13 found
Order:
See also
Kevin Reuter
University of Zürich
  1. Feeling the right way: Normative influences on people's use of emotion concepts.Rodrigo Díaz & Kevin Reuter - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (3):451-470.
    It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are experienced. People consider that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  2. Dual Character Concepts in Social Cognition: Commitments and the Normative Dimension of Conceptual Representation.Guillermo Del Pinal & Kevin Reuter - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S3):477–501.
    The concepts expressed by social role terms such as artist and scientist are unique in that they seem to allow two independent criteria for categorization, one of which is inherently normative. This study presents and tests an account of the content and structure of the normative dimension of these “dual character concepts.” Experiment 1 suggests that the normative dimension of a social role concept represents the commitment to fulfill the idealized basic function associated with the role. Background information can affect (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  3. The good, the bad, and the timely: How temporal order and moral judgment influence causal selection.Kevin Reuter, Lara Kirfel, Raphael van Riel & Luca Barlassina - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5 (1336):1-10.
    Causal selection is the cognitive process through which one or more elements in a complex causal structure are singled out as actual causes of a certain effect. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we investigated the role of moral and temporal factors in causal selection. Our results are as follows. First, when presented with a temporal chain in which two human agents perform the same action one after the other, subjects tend to judge the later agent (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  4.  45
    Separating the evaluative from the descriptive: An empirical study of thick concepts.Pascale Willemsen & Kevin Reuter - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (2):135-146.
    Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  5. No knowledge required.Kevin Reuter & Peter Brössel - 2018 - Episteme 16 (3):303-321.
    Assertions are the centre of gravity in social epistemology. They are the vehicles we use to exchange information within scientific groups and society as a whole. It is therefore essential to determine under which conditions we are permitted to make an assertion. In this paper we argue and provide empirical evidence for the view that the norm of assertion is justified belief: truth or even knowledge are not required. Our results challenge the knowledge account advocated by, e.g. Williamson (1996), in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  6. Stereotypes, Conceptual Centrality and Gender Bias: An Empirical Investigation.Guillermo Del Pinal, Alex Madva & Kevin Reuter - 2017 - Ratio 30 (4):384-410.
    Discussions in social psychology overlook an important way in which biases can be encoded in conceptual representations. Most accounts of implicit bias focus on ‘mere associations’ between features and representations of social groups. While some have argued that some implicit biases must have a richer conceptual structure, they have said little about what this richer structure might be. To address this lacuna, we build on research in philosophy and cognitive science demonstrating that concepts represent dependency relations between features. These relations, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  7. Where is your pain? A Cross-cultural Comparison of the Concept of Pain in Americans and South Korea.Hyo-eun Kim, Nina Poth, Kevin Reuter & Justin Sytsma - 2016 - Studia Philosophica Estonica 9 (1):136-169.
    Philosophical orthodoxy holds that pains are mental states, taking this to reflect the ordinary conception of pain. Despite this, evidence is mounting that English speakers do not tend to conceptualize pains in this way; rather, they tend to treat pains as being bodily states. We hypothesize that this is driven by two primary factors—the phenomenology of feeling pains and the surface grammar of pain reports. There is reason to expect that neither of these factors is culturally specific, however, and thus (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  8. Conspiracy theories are not theories.Kevin Reuter & Lucien Baumgartner - manuscript
    This paper presents the results of two corpus studies investigating the discourse surrounding conspiracy theories and conventional theories. The first study demonstrates that conspiracy theories lack the epistemic and scientific standing characteristic of theories. The second study provides evidence that conspiracy theories are frequently spread in a manner that resembles the dissemination of falsehoods and misinformation. These findings indicate that conspiracy theories do not possess the characteristics typically associated with genuine theories.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. Asymmetry Effects in Generic and Quantified Generalizations.Kevin Reuter, Eleonore Neufeld & Guillermo Del Pinal - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 45Th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society:1-6.
    Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work found that generics display a unique asymmetry between their acceptance conditions and the implications that are typically drawn from them. This paper presents evidence against the hypothesis that only generics display an asymmetry. Correcting for limitations of previous designs, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics, various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’), and variations in types (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. Not More than a Feeling.Kevin Reuter, Michael Messerli & Luca Barlassina - 2022 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (1):41-50.
    Affect-based theorists and life satisfaction theorists disagree about the nature of happiness, but agree about this methodological principle: a philosophical theory of happiness should be in line with the folk concept HAPPINESS. In this article, we present two empirical studies indicating that it is affect-based theories that get the folk concept HAPPINESS right: competent speakers judge a person to be happy if and only if that person is described as feeling pleasure/good most of the time. Our studies also show that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. What is a Conspiracy Theory?M. Giulia Napolitano & Kevin Reuter - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):2035-2062.
    In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12. Reading Words Hurts: The impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words.Erica Cosentino, Markus Werning & Kevin Reuter - 2015 - In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings & P. P. Maglio (eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: pp. 453-458.
    This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people (based on their self-report) associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like syringe, wound, knife, and cactus, are considered to be more pain-related for those who are more pain-sensitive. We discuss our results in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  13.  37
    What is the folk concept of life?Kevin Reuter & Claus Beisbart - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):486-507.
    This paper details the content and structure of the folk concept of life, and discusses its relevance for scientific research on life. In four empirical studies, we investigate which features of life are considered salient, universal, central, and necessary. Functionings, such as nutrition and reproduction, but not material composition, turn out to be salient features commonly associated with living beings (Study 1). By contrast, being made of cells is considered a universal feature of living species (Study 2), a central aspect (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark