The Center for Philosophy and the Health Sciences at Aarhus University is hosting a lecture by Joshua Knobe. It will take place on Thursday, January 29, 15:15–16:45 (UTC+1) via Zoom. The abstract reads:
The notion of normality plays a role in the way people understand many different scientifically important concepts. For example, normality figures in people’s understanding of what it is for a trait to be innate, what it is for one event to cause another, and what it is for the state to count as a disease. I will be presenting a theory about ordinary attributions of normality and then exploring the application of this theory to all three of these types of judgments. The theory is that ordinary attributions of normality involve a mixture of statistical judgments (how frequent something is) and evaluative judgments (how good something is). Thus, the key claim is that both statistical and evaluative judgments play a role in people’s ordinary understanding of innateness, causation and disease.
Barbara A. Spellman, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, Janice Nadler, and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan: “Psychology and Jurisprudence Across the Curriculum”
John Mikhail: “Holmes, Legal Realism, and Experimental Jurisprudence”
Frederick Schauer: “The Empirical Component of Analytic Jurisprudence”
Felipe Jiménez: “The Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence”
Jonathan Lewis: “Competing Conceptual Inferences and the Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence”
Joseph Avery, Alissa del Riego, and Patricia Sánchez Abril: “The Contours of Bias in Experimental Jurisprudence”
Christoph Bublitz: “Experimental Jurisprudence and Doctrinal Reasoning – A View from German Criminal Law”
Bert I. Huang: “Law and Morality”
Brian Sheppard: “Legal Constraint”
Part 2 – Introductions
Guilherme da Franca Couto Fernandes de Almeida, Noel Struchiner, and Ivar Hannikainen: “Rules”
James A. Macleod: “Surveys and Experiments in Statutory Interpretation”
Thomas R. Lee and Stephen C. Mouritsen: “Corpus Linguistics and Armchair Jurisprudence”
Meirav Furth-Matzkin: “Using Experiments to Inform the Regulation of Consumer Contracts”
Doron Dorfman: “Experimental Jurisprudence of Health and Disability Law”
Jessica Bregant, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, and Verity Winship: “Studying Public Perceptions of Settlement”
Benedikt Pirker, Izabela Skoczeń, and Veronika Fikfak: “Experimental Jurisprudence in International Law”
Heidi H. Liu: “The Law and Psychology of Gender Stereotyping”
Christian Mott: “The Experimental Jurisprudence of Persistence through Time”
Lukas Holste and Holger Spamann: “Experimental Investigations of Judicial Decision-Making”
Christoph Engel and Rima-Maria Rahal: “Eye-Tracking as a Method for Legal Research”
Jessica Bregant: “Intuitive Jurisprudence – What Experimental Jurisprudence Can Learn from Developmental Science”
Part 3 – Applications
Corey H. Allen, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Jason Shepard, and Eyal Aharoni: “Moral Judgments about Retributive Vigilantism”
Karolina M. Prochownik, Romy D. Feiertag, Joachim Horvath, and Alex Wiegmann: “How Much Harm Does It Take? An Experimental Study on Legal Expertise, the Severity Effect, and Intentionality Ascriptions”
Gabriel Lima and Meeyoung Cha: “Human Perceptions of AI-Caused Harm”
Christopher Brett Jaeger: “Reasonableness from an Experimental Jurisprudence Perspective”
Lucien Baumgartner and Markus Kneer: “The Meaning of ‘Reasonable’ – Evidence from a Corpus-Linguistic Study”
Roseanna Sommers: “Commonsense Consent and Action Representation – What is ‘Essential’ to Consent?”
Neele Engelmann and Lara Kirfel: “Who Caused It? Different Effects of Statistical and Prescriptive Abnormality on Causal Selection in Chains”
Ori Friedman: “Ownership for and Against Control”
Andrew Higgins and Inbar Levy: “Examining the Foundations of the Law of Judicial Bias – Expert versus Lay Perspectives on Judicial Recusal”
Jacqueline M. Chen and Teneille R. Brown: “The Promise and the Pitfalls of Mock Jury Studies – Testing the Psychology of Character Assessments”
Piotr Bystranowski, Ivar Hannikainen, and Kevin Tobia: “Legal Interpretation as Coordination”
Janet Randall and Lawrence Solan: “Legal Ambiguities – What Can Psycholinguistics Tell Us?”
Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter: “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Rights for Future Generations”
Austin A. Baker and J. Remy Green: “The Right to Transgender Identity”
Enrique Cáceres, Christopher Stephens, Azalea Reyes-Aguilar, Daniel Atilano, Manuel García, Rosa Lidia López-Bejarano, Susana González, Carmen Patricia López-Olvera, Octavio Salvador-Ginez, and Margarita Palacios: “The Legal Conductome – The Complexity Behind Decisions”
Neil C. Thompson, Brian Flanagan, Edana Richardson, Brian McKenzie, and Xueyun Luo: “Trial by Internet – A Randomized Field Experiment on Wikipedia’s Influence on Judges’ Legal Reasoning”
Literature
Tobia, Kevin (ed.) (2025): The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. (Link)
The 2025 conference of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology will take place in Warsaw, Poland, from September 2 to 5, hosted by the Polish Academy of Sciences. As keynote speakers, Emma Borg, Cameron Buckner, Nora Newcombe, and Petra Schumacher are confirmed.
Abstracts for papers, posters, and symposia can be submitted until March 3. The call reads:
The Society invites the submission of papers, posters and symposia. Submissions are refereed and selected on the basis of quality and relevance to psychologists, philosophers and linguists. If you have any questions, contact us by writing an email to espp2025@gmail.com.
Travel scholarships for PhD Students
Thanks to support from IFiS/GSSR, via the NAWA grant PROM Short-term academic exchange (in Polish, PROM Krótkookresowa wymiana akademicka; BPI/PRO/2024/1/00020/DEC/1), we can award up to 10 travel grants for PhD students at universities outside Poland to attend the conference and present a talk or poster. Please see the Call for Applications for these scholarships, which promotes equal opportunity for people with disabilities, and adequate gender representation. Successful applications will be selected on the basis of: (i) quality of the proposed talk or poster, as judged by the ESPP expert reviewers’ report on the anonymised abstract you submit when applying to present at the conference; (ii) NAWA PROM’s eligibility rules (see the Call for Applications).
Submission instructions for papers, posters and symposia
The deadline for all submissions is 3rd March 2025. Submissions should be made online via EasyChair.
Papers should be designed to be presentable within 20 minutes (for a total 30 minutes session). Submissions should consist of a long abstract of up to 1000 words (excluding bibliography). If required, an additional page of tables and/or graphs may be included. A submission for a poster presentation should consist of a 500-word abstract.
When submitting your paper or poster online, please first indicate the primary discipline of your paper (philosophy, psychology, or linguistics) and whether your submission is intended as a paper or a poster. Submitted papers may also be considered for presentation as a poster if space constraints prevent acceptance as a paper or if the submission is thought more suitable for presentation as a poster. All paper and poster submissions (whether abstracts or full papers) should be in DOC or PDF format and should be properly anonymized in order to allow for blind refereeing.
Each person may present only one paper during the conference’s parallel sessions, though you may be a co-author of more than one paper. If you submit multiple single-authored papers only one will be accepted. This includes contributions to submitted symposia.
Symposia are allocated a two-hour slot and consist of a set of four linked papers on a common theme or three linked papers with an introduction. Symposia should include perspectives from at least two of the three disciplines represented in the society (philosophy, psychology and linguistics). Submissions should be made by symposium organizers (not speakers).
When submitting a symposium proposal online, your submissions should include the following three elements in a single PDF:
A list of 3 or 4 speakers which indicates representation of at least two disciplines (individual speakers may also represent multiple disciplines).
A general abstract of up to 500 words, laying out the topics to be addressed and indicating connections among the talks.
Individual abstracts of up to 500 words and provisional titles for each talk. Please do not submit more than one PDF file per symposium.
