Listed in order of presentation.

 

Friday Submitted Presentations:

 

“Epistemic Contextualism as an Empirical Hypothesis”

Michael A. Hunter (London School of Economics, Philosophy)

In this paper, I will discuss the pitfalls of previous attempts to test for either epistemic contextualism or subject-sensitive invariantism. I will then offer a better way to discover if knowledge ascriptions, as they are used by ordinary language users, are either contextualist or invariantist. In addition, I will also illustrate how proper empirical testing generates significant data that supports contextualism, and will show why this data is important for the philosophical theory.  

 

“An Experimental Supplement to the Discussion of ‘The Transplant Intuition’”

Sara Weaver (University of Alberta)

Nicolas Bullot (Macquarie University)

When applying identity theory to practical ethics, identity theorists emphasize the study of folk intuitions about personal persistence. Our study tested the verification of the “Transplant Intuition,” an intuition asserted by philosophers to be characteristic of people's beliefs about personal persistence and symptomatic of the Psychological Approach (PA). The results of our study strongly support the assertion that folk attribute the PA to judgments about personal persistence. However, problems with the coherence of the participant’s beliefs disrupt these results somewhat. This discussion will address these concerns and propose that Jeff McMahan’s Embodied Mind account allows for a more charitable interpretation.

 

“Normativity in Action: How to Explain the Knobe Effect and Its Relatives”

Frank Hindriks (University of Groningen, Philosophy)

How should we understand folk psychological notions such as intentional action, choosing, and deciding? Recent evidence supports the conclusion that normative considerations influence our judgments about these notions. Joshua Knobe defends the view that ‘moral considerations actually figure in the competencies people use to make sense of human beings and their actions’. I defend an alternative proposal on which beliefs about normative reasons explain the findings. I have defended this reason explanation elsewhere for the case of intentional action. Here I consider the extent to which it generalizes to other notions in order to answer Knobe’s criticism that my reason explanation leaves us ‘with a mystery as to why the impact of moral judgment is so pervasive’.

 

“Dis-­Integrating Intuitions About Qualia and Consciousness”

Anthony F. Peressini (Marquette University, Philosophy)

In recent critical work on Guilio Tononi’s Integrated Theory of Consciousness, I’ve argued that he collapses the notion of consciousness into the notion of qualia. What is needed is a clearer understanding of what we mean, both intuitively and theoretically, by “consciousness” and “qualia.” Brain scientists are doing one piece of this, but another front could be experimental study of the intuitions involved. I have begun work on the design of an experimental framework for testing pre-theoretic intuitions surrounding qualia and consciousness. I plan to present the results of a pilot study for discussion of the potential for further research along these lines.

 

“I couldn't have done otherwise”

Florian Cova (Jean Nicod Institute)

In this paper, I present data suggesting that both the compatibilist and incompatibilist analyses or uses of expressions such as “I couldn’t have done otherwise” fail to capture our ordinary linguistic practices of excuses. I then propose an analysis of our use of such excuses and argue that they make use of the meaning of “could have done otherwise” that is relevant for moral responsibility. Finally, on the basis of this analysis, I argue that, on the sense that is relevant for the philosophical debate, people that live in deterministic world still have the ability to do otherwise.

 

“The Experiences of Reading: A Quantitative Study of Consciousness”

Alan Moore (University of California, Riverside, Philosophy)

Eric Schwitzgebel (University of California, Riverside, Philosophy)

Philosophers and psychologists give contradictory descriptions of the conscious experience of reading, and this study looks to one hundred and forty-eight subjects to shed light on the disagreement. Subjects reported on their experiences while reading, and these reports were compared to subsequent recollection of visual and auditory detail. Subjects radically altered their introspective reports over the course of the experiment, so much, in fact, that introspective reports did not form a coherent picture of inner-life. This suggests that certain types of reports are not an accurate measure of experience.

 

“The Challenge of Sticking With Intuitions Through Thick and Thin”

Joshua Alexander (Sienna College)

Jonathan Weinberg (University of Arizona)

Philosophical discussions often involve arguments that move from claims about people's philosophical intuitions to claims about the truth or plausibility of specific philosophical theories. Our philosophical intuitions provide data to be explained by our philosophical theories, evidence that may be adduced in arguments for their truth, or reasons that may be appealed to for believing them to be true. But, what are philosophical intuitions? Answers vary, ranging from "thin" conceptions that identify intuitions as merely instances of some fairly generic and epistemologically uncontroversial category of mental states or episodes to "thick" conceptions that add to this thin base certain metaphysical, phenomenological, or psychological conditions. Thick conceptions are now in fashion, in part because they offer a way of responding to recent empirical challenges to our intuition deploying practices. But, this response is not without its costs, making it difficult for us to determine when anyone is doing philosophy correctly.

 

“Are intuitions negotiable?”

