On the Relevance of Experimental Philosophy to Neuroethics

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-57
Author(s):  
Heather Browning ◽  
Walter Veit
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy

Shifting Concepts

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Central Area ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Semantic Properties ◽  
Conceptual Variation

Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology. Since the 1970s, psychologists have carried out intriguing experiments testing the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, and have found a great deal of variation in categorization behaviour across individuals and cultures. During the same period, philosophers of language and mind did important work on the semantic properties of concepts, and on how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. An important motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared, across individuals and cultures. However, there was little interaction between these two research programs until recently. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. Moreover, in the last decade, philosophers have approached questions about the tension between conceptual variation and shared concepts in communication from a new perspective: that of ameliorating concepts for theoretical or for social and political purposes. The volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers working on concepts who come from these different research traditions.

Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 2

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
New Research ◽  
Philosophical Questions

This is the second volume in Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, a series with the aim of providing a venue for publishing work in this emerging field. Experimental philosophy is a new movement that seeks to use empirical techniques to illuminate some of the oldest issues in philosophy. It is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and related disciplines, such as linguistics and sociology. Although the movement is only a few years old, it has already sparked an explosion of new research, challenging a number of cherished assumptions in both philosophy and the cognitive sciences. This volume includes both theoretical and experimental chapters as well as chapters that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. It is divided into three parts that explore epistemology, moral and political philosophy, and metaphysics and mind, showcasing the diversity of work that has arisen as traditionally philosophical questions have met the tools of social science.

Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Network Analysis ◽  
Statistical Methods ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Methodological Approaches

The papers collected in this third volume of Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy illustrate the ways in which the field continues to broaden, taking on new methodological approaches and interacting with substantive theories from an ever wider array of disciplines. As the papers themselves clearly show, some recent research in experimental philosophy is going more deeply into well-established questions in the field, but at the same time, other strands of research are exploring issues that hardly appeared at all in the field even a few years ago. Thus, we see the introduction of new empirical and statistical methods (network analysis), new theoretical approaches (formal semantics), and the development of entirely new interdisciplinary connections (in the emerging field of “experimental jurisprudence”)

scholarly journals Individual and Cross-Cultural Differences in Semantic Intuitions: New Experimental Findings

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 322-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Beebe ◽  
Ryan Undercoffer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Anchoring Effects ◽  
Semantic Reference ◽  
Experimental Findings ◽  
Epistemic Perspective

In 2004 Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich published what has become one of the most widely discussed papers in experimental philosophy, in which they reported that East Asian and Western participants had different intuitions about the semantic reference of proper names. A flurry of criticisms of their work has emerged, and although various replications have been performed, many critics remain unconvinced. We review the current debate over Machery et al.’s (2004) results and take note of which objections to their work have been satisfactorily answered and which ones still need to be addressed. We then report the results of studies that reveal significant cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions when we control for variables that critics allege have had a potentially distorting effect on Machery et al.’s findings. These variables include the epistemic perspective from which participants are supposed to understand the research materials, unintended anchoring effects of those materials, and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of speech acts within them. Our results confirm the robustness of the cross-cultural differences observed by Machery et al. and thereby strengthen the philosophical challenge they pose.

Further Insights on Fake-Barn Cases and Intuition Variation

Episteme ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Carsten Bergenholtz ◽  
Jacob Busch ◽  
Sara Kier Praëm
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Risk Attitude ◽  
Knowledge Ascription ◽  
Underlying Factor ◽  
Demographic Group ◽  
Knowledge Ascriptions ◽  
Group Variation ◽  
Fake Barn

Abstract Studies in experimental philosophy claim to document intuition variation. Some studies focus on demographic group-variation; Colaço et al., for example, claim that age generates intuition variation regarding knowledge attribution in a fake-barn scenario. Other studies claim to show intuition variation when comparing the intuition of philosophers to that of non-philosophers. The main focus has been on documenting intuition variation rather than uncovering what underlying factor(s) may prompt such a phenomenon. We explore a number of suggested explanatory hypotheses put forth by Colaço et al., as well as an attempt to test Sosa's claim that intuition variance is a result of people ‘filling in the details’ of a thought experiment differently from one another. We show (i) that people respond consistently across conditions aimed at ‘filling in the details’ of thought experiments, (ii) that risk attitude does not seem relevant to knowledge ascription, (iii) that people's knowledge ascriptions do not vary due to views about defeasibility of knowledge. Yet, (iv) we find no grounds to reject that a large proportion of people appear to adhere to so-called subjectivism about knowledge, which may explain why they generally have intuitions about the fake-barn scenario that vary from those of philosophers.

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