Full Psych Science paper from @bxjaeger.bsky.social available at:

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Here is the pattern of judgments for the individual targets:

How do people decide whether it’s wrong to harm a pig? A chimp? A baby?

In the West, these judgments are based more on *experience* (being able to feel) than on *agency* (being able to think and act)

New study finds that same pattern across other cultures

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Such awful news. You have contributed so much to the field, and we have all benefited from your work in so many different areas

Why do people love sad music? You probably wouldn't want a stranger to tell you how their life is falling apart... so why do you want a stranger to *sing* about how their life is falling apart?

Cognitive scientist/opera singer Tara Venkatesan on recent experimental results about this puzzle

Interview with philosopher/psychologist @felipedebrigard.bsky.social. Discusses his work, but also more personal aspects of his life

Quotation here is about what it was like growing up during a very violent period in the history of Colombia

www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com#/felipe-de-b...

Experimental Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) [Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Justin Sytsma, Kevin Reuter, and Pascale Willemsen replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]

must read about experimental philosophy

In a recent paper, we find that there has been a truly massive increase in the use of these other formal methods in philosophy

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Other options are:

2'. A choice between formal methods (logic or probability or stats, etc.)

Or:

2''. A course that teaches multiple formal methods (some logic, but also some probability, etc.)

But recently, there has been a big movement against that. Many people are thinking that if you already have taken one logic course, then the next requirement shouldn't be to take another logic course (meaning two logic courses and zero courses in any other formal method)

If students arrive in grad school having already taken an introductory logic course, and if there is going to be another formal method course they are required to take, what should that course be?

The answer used to be:

2. Another logic course (usually on the meta-theory of first order logic)

Haha! I am enjoying this back-and-forth.

In case it's helpful, maybe we can introduce some distinctions regarding the logic requirements in philosophy departments

Many departments require:

1. An introductory logic course for all undergrad philosophy majors

But then there's a further question...

Plural Causes Abstract. Causal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a li...

People sometimes say that an outcome was caused by two things. We might say Amy got sick because

(a) There was cilantro in the soup

*and*

(b) Amy is allergic to cilantro

Beautiful new theory of causal selection from @tadegquillien.bsky.social that explains why we sometimes select two causes

Prinzing’s analysis is not about the content of the papers but about the journals in which they are published. It’s a study of the proportion of philosophy papers that cite work from empirical journals

The *majority* of philosophy papers now cite at least some empirical data. Papers that do purely a priori philosophy are in a minority

Very happy to invite you to the second online-talk in our series. This thursday, Josh Knobe and Ivar Hannikainen, 4pm, everyone welcome.
Join Zoom Meeting
uzh.zoom.us/j/6806768837...
Meeting ID: 680 676 8837
Passcode: xphi123

Hi Bluesky! 👋 We’re the Philosophical Moral Psychology Lab, based at the Uehiro Oxford Institute. We use experimental philosophy and moral psychology methods to study morality, with the aim of contributing to normative and philosophical debates in ethics. Follow us to keep up with our work!

It’s a small book but it is nice to hold it in my hands

The sort of case that Earp considers in his paper is more like: AI writes section 2 of your paper. The section might look like it was written by a human, but no human actually wrote it. Then the question is whether something important has been lost

This is so interesting! It seems like the way you are imagining it as that AI tells you the answer to a question but doesn’t tell you how it arrived at that answer. That’s a really helpful case to consider…

I’m really curious to hear people’s thoughts on this issue!

(Feel free to reply even if you haven’t yet read Brian’s piece)

Whereas in philosophy, there’s a strong pull in a different direction

It doesn’t seem to be just a matter of the idea that AI work won’t be as good as human work (though it might also be that). It seems to involve some goal other than just the goal of ending up with the best possible work

This piece by psychologist/philosopher Brian Earp is about the differing attitudes toward AI in psychology vs. philosophy

In psych, one common attitude is; The goal is to get the right answer to fundamental questions in psychology. If AI helps us do that, well then, all the better…

1/

This essay identifies a normative function of the concept of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that the concept of intentional action functions to focus our evaluative concern on some doings rather than others. It acts as a proxy for evaluative priority. Two arguments are offered for this thesis. First, we need a concept that functions to focus evaluative concern, and the concept of intentional action exhibits features we'd expect from a concept with this prioritizing function. Second, the thesis is explanatorily powerful: it explains in a unified manner a number of puzzling features of intentional action, including the Knobe effect, the threshold of sufficient control governing intentional action, disagreement over whether knowledge is required for intentional action, cultural variation in ascription of intentionality, and the radical pluralism of ways that intentional action manifests. This second argument also shows what can be gained by attending to the functions of our concepts of agency.

New article:

Mikayla Kelley, "The Normative Function of Intentional Action", Philosophers' Imprint 26: 5. doi: doi.org/10.3998/phim...

Abstract in alt text. #philsky

Is philosophy too precious for AI? On writing, thinking, and the ego of authorship

New post 🚨 Is philosophy too precious for AI? briandavidearp.substack.com/p/is-philoso... ... on the science-humanities divide in LLM appreciation

I wonder if this same point also applies in all the other cases

For example, there are people in religion depts doing highly influential work in cognitive science of religion, but the field seems to be leaving religion depts and just becoming a part of cog sci

(2)

For this question about DH, it might be helpful to see DH as one example of a broader phenomenon - attempts to import quantitative, scientific methods into humanities disciplines

Other examples include: experimental philosophy, cognitive science of religion, computational work in music…

(1)

So maybe a good way to encourage reporting of null results would be to make it more possible to report results in a form that didn't require writing a publishable paper?

(These thoughts inspired by a helpful conversation with @liao.shen-yi.org)

I would absolutely want to make my results available to anyone who might find them useful, but I'd be a bit reluctant to take all of the time that would be necessary to write up a complete publishable paper (e.g., explaining in detail why I initially thought the hypothesis was true)

(2)

Just speaking for myself, I would be much more likely to report null results if there were a good way of doing that without writing up a full publishable paper

Suppose I come up with what I think is an exciting new hypothesis, but then it turns out that my hypothesis is completely wrong…

(1)

Thanks Devin! Roughly speaking, the issue is: If my idea turns out to be wrong, I wouldn't want to write an introduction explaining why I originally thought it was right or why I thought this study would be worth running… but I would still be happy to write up the details of the methods and results