General Aim
The aim of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology is to promote interaction between philosophers and psychologists on issues of common concern. Psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, computer scientists and biologists are encouraged to report experimental, theoretical and clinical work that they judge to have philosophical significance; and philosophers are encouraged to engage with the fundamental issues addressed by and arising out of such work. In recent years ESPP sessions have covered such topics as theory of mind, attention, reference, problems of consciousness, introspection and self-report, emotion, perception, early numerical cognition, spatial concepts, infants’ understanding of intentionality, memory and time, motor imagery, counterfactuals, the semantics/pragmatics distinction, comparative cognition, minimalism in linguistic theory, reasoning, vagueness, mental causation, action and agency, thought without language, externalism, hypnosis, and the interpretation of neuropsychological results.
Part 1 – Topics in Experimental General Jurisprudence
Raff Donelson: “Experimental Approaches to General Jurisprudence”
Guilherme de Almeida, Noel Struchiner, and Ivar Hannikainen: “The Experimental Jurisprudence of the Concept of Rule – Implications for the Hart-Fuller Debate”
Part 2 – Topics in Experimental Particular Jurisprudence
Kevin Tobia: “Legislative Intent and Acting Intentionally”
Lara Kirfel and Ivar Hannikainen: Why Blame the Ostrich? Understanding Culpability for Willful Ignorance”
Paulo Sousa and Gary Lavery: “Culpability and Liability in the Law of Homicide – Do Lay Moral Intuitions Accord with Legal Distinctions?”
Levin Güver and Markus Kneer: “Causation and the Silly Norm Effect”
Part 3 – (New) Methods and Topics in Experimental Jurisprudence
Justin Sytsma: “Ordinary Meaning and Consilience of Evidence”
Pascale Willemsen, Lucien Baumgartner, Severin Frohofer, and Kevin Reuter: “Examining Evaluativity in Legal Discourse – A Comparative Corpus-Linguistic Study of Thick Concepts”
Leonard Hoeft: “A Case for Behavioral Studies in Experimental Jurisprudence”
Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter: “Experimental Longtermist Jurisprudence”
Literature
Prochownik, Karolina, and Stefan Magen (eds.) (2024): Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law, London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury. (Link)
Applications are possible until November 25. The job announcement reads:
PhD scholarship at GSN
You can apply for a neurophilosophy PhD scholarship in an annually recurring call for scholarships (application period from early December to mid-February). The GSN offers a structured doctoral program with an independent PhD (GSN Doctoral Program), in which you can choose from a wide range of interdisciplinary courses together with your TAC (Thesis Advisory Board) to put together an interdisciplinary study program tailored to your individual research interests. This gives you a sound neuroscientific insight into the (natural) scientific contexts that are important for your neurophilosophical doctoral project. In addition, there is an extensive range of “soft skills” and an attractive social program.
Call for PhD scholarships in Neurophilosophy
The application round for 2024/25 is now open and will close on 17 February 2025 (12:00 noon CET).
The Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences (GSN) at LMU Munich invites applications for several PhD scholarships in Neurophilosophy. The GSN is the teaching entity for the Munich Center of Neurosciences – Brain & Mind (MCN). By creating an interdisciplinary network of research, the GSN provides a stimulating environment for students and faculty to produce novel formulations of current concepts and theories. Successful applicants will be affiliated with the Research Center for Neurophilosophy and Ethics of Neurosciences at the GSN.
Projects in the research center fall in the following areas:
philosophy of cognitive neuroscience (explanation, reduction)
philosophy and cognitive science of agency (mental causation, free will, moral psychology, abilities)
philosophy and cognitive science of reasoning (e.g. deductive and non-deductive reasoning, logic and neural networks, decision making)
ethics of neuroscience (research ethics, enhancement)
philosophy of perception
philosophy and social cognition
In the new application round we encourage applications in smaller focus areas in order to build research groups. In the 2024/25 round the focus areas are:
human agency (esp. mental causation, complex action, multi-tasking, attention, reductive and non-reductive explanation of agency)
metacognition (esp. metacognition in perception, self-evaluation and sense of self)
group cognition (group epistemology, collective decisions and group responsibility)
However, single exceptional and independent projects in one of the other areas are also encouraged.
Applicants should have advanced training in philosophy (typically a Master’s degree in philosophy) and a genuine interest in the neurosciences. This includes the willingness to acquire substantial knowledge of empirical work relevant to their philosophical project. Cooperative projects with empirical scientists in the network of the MCN are strongly encouraged.
