Intuitive Expertise and Irrelevant Options

In the ‘push-dilemma,’ a train is about to run over several people and can only be stopped by pushing a heavy person onto the tracks. Most lay people and moral philosophers consider the ‘push-option,’ i.e., pushing the heavy person, as morally wrong. Peter Unger (1992, 1996) suggested that adding irrelevant options to the push-dilemma would overturn this intuition. This chapter tests Unger’s claim in an experiment with both lay people and expert moral philosophers. This allowed an investigation of the ‘expertise defense,’ which various philosophers have suggested as an answer to ‘experimental restrictionists,’ who argue that experimental philosophy undermines the trustworthiness of intuitions about hypothetical cases. Overall, the chapter finds that adding irrelevant options increases the ratings for the push-option. Moreover, the intuitions of expert moral philosophers are no less susceptible to the presence of irrelevant options than lay people’s intuitions. The chapter discusses how these findings bear on the expertise defense.

Can Real Social Epistemic Networks Deliver the Wisdom of Crowds?

Most experimental philosophy employs small-N studies with randomization. Additional light may be shed on philosophical questions by large-scale observational studies that employ Big Data methodologies. This chapter explains and showcases the promising methodology of testimonial network analysis and visualization for experimental epistemology, arguing that it can be used to gain insights and answer philosophical questions in social epistemology. The use case is the epistemic community that discusses vaccine safety primarily in English on Twitter. In two studies, the authors show, using both statistical analysis and exploratory data visualization, that there is almost no neutral or ambivalent discussion of vaccine safety on Twitter. Roughly half the accounts engaging with this topic are pro-vaccine, while the other half is con-vaccine. The results also indicate that these two camps rarely engage with one another, and that the con-vaccine camp has greater epistemic reach and receptivity than the pro-vaccine camp. In light of these findings, the authors question whether testimonial networks as they are currently constituted on popular forums such as Twitter are living up to their promise of delivering the wisdom of crowds.

Fuller and the Folk

Legal philosophers have long debated whether purported laws must meet specific criteria in order to count as genuine law. Lon Fuller offered a major contribution to this debate when he proposed that legal systems necessarily observe eight procedural principles, which he called “the inner morality of law.” This chapter people’s intuitions regarding Fuller’s procedural principles, revealing limited and fickle support: Laypeople and experienced lawyers alike believed that hypothetical laws would have to abide by procedural principles (e.g. “there could be no retrospective laws”) that actual laws often violate (e.g. “there are laws that are retrospective”). The studies not only demonstrate the ease with which people oscillate between contrasting views about the nature of law, they also illustrate how experimental methods can shed light on long-standing questions at the heart of jurisprudence.

I Owe You an Explanation

To cohesively interact with others, we must recognize that we are sometimes obligated to explain our actions. In three experiments, this chapter provides evidence that young children are aware of social norms governing when explanations are owed, and judge that people are obligated to explain their actions when they directly interfere with others’ goals. In Experiment 1, 3–6-year-olds were more likely to say that agents had to explain their actions when they interfered with others’ goals, than when agents did not interfere. In Experiment 2, children differentiated between when explanations are owed and when they are desired. Finally, in Experiment 3, children showed they understand that an explanation is owed to the person whose goal was frustrated, but not to other people. These findings build on recent work in experimental philosophy on norms that govern the content of utterances, by examining norms governing when certain utterances should be said.

Maggots Are Delicious, Sunsets Hideous

On the one hand, judgments about taste and aesthetics seem somehow more subjective than other judgments—those about matters of descriptive fact, for instance. On the other hand, it seems we sometimes genuinely disagree in virtue of making different taste and aesthetic judgments. And many theorists think that in order to ground genuine disagreement, judgments must have contradictory contents—contents that cannot both be true. Most semantic theories of taste and aesthetic predicates, including contextualism and truth relativism, attempt to account for the comparative subjectivity of taste and aesthetic judgments while preserving this supposed contradiction datum. This chapter presents results from three studies suggesting that while most people think they can disagree about taste and aesthetics, this is not because they think their judgments in this domain preclude one another’s truth. Indeed, the results suggest that many people do not regard judgments of taste and aesthetics as truth-apt at all.

The Relevance of Alternate Possibilities for Moral Responsibility for Actions and Omissions

Many philosophers have argued that alternative possibilities are required for an agent’s moral responsibility for the consequences of omitting an action. In contrast, it is argued that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility for the consequences of performing an action. Thus, while an agent can be morally responsible for an action she could not have avoided, an agent is never morally responsible for omitting an action she could not have performed. Call this the Action/Omission Asymmetry Thesis. This chapter describes various strategies to challenge the Action/Omission Asymmetry Thesis and identifies the predictions those strategies make about the conditions under which an agent will be held morally responsible for an unavoidable action or omission. Studies reported in the chapter indicate that whether there is an Action/Omission Asymmetry strongly depends, first, on the type of moral judgment considered relevant for the Action/Omission Asymmetry Thesis, and, second, the scale used to test the folk’s intuition.

Does Skepticism Lead to Tranquility? Exploring a Pyrrhonian Theme

Pyrrhonian Skepticism, as described by Sextus Empiricus, has proven to be an influential philosophical tradition. However, little attention has been paid to the empirical claims that animate the Pyrrhonian project. This chapter aims to reverse that trend. First, it argues that Sextus’s assertion that belief causes anxiety plays an essential role in Sextus’s philosophy. It then reviews modern research on dogmatism and anxiety, and building on this research, presents three different studies conducted with the purpose of elucidating the relationship between them. The results suggest, contrary to Sextus’s claim, that dogmatism predicts low levels of anxiety, though no evidence about their causal relation was found.

Introduction

The chapters 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 chapters 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 (most notably, in the emerging field of “experimental jurisprudence”)....

In Our Shoes or the Protagonist’s? Knowledge, Justification, and Projection

Sackris and Beebe show that many people seem willing to attribute knowledge in the absence of justification. Their results provide some reason to claim that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. This chapter provides some support for this claim. It does so by addressing an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the observed knowledge attributions stemmed from protagonist projection, a linguistic phenomenon in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. That said, caution is recommended. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before much confidence is given to the claim that the folk concept of knowledge does not take justification to be necessary for its use.

The Ship of Theseus Puzzle

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two locations, speaking eighteen different languages was conducted. The results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Moreover, the results also suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”—that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence.