"a movement that is blurring the lines between philosophy and psychology. This new approach, called experimental philosophy, aims to apply the practical tools and findings of the cognitive sciences to philosophical problems"
thenewjournalatyale.com/2012/04/we-started-the-f...
#xPhi […]
Read this interesting piece by one of out brilliant editorial board members! #philsky #experimentalphilosophy
Our article is online: The Moral Justifications of Disability Discrimination in Health Care Allocation: An Experimental Assessment #bioethics #xphi #experimentalphilosophy
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Program pages 1 and 2 (of 6)
Program pages 3 and 4 (of 6)
Program pages 5 and 6 (of 6)
🧵This week I'm posting about presentations from two cool events (over on Twitter): x.com/byrd_nick/stat...
What are the events?
(1) The 1st Experimental Argument Analysis workshop
(2) The 5th European #ExperimentalPhilosophy #Conference
#cogSci #xPhi #Linguistics #Psychology #Logic #edu #teaching
Thibaut Giraud & Florian Cova investigate educated folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility: doi.org/10.1080/0951... #experimentalphilosophy
6/14
Mia Karabegovic, Tristin Blatt, Pascal Boyer & Hugo Mercier test people's intuitions about credit ownership in science, the arts, law, and everyday life: doi.org/10.1080/0951... #experimentalphilosophy
5/14
If you want scholars who use #science to address questions in #philosophy, try the #experimentalPhilosophy starter pack:
#xPhi #xJur #BioXPhi #xPoS #xPoR
Where to find Nick Byrd’s slides in the APA meetings app (Step 1).
Step 2 of getting the slides.
What slides look like within the APA app.
Times Square, New York City on a morning in January 2025.
I posted my slides for my talk (about how to measure and manipulate reflective reasoning) to the APA Meetings app. Find them in the #ExperimentalPhilosophy Society session (Thursday 7-10pm).
Great to reconnect with old friends and make new friends at #APAEastern25.
Until next time ✌️
#xPhi #NYC
3. DIAGNOSTIC NATURALISM • RQ: How can signature X-Phi findings about how laypeople think and talk about phenomena be deployed to address characteristically philosophical problems? • Turn from evidence for philosophical theories to nature and genesis of longstanding problems. • Target: aporetic problems (Aristotle), cf. antinomies (Kant) • Diagnostic hypothesis H0: Aporetic problems arise from the way laypeople think and talk about phenomena of interest: • Remedial hypothesis Hn: Aporetic problems can be overcome (dissolved") by gaining empirical understanding of their cognitive sources:
8. BELIEF FRAGMENTATION Folk beliefs often fragmented' and conflicted. • Different cognitive processes, operating under different conditions, generate conflicting beliefs • stored in different 'belief fragments' • limitations of working memory (Oberauer et al. 2016) ‣ fragments never systematically screened for coherence (Bendaña & Mandelbaum, 2021) ‣ Individual torn between conflicting conceptions of same phenomenon:
BELIEF MODEL (FISCHER 2023) Problem results ultimately from conflicts between pre-philosophical beliefs: • Folk Indirect Realism: vision involves awareness of mental images • Folk Direct Realism: vision involves awareness only of physical objects of sight Arguments from illusion / hallucination formulated to adjudicate • suggest premises 'Illusions occur and "Hallucinations are possible inconsistent with folk Direct Realism add to aporetic cluster Problem arises from conflict between folk theories, exacerbated by (fallacious?) reasoning → Quietism no option (pace Austin)
BEYOND THE PRESENT PROBLEM • Methodological naturalism: build on best available scientific theories of natural phenomena, rather than on common sense (or armchair intuitions, etc.) (Kornblith, 2016). • Fragmentation findings provide a new and principled reason for naturalism ‣ Conflicted beliefs cannot provide even initial common ground for debates that seek to understand how phenomenon works ‣ Theorists who seek to understand how vision works, what it is, etc., should build on best theories from psychology and neuroscience (cf Burge, 2010; Drayson, 2021) and pay no more heed to folk beliefs than neuroscientists. etc.
Then Eugen Fischer shared “Diagnostic #Naturalism: The #ExperimentalPhilosophy of Aporetic Problems”.
Arguments + data seem to topple the ordinary #language project of resolving #philosophy problems via "common sense".
There's rarely ONE intuition.
There are often MULTIPLE.
They often CONTRADICT.
Two samples of participants (N≅500) who responded to 20 to 40 cases indicated that most people had both textualist and purposivist intuitions (about rules or "laws" like "no shooting animals" and "no smartphones in the classroom").
More data indicating that empathy correlated positively with purposive interpretations and negatively with textualist interpretations.
Other individual difference constructs that predicted variance in how people apply rules: action aversion, outcome aversion, control aversion, and some Big 5 personality constructs.
Implications • People seem to share a single concept of rule that has a dual character in nature. This goes against contemporary worries in jurisprudence that propose purely interpersonal explanations of disagreement in legal interpretation. It also bolds well with recent accounts of philosophical problems, specially Knobe's (forthcoming) • Obama appears to have been right: individual differences in the "breadth of one's empathy" do indeed matter in the application of rules, but much less than whether the rule's text was violated.
Now the #ExperimentalPhilosophy Society session!
@almeida2808.bsky.social presented #xJur data with @lawstuff.bsky.social and Ivar Hannikainen: "Trait #Empathy Predicts Purposivist Rule Application"
Results in image #altText
#openAccess preprint: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...
#xPhi #law #textualism
True or False?
#ExperimentalPhilosophy (#xPhi) can show whether P is (or is not) intuitive, but not whether P is confirmed or falsified.