of actions influences people's ascriptions of intentionality to those side effects. I present the paradigmatic cases that elicit what has been called the Knobe effect and offer some explanations of the Knobe effect. I put these explanations into two broad groups. One explains the Knobe effect by referring to our concept of intentional action. The other explains the Knobe effect without referring to our concept of intentional (...)
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  • A defense of intuitions.S. Matthew Liao - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 140 (2):247 - 262.
    Radical experimentalists argue that we should give up using intuitions as evidence in philosophy. In this paper, I first argue that the studies presented by the radical experimentalists in fact suggest that some intuitions are reliable. I next consider and reject a different way of handling the radical experimentalists' challenge, what I call the Argument from Robust Intuitions. I then propose a way of understanding why some intuitions can be unreliable and how intuitions can conflict, and I argue that on (...)
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  • (1 other version)Experimental philosophy and philosophical intuition.Ernest Sosa - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 132 (1):99-107.
    The topic is experimental philosophy as a naturalistic movement, and its bearing on the value of intuitions in philosophy. This paper explores first how the movement might bear on philosophy more generally, and how it might amount to something novel and promising. Then it turns to one accomplishment repeatedly claimed for it already: namely, the discrediting of armchair intuitions as used in philosophy.
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  • Intuitions and individual differences: The Knobe effect revisited.Shaun Nichols & Joseph Ulatowski - 2007 - Mind and Language 22 (4):346–365.
    Recent work by Joshua Knobe indicates that people’s intuition about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this effect is that there are stable individual differences in how ‘intentional’ is interpreted. That is, in Knobe’s cases, different people interpret the term in different ways. This interpretive diversity of ‘intentional’ opens up a new avenue to help explain Knobe’s results. Furthermore, the paper argues that the (...)
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  • The past and future of experimental philosophy.Thomas Nadelhoffer & Eddy Nahmias - 2007 - Philosophical Explorations 10 (2):123 – 149.
    Experimental philosophy is the name for a recent movement whose participants use the methods of experimental psychology to probe the way people think about philosophical issues and then examine how the results of such studies bear on traditional philosophical debates. Given both the breadth of the research being carried out by experimental philosophers and the controversial nature of some of their central methodological assumptions, it is of no surprise that their work has recently come under attack. In this paper we (...)
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  • (1 other version)Bad acts, blameworthy agents, and intentional actions: Some problems for juror impartiality.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2006 - Philosophical Explorations 9 (2):203 – 219.
    In this paper, I first review some of the recent empirical work on the biasing effect that moral considerations have on folk ascriptions of intentional action. Then, I use Mark Alicke's affective model of blame attribution to explain this biasing effect. Finally, I discuss the relevance of this research - both philosophical and psychological - to the problem of the partiality of jury deliberation. After all, if the immorality of an action does affect folk ascriptions of intentionality, and all serious (...)
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  • Intentional action, folk judgments, and stories: Sorting things out.Alfred R. Mele & Fiery Cushman - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):184–201.
    How are our actions sorted into those that are intentional and those that are not? The philosophical and psychological literature on this topic is livelier now than ever, and we seek to make a contribution to it here. Our guiding question in this article is easy to state and hard to answer: How do various factors— specifically, features of vignettes—that contribute to majority folk judgments that an action is or is not intentional interact in producing the judgment? In pursuing this (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Experimental philosophy.Joshua Knobe - 2006 - Philosophy Compass 2 (1):81–92.
    Claims about people's intuitions have long played an important role in philosophical debates. The new field of experimental philosophy seeks to subject such claims to rigorous tests using the traditional methods of cognitive science – systematic experimentation and statistical analysis. Work in experimental philosophy thus far has investigated people's intuitions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Although it is now generally agreed that experimental philosophers have made surprising discoveries about people's intuitions in each of these areas, (...)
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  • (1 other version)The rise and fall of experimental philosophy.Antti Kauppinen - 2007 - Philosophical Explorations 10 (2):95 – 118.
    In disputes about conceptual analysis, each side typically appeals to pre-theoretical 'intuitions' about particular cases. Recently, many naturalistically oriented philosophers have suggested that these appeals should be understood as empirical hypotheses about what people would say when presented with descriptions of situations, and have consequently conducted surveys on non-specialists. I argue that this philosophical research programme, a key branch of what is known as 'experimental philosophy', rests on mistaken assumptions about the relation between people's concepts and their linguistic behaviour. The (...)
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  • Folk intuitions, asymmetry, and intentional side effects.Jason Turner - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):214-219.
    An agent S wants to A and knows that if she A-s she will also bring about B. S does not care at all about B. S then A-s, also bringing about B. Did she intentionally bring B about? Joshua Knobe (2003b) has recently argued that, according to the folk concept of intentional action, the answer depends on B's moral significance. In particular, if B is reprehensible, people are more likely to say that S intentionally brought it about. Knobe defends (...)