The application period will open on 1 December 2024 and will close on 17 February 2025 (12:00 noon CET). Please check our website and the GSN website for details concerning the application procedure. The application includes an outline of your proposed research project, a CV, an official transcript of your academic work (list of attended courses; grades), diplomas and two separate academic reference letters. Please also name two potential supervisors (possibly including one non-philosopher) from the core or affiliated neurophilosophy faculty of the GSN.
How to apply for a GSN PhD scholarship
Please follow the standard application process for GSN PhD applications:
Organized by the research project “Appearance and Reality in Physics and Beyond,” this year’s “Method and Convergence” conference will take place at the University of Helsinki from June 25 to 27, bringing “together thinkers exploring philosophical methodology from different viewpoints. The focus is on the question of what kind of methodology could foster progress in philosophy, and on the question of how philosophy could foster progress in science.” Experimental philosophy is also taken into account (see below).
Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until March 15. The call reads:
Method and Convergence 2025 conference brings together thinkers exploring philosophical methodology from different viewpoints. The focus is on the question of what kind of methodology could foster progress in philosophy, and on the question of how philosophy could foster progress in science, as characterized below, after the sumission instructions. However, we welcome contributions about all important aspects of philosophical methodology.
Abstract submission
Submit your max. 1 page abstract using this template (link can also be found below).
Send your abstract to avril.styrman(at)helsinki.fi by March 15 2025. You will be informed of the approval of your speech in the conference by March 31. After the conference, each speaker may submit an article to the conference proceedings.
The conference team will arrange the peer review process of the articles. The articles accepted by the conference team will be submitted to Acta Philosophica Fennica, whose editors will review the articles independently of the conference team.
We invite case studies about ways in which philosophy has fostered progress in special sciences, and about ways in which philosophy could foster scientific progress.
How can scientific methods foster progress in philosophy?
The 20th and 21st century philosophical literature and the PhilPapers 2009 and 2020 surveys show that philosophy lacks processes that efficiently yield consensus on solutions to long-standing problems and preferences among competing theories (Chalmers 2009; Slezak 2018; Dellsén et al. 2024). In this sense, philosophy differs significantly from the special sciences. Sometimes the non-convergence into consensus stems not from the topics themselves, but from the methods of analysis. This raises the question of whether scientific methods could foster science-like convergence in philosophy, enabling more systematic accumulation of results and increasingly complete answers to fundamental questions, much like sciences where historical debates become irrelevant (Gutting 2016, pp. 323–5). This leads us to strongly interrelated naturalist themes.
Methodology and progress of philosophy
We invite case studies about what kind of progress has taken place in philosophy, and what kind of progress has been absent, and what kinds of methods, alone or together, could foster progress in the field. Although the focus is on the interplay of philosophy and science, we welcome insights about any known (and yet unknown) philosophical methods such as phenomenology, pragmatism, conceptual analysis, hermeneutics, analysis of language, discourse analysis, transcendental method, and thought experiments.
– Evaluation criteria of philosophical theories. We seek contributions that examine criteria for philosophical theories, preferably with case examples demonstrating how such criteria guide theory selection. From the naturalist viewpoint, we may ask whether science provides criteria that could make the selection between rival philosophical theories with the same function more objective and unequivocal than, for instance, plain intuition and reflecting equilibrium? The frequently cited virtues of scientific theories include accuracy, explanatory depth, internal consistency, ontological simplicity and unity, diachronic virtues (or fruitfulness over time), and external coherence (consistency and inferential relations with background knowledge or other well-regarded theories) (Kuhn 1977; McMullin 1982, 2014; Keas 2018). Brenner’s (2017) defense of simplicity as a criterion in metaphysics exemplifies this approach.
– Invention of ontological commitments. Ontological commitments are indispensable in the buildup of metaphysical theories, and we need the element of discovery if we want new sciences to emerge from philosophy. We invite contributions examining the invention or induction of new ontological commitments (Norton 2021; Schurz and Hütteman 2024; Arenhart and Arroyo 2021), as well as those addressing how strongly philosophers should adhere to ontological commitments of contemporary scientific theories, given Kuhn’s view that science advances through paradigm shifts.