Tomasz Wysocki (Wrocław University of Economics)

Dominik Dziedzic (University of Wroclaw)

Katarzyna Szubert (University of Wrocław)

We would like to present results of three experiments we conducted using following methodology. We gather a group of people who are asked to fill in questionnaires. Then, they discuss their answers and to write down both their own arguments as well as other arguments they found persuasive. Afterwards, they answer to the same questionnaire once more. We analyze both changes in the answers and the arguments which appeared during the discussion. We conducted three experiments: one inspired by Rawls’s Theory of justice, one in aesthetics, and one concerning Knobe’s famous CEO cases. Keeping in mind those results, we would like to draw some more general consequences.

 

 

Saturday Submitted Presentations

 

“Operationalizing Virtue”

Jennifer Baker (College of Charleston, Philosophy)

Jen Wright (College of Charleston, Psychology)

We have identified the theoretical commiments that underlie traditional, practical-rationality based accounts of virtue (TVE) and have devised an instrument to operationalize these. Our findings, that 57% of the time subjects cited a conflict between a norm and a motive when describing a case of their bad behavior, are consistent with TVE. We hope the explanation of our study and its rationale is a step forward in the situationist- virtue ethics debate. Namely, we hope to emphasize that TVE has not yet been operationalized and that virtue itself can never be operationlized. This is because TVE a. holds virtue to be an ideal b. includes practical rationality in a philosophical argument and distinguishes it sharply from a descriptive account of cognitive functioning or behavior c. is not characterlogical analysis, and d. is not at odds with the findings of social psychology.

 

“In Praise of Immoralist Folks”

Shen-yi Liao (University of Michigan, Philosophy)

Jonathan Phillips (Yale University, Philosophy)

How do ordinary people’s judgments of a work’s aesthetic value relate to their judgments of its moral value? We present some evidence that the relationship is not invariant. That is, the folk are neither moralists, who think moral defects are always aesthetic defects, nor autonomists, who think moral defects are never aesthetic defects. Instead, the relationship between folk aesthetic evaluations and folk moral evaluations of art is variant and sensitive to considerations such as the genre of a work. In other words, we think ordinary people occupy the immoralist position in the ethical criticism of art debate.

 

“Markets and Morality: How Does Competition Affect Moral Judgment?” 

Daniel L. Chen (Duke University, Law)

Scholars since Hume and Smith have debated possible causal connections between market experiences and moral beliefs.  Of particular interest today are questions related to incentive designs: for example, could the structure of employment affect moral attitudes?  Here, I study the impact of employment structure on three normative issues: utilitarian versus non-utilitarian values, other-regarding preferences, and charitable donations.  Through a labor market intermediary, I randomly assigned workers to competitive or piece-rate work conditions.   Competitively structured work experiences increased non-utilitarian value choices, non-utilitarian commitments towards outgroup members, and donations by productive workers.

 

“X-Files for X-Philes: What intuitions about demonic possession reveal about dualism”

Nina Strohminger (University of Michigan, Psychology)

Shaun Nichols (University of Arizona, Philosophy)

Research on essentialism and dualism has long been a mainstay of developmental psychology.  However, such investigations have gone largely untested in adult populations, under the belief that these intuitions are erased with education.  Here, we argue that imagination is a means through which native intuitions can continue to be assessed.  In a novel paradigm, we asked subjects to imagine someone inhabiting another person’s body, and report which traits would transfer to the new body.  Systematic differences in intuitions about spiritual possession shed light on implicit dualism in adults, which itself has ramifications for a variety of adult beliefs about morality, medicine, and folk psychology.

 

“From Risk to Knowledge  — From Knowledge to Intent: How People Perceive the Minds of Wrongdoers”

Pam Mueller (Princeton University, Psychology)

John M. Darley (Princeton University, Psychology)

Lawrence M. Solan (Brooklyn Law School)

In a series of experimental studies, we asked people to assign appropriate civil and/or criminal liability to individuals who cause harm with various states of mind.  The studies are principally aimed at two puzzles:  First, do people actually separate the various states of mind conceptually?  Second, to the extent that people distinguish among the states of mind that help to define normative behavior, how much do those distinctions contribute to people’s judgments of liability, both criminal and civil?  Our studies show that people appear to make distinctions about the states of mind of others that more or less correspond to legally-relevant categories.  Yet, when asked to assign consequences, their moral judgments play a larger role than do their cognitive categorizations. 

 

“Commonsense thinking about minds and morals: An empirical investigation”

Philip Robbins (University of Missouri, Philosophy)

In this talk I report findings from two experimental studies exploring how laypeople think about the relationship between multiple dimensions of mindedness (affect and cognition) and morality (patiency and agency). Two hypotheses were tested. According to the first hypothesis, people think of moral patiency as more dependent on the affective, or feeling, dimension of mindedness than the cognitive dimension. According to the second hypothesis, people think of moral agency as more dependent on the cognitive, or thinking, dimension of mindedness than the affective dimension. The first hypothesis was supported by the data; the second hypothesis was not.

 

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