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  • Intentionality and moral judgments in commonsense thought about action.Steven Sverdlik - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):224-236.
    The concept of intentional action occupies a central place in commonsense or folk psychological thought. Philosophers of action, psychologists and moral philosophers all have taken an interest in understanding this important concept. One issue that has been discussed by philosophers is whether the concept of intentional action is purely ‘naturalistic’, that is, whether it is entirely a descriptive concept that can be used to explain and predict behavior. (Of course, judgments using such a concept could be used to support moral (...)
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  • (1 other version)The concept of intentional action: A case study in the uses of folk psychology.Joshua Knobe - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 130 (2):203-231.
    It is widely believed that the primary function of folk psychology lies in the prediction, explanation and control of behavior. A question arises, however, as to whether folk psychology has also been shaped in fundamental ways by the various other roles it plays in people’s lives. Here I approach that question by considering one particular aspect of folk psychology – the distinction between intentional and unintentional behaviors. The aim is to determine whether this distinction is best understood as a tool (...)
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  • Desire, foresight, intentions, and intentional actions: Probing folk intuitions.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):133-157.
    A number of philosophers working under the rubric of “experimental philosophy” have recently begun focusing on analyzing the concepts of ordinary language and investigating the intuitions of laypersons in an empirically informed way.1 In a series of papers these philosophers—who often work in collaboration with psychologists—have presented the results of empirical studies aimed at proving folk intuitions in areas as diverse as ethics, epistemology, free will, and the philosophy of action. In this paper, I contribute to this research program by (...)
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  • On praise, side effects, and folk ascriptions of intentionality.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):196-213.
    In everyday discourse, we often draw a distinction between actions that are performed intentionally (e.g. opening your car door) and those that are performed unintentionally (e.g. shutting a car door on your finger). This distinction has interested philosophers working in a number of different areas. Indeed, intentional actions are not only the primary focus of those concerned with understanding and explaining human behavior, but they often occupy center stage in philosophical discussions of free will and moral and legal responsibility as (...)
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  • Intentional action and intending: Recent empirical studies.Hugh J. McCann - 2005 - Philosophical Psychology 18 (6):737-748.
    Recent empirical work calls into question the so-called Simple View that an agent who A’s intentionally intends to A. In experimental studies, ordinary speakers frequently assent to claims that, in certain cases, agents who knowingly behave wrongly intentionally bring about the harm they do; yet the speakers tend to deny that it was the intention of those agents to cause the harm. This paper reports two additional studies that at first appear to support the original ones, but argues that in (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Concept of Intentional Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psychology.Joshua Knobe - 2008 - In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  • Intentional action in ordinary language: core concept or pragmatic understanding?Fred Adams & Annie Steadman - 2004 - Analysis 64 (2):173-181.
    Among philosophers, there are at least two prevalent views about the core concept of intentional action. View I (Adams 1986, 1997; McCann 1986) holds that an agent S intentionally does an action A only if S intends to do A. View II (Bratman 1987; Harman 1976; and Mele 1992) holds that there are cases where S intentionally does A without intending to do A, as long as doing A is foreseen and S is willing to accept A as a consequence (...)
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  • Folk concepts of intentional action in the contexts of amoral and immoral luck.Paulo Sousa & Colin Holbrook - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3):351-370.
    This paper concerns a recently discovered, puzzling asymmetry in judgments of whether an action is intentional or not (Knobe, Philosophical Psychology 16:309–324, 2003a ; Analysis 63:190–193, b ). We report new data replicating the asymmetry in the context of scenarios wherein an agent achieves an amoral or immoral goal due to luck. Participants’ justifications of their judgments of the intentionality of the agent’s action indicate that two distinct folk concepts of intentional action played a role in their judgments. When viewed (...)
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  • Intention, intentional action, and moral responsibility.Alfred Mele & Steven Sverdlik - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 82 (3):265 - 287.
    Philosophers traditionally have been concerned both to explain intentional behavior and to evaluate it from a moral point of view. Some have maintained that whether actions (and their consequences) properly count as intended sometimes hinges on moral considerations - specifically, considerations of moral responsibility. The same claim has been made about an action's properly counting as having been done intentionally. These contentions will be made more precise in subsequent sections, where influential proponents are identified. Our aim in this paper is (...)
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  • Intentional action and the praise-blame asymmetry.Frank Hindriks - 2008 - Philosophical Quarterly 58 (233):630-641.
    Recent empirical research by Joshua Knobe has uncovered two asymmetries in judgements about intentional action and moral responsibility. First, people are more inclined to say that a side effect was brought about intentionally when they regard that side effect as bad than when they regard it as good. Secondly, people are more inclined to ascribe blame to someone for bad effects than they are inclined to ascribe praise for good effects. These findings suggest that the notion of intentional action has (...)
