The 32nd “Philosophy Conference” of the University of Valladolid’s Department of Philosophy, organized by José V. Hernández-Conde, will take place from May 16 to 17 in Valladolid, Spain. This year’s instalment is all about experimental philosophy.
May 16, 9:00–18:30 (UTC+2)
Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “No Luck for Moral Luck”
María Jiménez-Buedo (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia): “What do we Measure in the Dictator Game? Constructs, Validity and the Threat of Methodological Artifacts”
Mikel Asteinza (University of the Basque Country): “Epistemic Determinants of Scientific Disclosure and Their Impact on the Legal Audience – The Case of De-Extinction”
Andrei Moldovan and Obdulia Torres (University of Salamanca): “Expertisia as a Contextual Property”
Fernando Aguiar (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Would You Hire a Person With an Intellectual Disability? An Experimental Study on Action and Compassion”
Francisco Calvo (University of Murcia): “Of Seahorses and Plants – An Experimental Journey out of Ignorance”
Fernando Sanantonio (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): “External Sanctions, Compliance and Avoidance in Vegetarianism as a Normative System”
Daniel Martín (University of Granada): “Attitudes Toward Moral Improvement Based on Virtual Assistance”
May 17, 9:15–14:00 (UTC+2)
Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “The Geography of Wisdom”
Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada): “What is ‘Consenting’?”
Javier Anta (University of Salamanca): “An Experimental Approach to the Ordinary Meaning of ‘Information’”
Rodrigo Díaz (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Describing (Erroneously) Recalcitrant Emotions”
David Rodríguez-Arias (University of Granada): “Contemporary End-of-Life Bioethics – Empirical and Experimental Contributions”
This term at the University of Oldenburg, Stephan Kornmesser and I are teaching a course for master’s students who had no previous contact with x phi.1 We decided to try a hands-on approach rather than just discussing results, debates, and ideas from the field. For this purpose, we divided the course into two parts. In the first half, loosely based on Kornmesser et al. (forthcoming), we introduced some basics of experimental design and statistical analysis. Also, as a paradigmatic example of an early x phi study, we read Knobe (2003). In my opinion, this paper has the advantage of being both short and accessible; the experimental design is simple and the data collected (primarily the nominal yes-or-no responses) can be analyzed quite straightforwardly.
Thereafter, the course was divided into three groups,2 and students were instructed to replicate Knobe’s first study step by step. First, we reconstructed the questionnaire, using a German translation of the vignette (taken from Knobe 2014). Everyone probably knows the vignette, but to refresh your memory, here is the original once again (variations between Harm and Help Condition are indicated by square brackets):
The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, “We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but [and] it will also harm [help] the environment.”
The chairman of the board answered, “I don’t care at all about harming [helping] the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.”
They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed [helped].
Knobe (2003, 190)
Afterwards, students used the questionnaire to ask people on campus whether the chairman brought about the side effect intentionally. Finally, we calculated and interpreted χ2 tests for each group. To foster an understanding of how the χ2 test actually works, we calculated them by hand one step at a time instead of using software.
As can be seen in the picture below, showing the results from Group 1, Knobe’s original findings were perfectly replicated.3 In the Harm Condition, most subjects said that the chairman brought about the side effect intentionally, while in the Help Condition, most subjects said that he did not.4
Replication of Study 1 from Knobe (2003) by Student Group 1
As did Knobe (2003), people were also asked how much praise or blame the chairman deserves. Using the results from Group 1 again as an example, shown in the picture below, the mean of ascribed blame was 4.90 (SD = 1.26), while the mean of ascribed praise was 2.32 (SD = 1.63), which also fits in very well with Knobe’s results.5
Replication of Study 1 from Knobe (2003) by Student Group 1
Where do we go from here? In the second half of our course, the three groups are encouraged to develop their own research questions based on their philosophical interests. They will learn how to design an online survey and set one up themselves. Luckily, we have got a grant for research-based learning instructional projects from the university’s initiative forschen@studium,6 which will be used to recruit subjects from an online panel provider. Hence, learning panel integration will also be on our schedule. This is followed by guided data analysis and interpretation. Finally, the groups present their results to each other and document them in term papers. This means that, in the end, an entire research process is experienced.