– From pluralism to syntheses. The Vienna Circle Pamphlet dictates: “The goal ahead is unified science. The endeavor is to link and harmonize the achievements of individual investigators in their various fields of science.” However, the opposite trend has dominated philosophy since logical positivism: system-building has given way to analyzing details. In contrast, in many other areas of science and life, it is considered natural to build functional totalities out of parts. We invite submissions exploring how to better leverage the wealth of detailed philosophical investigations by counterbalancing specialization with unification. For instance, Ingthorsson (2019) argues that multiple theories of truth can be considered complementary views instead of considering them as rivals. Can you make a similar argument concerning other sets of theories or views that are typically considered as rivals?
– Philosophical theories as axiomatic systems. We invite submissions exploring ways to clarify concepts and to unify detailed aspects of topics by formulating metaphysical theories as axiomatic systems (De Jong and Betti 2010), with ontological commitments as primitive axioms/postulates, concepts defined in terms of them, and semantics mapped to them. In logic, an axiomatic system is expressed in a formal language and typically coupled with a proof system. However, a philosophical theory does not always need to be formal and typically does not require an explicit proof system, no more than Euclid’s Elements and Newton’s Principia did.
– Causal-mechanical explanations in philosophy. Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular changes from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions (Machamer et al. 2000). The core idea of mechanistic accounts is that causation is the activities of compound parts of organized wholes that produce changes in either whole and/or parts (Ingthorsson 2024). Causal-mechanical explanation and the axiomatic method play together very well. For instance, Newtonian mechanics is an axiomatic system that postulates hypothetical laws of nature that function in the context of an overall mechanism, namely, Keplerian Solar System. We invite contributions about the role of causal-mechanical explanations in metaphysics, or similar non-causal-mechanical explanations in metaphysics, such as in Trogdon (2018).
– Experimental philosophy typically investigates philosophical questions through methods of behavioral and social science. What kind of progress has taken place in different domains of experimental philosophy, such as rational thinking and moral judgment, mean? For instance, has experimental philosophy enhanced conceptual analysis and how? How has experimental philosophy influenced non-experimental philosophy? Are empiricists overlooking any philosophical tools that could enrich their interpretation of experimental results?
The fifth instalment of “Agency and Intentions in Language” (AIL) is coming. Hosted by the University of Göttingen, it will take place online from January 29 to 31, 2025.
Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until December 18, 2025. The call reads:
Call for Papers
On the linguistic side, we welcome submissions examining any grammatical phenomena sensitive to the degree of agency or interpretation of an action as intentional versus accidental, such as controller choice, subjunctive obviation, licensing of polarity items, aspect choice in Slavic, case marking in ergative split languages and ‘out-of-control’ morphology. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: ways in which natural languages manifest different degrees of agency or the distinction between intentional and accidental actions (morphological marking, syntactic structures, semantic denotations of verbs and adverbials, pragmatic and contextual differences); connections between agency, intentions, and event structure; relations between agency, intentions, and causation.
On the side of philosophy, we welcome submissions addressing any aspect related to philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, the nature of agency, intentions, and acting intentionally. Both theoretical and empirical research are welcome as they contribute to debates on various theories of action, free will, moral responsibility, nature of reasons, and practical rationality.
On the side of psychology, we welcome submissions that deal with agency, intentions, moral responsibility, and other related topics, broadly construed. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: issues in developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, clinical psychology (the sense of agency in individuals with schizophrenia, OCD, etc.), and adults’ perception of agency and responsibility.
Submissions
Anonymous abstracts, not exceeding 2 pages (including references and examples), with font no less than 11 Times New Roman, and 2 cm margins, should be uploaded on AIL5 OpenReview site.
If you are not registered on OpenReview, we recommend you use your institutional email for registration – in this case, your profile will be activated automatically. If you decide to use your non-institutional email, please allow two weeks for the profile to be activated.
We expect to notify authors of their acceptance in early January 2025. Presentations will be allotted 30 minute slots with 15 minutes for questions and discussion.
Volume 5 of the “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy,” edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, just hit the shelves! It comprises a total of 16 chapters on no less than 480 pages. See below for the table of contents.