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  • The good, the bad and the blameworthy: Understanding the role of evaluative reasoning in folk psychology.Joshua Knobe & Gabriel S. Mendlow - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):252-258.
    People ordinarily make sense of their own behavior and that of others by invoking concepts like belief, desire, and intention. Philosophers refer to this network of concepts and related principles as 'folk psychology.' The prevailing view of folk psychology among philosophers of mind and psychologists is that it is a proto-scientific theory whose function is to explain and predict behavior.
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  • Intentional action: Controversies, data, and core hypotheses.Alfred R. Mele - 2003 - Philosophical Psychology 16 (2):325-340.
    This article reviews some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what agents do intentionally and what they intend in various stories and explores its bearing on the philosophical project of providing a conceptual analysis of intentional action. The article is a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a variety of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and vice versa. Topics examined include double effect; the influence of moral considerations on judgments about what (...)
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  • The folk strike back; or, why you didn’t do it intentionally, though it was bad and you knew it.Mark T. Phelan & Hagop Sarkissian - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 138 (2):291 - 298.
    Recent and puzzling experimental results suggest that people’s judgments as to whether or not an action was performed intentionally are sensitive to moral considerations. In this paper, we outline these results and evaluate two accounts which purport to explain them. We then describe a recent experiment that allegedly vindicates one of these accounts and present our own findings to show that it fails to do so. Finally, we present additional data suggesting no such vindication could be in the offing and (...)
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  • The folk concept of intentional action: Philosophical and experimental issues.Edouard Machery - 2008 - Mind and Language 23 (2):165–189.
    Recent experimental fi ndings by Knobe and others ( Knobe, 2003; Nadelhoffer, 2006b; Nichols and Ulatowski, 2007 ) have been at the center of a controversy about the nature of the folk concept of intentional action. I argue that the signifi cance of these fi ndings has been overstated. My discussion is two-pronged. First, I contend that barring a consensual theory of conceptual competence, the signifi cance of these experimental fi ndings for the nature of the concept of intentional action (...)
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  • Does emotion mediate the relationship between an action's moral status and its intentional status? Neuropsychological evidence.Liane Young, Daniel Tranel, Ralph Adolphs, Marc Hauser & Fiery Cushman - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):291-304.
    Studies of normal individuals reveal an asymmetry in the folk concept of intentional action: an action is more likely to be thought of as intentional when it is morally bad than when it is morally good. One interpretation of these results comes from the hypothesis that emotion plays a critical mediating role in the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. According to this hypothesis, the negative emotional response triggered by a morally bad action drives the attribution (...)
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  • Acting Intentionally: Probing Folk Notions.Alfred Mele - 2001 - In Bertram F. Malle, Louis J. Moses & Dare A. Baldwin (eds.), Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition. MIT Press. pp. 27--43.
    In the first section, I will argue that the folk concept of necessary conditions for intentional action needs refinement. In the second and third sections, I will identify some additional issues one would need to explore in con- structing a statement of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for intentional action. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the conceptual analyst’s task.
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  • Judgements of intentionality and moral worth: Experimental challenges to Hindriks.Alessandro Lanteri - 2009 - Philosophical Quarterly 59 (237):713-720.
    Joshua Knobe found that people are more likely to describe an action as intentional if it has had a bad outcome than a good outcome, and to blame a bad outcome than to praise a good one. These asymmetries raised numerous questions about lay moral judgement. Frank Hindriks recently proposed that one acts intentionally if one fails to comply with a normative reason against performing the action, that moral praise requires appropriate motivation, whereas moral blame does not, and that these (...)
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  • Effects of moral cognition on judgments of intentionality.Jennifer Nado - 2008 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (4):709-731.
    Several recent articles on the concept of intentional action center on experimental findings suggesting that intentionality ascription can be affected by moral factors. I argue that the explanation for these phenomena lies in the workings of a tacit moral judgment mechanism, capable under certain circumstances of altering normal intentionality ascriptions. This view contrasts with that of Knobe ([2006]), who argues that the findings show that the concept of intentional action invokes evaluative notions. I discuss and reject possible objections to the (...)
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  • Intentionality, Morality, and Their Relationship in Human Judgment.Bertram Malle - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):61-86.
    This article explores several entanglements between human judgments of intentionality and morality (blame and praise). After proposing a model of people’s folk concept of intentionality I discuss three topics. First, considerations of a behavior’s intentionality a ff ect people’s praise and blame of that behavior, but one study suggests that there may be an asymmetry such that blame is more affected than praise. Second, the concept of intentionality is constitutive of many legal judgments (e.g., of murder vs. manslaughter), and one (...)
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  • Foreknowledge, caring and the side-effect effect in young children.Sandra Pellizzoni - 2009 - Developmental Psychology 45:289-295.
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