Kornmesser, Stephan, Alexander Max Bauer, Mark Alfano, Aurélien Allard, Lucien Baumgartner, Florian Cova, Paul Engelhardt, Eugen Fischer, Henrike Meyer, Kevin Reuter, Justin Sytsma, Kyle Thompson, and Marc Wyszynski (forthcoming): Experimental Philosophy for Beginners. A Gentle Introduction to Methods and Tools, Cham: Springer. (Link)
Knobe, Joshua (2003): “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,” Analysis 63 (3), 190–194. (Link)
Knobe, Joshua (2014): “Absichtliches Handeln und Nebeneffekte in der Alltagssprache,” translated by Jürgen Schröder, in: Thomas Grundmann, Joachim Horvath, and Jens Kipper (eds.): Die Experimentelle Philosophie in der Diskussion, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 96–101. (Link)
Endnotes
If you are interested in teaching x phi to beginners, you should also take a look at De Cruz (2019). In her blog post, she describes a teaching approach to third-year undergraduates at Oxford Brookes University. ↩︎
Of course, the great students of our course deserve credit! Group 1: Johannes Bavendiek, Marvin Jonas Laesecke, and Aileen Wiechmann; Group 2: Rebecca Kratzer, Frederike Lüttich, and Jule Rüterbories; Group 3: Bastian Göbbels, Finn Ove Gronotte, Marina Hinkel, and Riduan Schwarz. ↩︎
χ2(1, 54) = 27.865, p < 0.001. For comparison: Knobe (2003, 192) reports χ2(1, 78) = 27.2, p < 0.001. ↩︎
t(54) = 6.43, p < 0.001. For comparison: Knobe (2003, 193) reports – pooled for both of his studies – a mean of 4.8 in the harm condition and of 1.4 in the help condition; t(120) = 8.4, p < 0.001. ↩︎
Today, the “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, starts. They write:
We are delighted to announce the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The worshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. The link to the Teams meetings is below.
February 14, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Renato Turco (University of Genoa): “An Experimental Approach to Empty Definite Descriptions”
Lucien Baumgartner (University of Zurich), Paul Rehren (Utrecht University), and Krzysztof Sękowski (University of Warsaw): “Measuring (Un)Intentional Conceptual Change in Philosophy – A Corpus Study”
March 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Isabelle Keßels (University of Düsseldorf), Paul Hasselkuß (University of Düsseldorf), and Daian Bica (University of Düsseldorf): “The Safety Dilemma Put to the Test”
José V. Hernández-Conde (University of Valladolid) and Agustín Vicente (University of the Basque Country; Ikerbasque): “A Comparative Analysis of the Knobe Effect – Assessing Moral, Aesthetic, and Alethic Reasoning in Autistic and Neurotypical Populations”
April 10, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)
Tingting Sui (Peking University), Sebastian Sunday (Peking University): “A Confucian Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles”
Ryan Doran (University of Barcelona; University of Cambridge): “True Beauty”
May 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)
William Gopal (University of Glasgow): “Identifying & Rectifying the Instrumentalist Bias in Analytic Social Epistemology”
Giuseppe Ricciardi (Harvard University) and Kevin Reuter (University of Zurich): “Exploring the Agent-Relativity of Truth”
June 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)
Federico Burdman (Alberto Hurtado University), Gino Marttelo Carmona Díaz (University of the Andes), and María Fernanda Rangel Carrillo (University of the Andes): “Lay Perceptions of Control and Moral Responsibility in Addiction”
Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “A Cross-Cultural Study on the Ethics and Moral Psychology of HPV Vaccination”
On Wednesday, April 10, from 16:00–18:00 (UTC-5), Markus Kneer will be talking about “Biases in Mens Rea Attribution & How to Address Them” at the University of the Andes (Hemiciclo 001) in Bogotá, Colombia. Markus writes:
In this talk I aim to do three things: First, I’ll briefly introduce the new subdiscipline of Experimental Philosophy of Law. Second, I will explore legal conceptions of certain inculpating mental states (mens rea), in particular intention and negligence. To do so, I’ll show how experimental philosophy of law can help elucidate bias in their attribution and potential mismatch between legal and folk conceptions thereof. Third, I will discuss how biases in mens rea attribution could be alleviated.
In our “Faces of X-Phi” series, experimental philosophers from all around the globe answer nine questions about the past, present, and future of themselves and the field. Who would you like to see here in the future? Just leave a suggestion in the comments! Today, we present Josh Knobe.
The Past
(1) How did you get into philosophy in the first place?
I was always obsessed with philosophy, but at least at first, I had a lot of misgivings about going into academia. Back when I was an undergrad, I had a sense that academic philosophy was too much a matter of playing some little game designed to display one’s own cleverness and not enough a matter of genuinely trying to get to the bottom of things.