Alexander Max Bauer and Jan Romann: “Equal Deeds, Different Needs”
John Bronsteen, Brian Leiter, Jonathan Masur, and Kevin Tobia: “The Folk Theory of Well-Being”
Shannon Brick: “Deference to Moral Testimony and (In)Authenticity”
Florian Cova: “Calibrating Measures of Folk Objectivism”
Justin Sytsma: “Resituating the Influence of Relevant Alternatives”
Samuel Murray, Elise Dykhuis, and Thomas Nadelhoffer: “Do People Understand Determinism? The Tracking Problem for Measuring Free Will Beliefs”
Natalja Deng, Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller, and James Norton: “Investing the Three Ts of Present-Bias – Telic Attitudes, Temporal Preferences and Temporal Ontology”
Blake McAllister, Ian Church, Paul Rezkalla, and Long Nguyen: “Empirical Challenges to the Evidential Problem of Evil”
Eric Mandelbaum, Jennifer Ware, and Steven Young: “The Sound of Slurs – Bad Sounds for Bad Words”
The Society for Philosophy of Causation’s second meeting will be held at the University of Göttingen, Germany, from July 19 to 21. The society’s first meeting was held last year at Kyoto University, Japan, where the society was also founded.
While the initial deadline (April 23) has already passed, I was told that submissions will still be considered. The call reads:
Encouraged are submissions on philosophy, psychology, and computer science of causation, and effort will be made to balance these topics. That is, you shouldn’t be discouraged if your submission is more on the cognitive science or computer science side of causation, the name of the society notwithstanding.
The instructions haven’t changed much. Please submit an abstract of 300–1000 words to gosation@causation.science. Specifically, please send an email with your name, the title of your talk, and the abstract in the body of the email and submission as its title. If you have a (drafty or polished) paper, or your abstract can’t be easily pasted as text (e.g., it contains figures or symbols), please in addition attach a PDF of the paper or the abstract. Please mind that the more of the argument your abstract contains, the more likely it will be accepted.
For more information about the Society for Philosophy of Causation and their conference, visit https://causation.science.
This text was first published at xphiblog.com on June 22, 2021. It has been slightly updated.
I still remember how I sat on the porch last year, somewhen around April, reading Jonathan’s and Justin’s “Actual Causation and Compositionality” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020) for an upcoming session of X-Phi Under Quarantine, when suddenly – halfway through it – this idea struck me: There is something odd about the way subjects were asked by Jonathan and Justin, I thought.
But first things first. For those of you unfamiliar with the paper, I will give you a little rundown. Jonathan and Justin argue that theories of actual causation often endorse the Compositionality Constraint of Actual Causation (CCAC): For a series of individual events – say, c, d, and e – the CCAC states that if c caused e, then it did so either directly or it did so indirectly via at least one intermediary d. This intermediary then is itself an effect of c and a cause of e.
The CCAC’s validity does not solely rest upon experts’ intuitions. With the “Folk Attribution Desideratum” (FAD) (Livengood, Sytsma, and Rose 2017), it can be demanded “that what a theory of actual causation says about concrete, everyday cases [has to] accord with ordinary causal attributions” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 48).
Now, research has already shown that causal attributions can be influenced by normative judgements. This gives reasonable doubt that ordinary causal attributions accord with concrete cases. Jonathan and Justin hypothesize that, thus, “ordinary causal attributions will tend to violate the compositionality constraint for cases in which someone or something is responsible for an effect by way of an intermediary that does not share in the responsibility” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 48). To investigate whether this was the case, they conducted a series of vignette studies. One of them, the Revolver Case (RC), introduces subjects to the following story:
Trent has decided to kill his father, Brad. He aims his loaded revolver at Brad and pulls the trigger, releasing the hammer. The hammer strikes the cartridge, igniting the gun powder. The gun powder explodes, driving the bullet from the gun. The bullet hits Brad in the head. He dies instantly.
(Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 59)
After being introduced to this vignette, subjects had to state their agreement or disagreement with the four statements (1) “Trent caused Brad’s death,” (2)“The hammer caused Brad’s death,” (3) “The gun powder caused Brad’s death,” and (4) “The bullet caused Brad’s death” on a seven-point scale from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 7 (“strongly agree”).
Now, in case the causal attributions of laypeople would comply with the CCAC, subjects should agree to all statements of the RC: Not only was Brad’s death caused by Trent, but also by the hammer, the gun powder, and the bullet.