So after I graduated from undergrad, I left the world of academia and took a bunch of random jobs. I had a job working with homeless people. I spent some time translating documents from French and German for a computer company. I was writing software that helped low-income people get housing. For a little while, I was teaching English in a small town in Mexico.
But that whole time, I was still writing philosophy. I would write philosophy papers on nights and weekends. Then, when I thought a paper was completely done, I would put it in my desk drawer and never show it to anyone again. (Needless to say, all of these philosophy papers were awful.)
After four years of that, I started to feel that my life was going nowhere, and I applied to grad school in philosophy.
(2) And how did you end up doing experimental philosophy?
Even when I first arrived in grad school, I was running experimental studies. I was working with a professor in the psych department and putting together the papers for psychology journals. But fundamentally, I saw that whole thing as a hobby – just a little thing I was doing on the side.
My main focus at the time was on work that was more in the Continental tradition. I was obsessed with Kierkegaard, Sartre, Marx. My advisor was the Nietzsche scholar Alexander Nehamas.
Then, after a few years, I had something of an existential crisis. I started to feel that this work I had been doing in the Continental tradition was not the best way to answer the questions that were troubling me. And I started to think that maybe work using experimental methods – the very thing I had seen as just a hobby – might actually be a better way of pursuing those questions.
(3) Which teachers or authors have influenced you the most on your philosophy journey – and how?
Of course, all of us have been deeply influenced by our teachers and by various great figures from the history of philosophy, but if I think about it honestly, I would have to say that I have been much more influenced by my students and by other philosophers who are more junior than I am. Looking at the generation of philosophers who are now in their 20s and 30s, I feel like they have gone beyond my generation in so many important respects, and my whole approach to philosophy has been shaped by their contributions.
The Present
(4) Why do you consider experimental philosophy in its present form important?
As you probably know, there is a huge literature about this question already – tons of papers exploring metaphilosophical questions about what experimental philosophy is and whether it can shed light on important philosophical issues. But in my view, this entire literature has gotten off on the wrong foot. It isn’t even grappling with the questions that are most relevant here.
Just to start off with, what do experimental philosophers actually do day to day? In the first instance, what they do is to explore questions about how human beings think and feel. If you just pick out an experimental philosophy paper at random and start reading it, you will find a whole lot of evidence and arguments concerning questions about what is going on in human beings’ minds.
Now, what you see in the existing metaphilosophical literature is often an assumption that questions about human beings couldn’t possibly be philosophically relevant just themselves. So the thought is that if you want to understand what is philosophically important here, we have to show that facts about human beings can help us address some other question – a question that is not itself about human beings. Usually, the focus is on arguments of the form: Learning how people think about X can tell us about the true nature of X (e.g., learning how people think about causation can tell us about the true nature of causation). Then the assumption is that the key issue we need to grapple with as we explore the importance of experimental philosophy is whether or not arguments of this form can be made to work.
But this whole way of framing the issue is wrong from the beginning. If you want to understand what is so deep and important about experimental philosophy, you’ve got to actually care about questions concerning human beings. Most of this research is about exactly what it seems to be about. It’s about human beings, and how they think and feel. So if you want to understand why it is philosophically significant, you have to at least be talking about the potential philosophical significance of questions about human beings.
This point is so simple and straightforward that it almost feels like it should go without saying. Research in experimental philosophy of language is fundamentally about human languages, and if you don’t care about contingent facts about human beings and the languages they speak, you will never be able to understand what is supposed to be important about it. Experimental philosophy of law is about human systems of law, and if you think the only important questions in philosophy of law are about, say, the metaphysics of law, you will never understand why people are running all of these experimental studies.
Of course, we all know that some philosophers think contingent facts about human beings have no deeper philosophical significance. We can easily imagine the philosopher who says: “I think that there is no philosophical significance in itself to the study of how human languages actually work. Given that, please try explaining to me why your research in experimental philosophy of language is supposed to be valuable.” But in responding to such a person, we should not start out by conceding that this conception of philosophy might be correct. What we should be doing is arguing against precisely this conception.
(5) Do you have any critical points to make about experimental philosophy in its current state?
When it comes to experimental methods, there has been such a huge improvement over time. I’m really excited about all the reforms that have been introduced in recent years, but there is plenty to criticize about the way we did things in the early years of experimental philosophy.
As you may know, research methods in experimental philosophy were completely transformed by the replication crisis. The field has introduced a whole host of reforms that have allowed us to create more replicable research (larger sample sizes, pre-registration, open data, open code, etc.). The result has been a radical change in the whole character of the field. These days, it feels like there is much less interest in trying to put together flashy or counterintuitive findings and much more interest in just getting things right.
In the early years of experimental philosophy, before all these reforms, I think we were going wrong in some pretty fundamental ways. There was just way too much emphasis on getting results that would be “fun” or “exciting” and way too little on finding the right answer. The inevitable outcome was a whole bunch of results that failed to replicate.
More recent experimental philosophy is doing all the right things to avoid the bad practices we used at that time, but we need to do more on one specific front. There are still too many papers citing studies from that early time that have failed to replicate. If we are getting evidence that something doesn’t actually happen, we need to stop thinking about the philosophical implications of it happening and start thinking about the implications of the fact that it doesn’t happen. (As a small step in that direction, I put together a page with information about recent results that refute claims from my own previous papers.)
(6) Which philosophical tradition, group, or individual do you think is most underrated by present-day philosophy?
Traditionally, I think a whole style or approach to philosophy was tragically underrated. Things are getting better on that front, but I worry that we haven’t yet gone far enough in changing our view about this style of philosophy.
A number of decades ago, there was a clear sense that your goal as a philosopher should be to articulate a big new philosophical view and then argue that everyone else is wrong and your new view is right. So there was a widespread understanding that you were supposed to have some paper where you say: “In this paper, I boldly introduce View X.” Then, over the course of the next few decades, you were supposed to keep saying that View X was right and defending it against all objections. Let’s refer to philosophers who do this as “View X-ers.”
The View X-ers always get a lot of attention, and they can sometimes manage to upstage the philosophers engaged in another, very different form of inquiry. The most noticeable fact about these other philosophers is that they are curious about philosophical questions. They are thinking about the big issues, but they aren’t wedded to any specific view about those issues. Instead, they are focused primarily on trying to think carefully about the evidence and what it suggests about the various different views. We can refer to these philosophers as the “Curious-ers.”
Traditionally, I think the Curious-ers were completely underrated. They did lots of fantastic work, but all the attention got sucked up by the View X-ers. Things are clearly beginning to change on that dimension – but we still have not gone far enough. We need even more love for the Curious-ers!
The Future
(7) How do you think philosophy as a whole will develop in the future?
Well, it’s always a little bit hard to predict the future, but it’s easy to see what direction philosophy is going in right now, so let’s start with that.
When I first joined the field, Anglo-American philosophy was very dominated by certain specific approaches, and every other approach was seen as marginal or peripheral. Work on certain issues in metaphysics was completely dominated by a tradition associated with Kripke and Lewis. Work in political philosophy was completely dominated by a tradition associated with Rawls. And so on.
At this point, twenty years later, all of that has changed. In so many different ways, the influence of that formerly-dominant approach is receding, and all sorts of other approaches are rising in importance. It’s not that any single other approach has come to dominate everything. Rather, it’s that the previously dominant approach is becoming ever less prominent, and in its place, we see a flowering of all sorts of new research programs.
This change in the discipline of philosophy more broadly has led to a corresponding change within experimental philosophy. If you look back at the experimental philosophy that was published in the early 2000s, it’s easy to see that a lot of it is aimed at engaging with the traditions that were so dominant at that time (e.g., using experimental studies to argue against ideas from those specific traditions), but since then, things have changed radically. It’s not so much that recent work offers a different view about those same old questions; it’s more that people’s interests have broadened in so many ways, and people are now exploring all sorts of new issues that are almost completely unrelated to what philosophers were so focused on back then.
If you look at what is happening in philosophy of language these days, you see a massive decline of interest in the more metaphysics-adjacent questions that were so dominant in the 20th century and an embrace of a huge array of new questions coming out of linguistics. Experimental philosophy of language has very much gone in this same direction. These days, you can see a wealth of new research coming out about all sorts of different detailed, linguistic questions (generics, presupposition projection, epistemic modals, thematic roles, lexical causatives, etc.). And the same applies elsewhere. Philosophy of law used to be dominated by a relatively narrow range of questions in general jurisprudence, but in recent years, we see an explosion of new research about all sorts of other questions. Experimental philosophy of law shows that same change. Recent experimental work has looked at the concept of consent, the concept of the reasonable person – a whole array of exciting empirical questions.
(8) What do you wish for the future of experimental philosophy?