Here comes the first twist: In this study (and the remaining studies reported in their paper), subjects tended to rate statements about intermediaries as rather low. In the RC, responses indicate that Trent caused Brad’s death, while the hammer and the gun powder did not. Hence, the CCAC is clearly violated and does not meet the FAD.
Now, back to the beginning: What struck me as odd here was that there are a whole lot of statements about causation to be made from the vignettes used. But every time, Jonathan and Justin picked out only a small handful of them.
Take for example the RV, above. We can easily split the vignette up into eight events:
Event A: “pulling the trigger”
Event B: “releasing the hammer”
Event C: “striking the cartridge”
Event D: “igniting the gun powder”
Event E: “the gun powder exploding”
Event F: “driving the bullet from the gun”
Event G: “the bullet hitting Brad in the head”
Event H: “the death of Brad”
Next, we can combine those events to statements of the form “X caused Y.” Including all reasonable combinations of events to be made therefrom, this results in a total of 28 different items, including statements like, e.g., “Pulling the trigger caused the release of the hammer,” “Striking the cartridge caused the ignition of the gun powder,” or “The bullet being driven from the gun caused the bullet to hit Brad in the head.”
This is exactly what Jan Romann and I did in a small-scale study: First, subjects were presented the RV. Then, they were shown the 28 causal statements (in an ordered sequence). As in the original study, subjects had to state their agreement on a seven-point scale from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 7 (“strongly agree”).
52 non-native English speakers completed the survey. And here comes the second twist: This time (and in stark contrast to Jonathan’s and Justin’s data), an (oftentimes overwhelming) majority of subjects chose to “strongly agree” that “X caused Y” for every item, including those that are analogues to the four statements from Jonathan’s and Justin’s study, as can be seen in the Figure below.
White bars represent data from Jonathan and Justin (1 = “Trent caused Brad’s death,” 2 = “The hammer caused Brad’s death,” 3 = “The gun powder caused Brad’s death,” 4 = “The bullet caused Brad’s death”), black bars represent our data (A/H = “Pull- ing the trigger caused the death of Brad,” B/H = “Releasing the hammer caused the death of Brad,” D/H = “Igniting the gun powder caused the death of Brad,” E/H = “The explosion of the gun powder caused the death of Brad,” F/H = “The bullet being driven from the gun caused the death of Brad,” G/H = “The bullet hitting Brad in the head caused the death of Brad”). We assume that cases 1 and A/H, 2 and B/H, 3 and D/H, 3 and E/H, 4 and F/H, as well as 4 and G/H are analogous.
Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank tests (with p-values corrected) reject the hypothesis that the central tendency for any of the 28 combinations is smaller than or equal to the “neutral” answer of 4 on the scale.
I think that, first and foremost, this teaches us that when questioning people, we must be very careful not only in choosing our words but also in choosing our set of questions. The story they tell us, it seems, depends not only on our question’s wording but also on the catalogue of questions that we put together in the first place.
This study, I’m afraid, doesn’t tell us anything about the origin of this difference yet. This clearly must be addressed in future research. To be honest, I am not even sure what – of all the available attempts – might be the best (or my favourite) explanation.
Jonathan and Justin state that “even philosophers, such as Lewis and Menzies, explicitly giving analyses of the ordinary concept of causation have offered theories that entail the compositionality constraint.” They ask: “How could they have gotten things so wrong?” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 64f.) What I am sure about, now, is this: Their conclusion seems a bit hasty.
Our small study has been published as a discussion note in Philosophy of Science. You can find it here. And stay tuned: Of course, a more fleshed-out study – first reproducing the findings from Justin and Jonathan for their different vignettes and then applying various variations of the task – is already on its way!
Literature
Bauer, Alexander Max, and Jan Romann (2022): “Answers at Gunpoint. On Livengood and Sytsma’s Revolver Case,” Philosophy of Science 89 (1), 180–192. (Link)
Livengood, Jonathan, and Justin Sytsma (2020): “Actual Causation and Compositionality,” Philosophy of Science 87 (1), 43–69. (Link)
Livengood, Jonathan, Justin Sytsma, and David Rose (2019): “Following the FAD. Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8, 273–294. (Link)
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