As a way into this question, let’s start with an analogy. Consider what we might wish for the future of scholarship in non-Western philosophy. I think that if we reflect on this question, we can get some helpful insight into what we should want for the future of experimental philosophy.
When American philosophers first turn to non-Western philosophy, they sometimes start with a preconceived view about what the important philosophical questions are (roughly, the ones from Western philosophy) and then ask how non-Western philosophy can shed light on those questions. What a terrible idea! Clearly, a better approach would be to pick up some non-Western texts and then look with an open mind at what philosophical insights we can get by exploring those texts. But of course, this takes work. If you are trained in Western philosophy, the first things you think of are questions from Western philosophy, and it can be hard to learn to think differently.
I see experimental philosophy in the same way. When people first start doing experimental philosophy, the obvious first approach is to keep working away on a list of preconceived questions borrowed from non-experimental philosophy. In some cases, people even proceed by just literally taking thought experiments from the non-experimental literature and running experiments using those very thought experiments. Ultimately, it seems unlikely that this will be the best approach. The best approach, I think, is to look at the empirical phenomena and try to think about what is most philosophically important in them.
Of course, this takes work, and if you are trained in non-experimental philosophy, it might be quite difficult at first, but I hope we can keep going even farther in that direction.
(9) Do you have any interesting upcoming projects?
These days, I am working on a bunch of unrelated projects. Here are two that might be worth mentioning:
(1) Matthias Uhl and I are working on a project about the idea that people see certain sorts of environments as the natural environments for human beings. Looking around ourselves, we see plenty of people living in cities, working for corporations, hunched over their laptops as they scroll pictures of acquaintances on Instagram… but people seem to think that this is not the natural environment for a human being to live in. Instead, the natural environment might be something like: walking in a forest while talking in person with a close friend.
What we find is that people attach a special significance to whatever you do when you are in this natural environment. If you behave one way while you are at the office hunched over your laptop but you act a very different way when you are taking a walk in the forest, people think that the way you behave when you are in the forest is more reflective of your true self.
(2) Linas Nasvytis, Fiery Cushman, and I are working on a project about which possibilities naturally come to people’s minds. Suppose you try to imagine something a person could have for lunch. There is no right or wrong answer here; just think of whichever lunch first comes to mind. When people try to do this, they often find that the first thing that comes to mind is something that they see as good. This fact seems like it might reveal something fundamental about people’s representations of categories.
We put together a neural net that represents categories in a way that shows this very same effect. The neural net samples objects from a category, and when it does this, it tends to sample objects that it regards as good. Comparing this computational model to data from human cognition, we are getting at least some initial indication that it might be on the right track.
Needs are something that fundamentally defines us as human beings. In “Empirische Studien zu Fragen der Bedarfsgerechtigkeit” (Empirical Studies on Questions of Need-Based Distributive Justice), I recap a series of vignette studies that examine the role that needs play in dealing with problems of distributive justice. While needs are often underrepresented in discussions of distributive justice, they are shown to have a fundamental importance in people’s thinking.
Among other things, the following becomes clear:
Impartial observers make gradual assessments of the fairness of distributions.
These assessments depend on how well an individual is supplied with a relevant good.
If information on a need threshold is given, these assessments are made relative to this reference point. (Bauer et al. 2023a)
Impartial decision-makers consider need, productivity, and accountability when making hypothetical distribution decisions.
If an individual’s productivity is not sufficient to cover their needs, these higher needs are partially compensated for (at the expense of other individuals who are not so badly off)
Willingness to compensate decreases if an individual is accountable for having produced less or for needing more. (Bauer et al. 2022)
Both impartial observers and impartial decision-makers attribute different levels of importance to different kinds of needs.
This reveals a hierarchy of needs in the following order: Survival, Decency, Belonging, Autonomy. (Bauer et al. 2023b)
Literature
Bauer, Alexander Max, Frauke Meyer, Jan Romann, Mark Siebel, and Stefan Traub (2022): “Need, Equity, and Accountability. Evidence on Third-Party Distribution Decisions from a Vignette Study,” Social Choice and Welfare 59, 769–814. (Link)
Bauer, Alexander Max, Adele Diederich, Stefan Traub, and Arne Robert Weiss (2023a): “When the Poorest Are Neglected. A Vignette Experiment on Need-Based Distributive Justice,” SSRN Working Paper 4503209. (Link)
Bauer, Alexander Max, Jan Romann, Mark Siebel, and Stefan Traub (2023b): “Winter is Coming. How Laypeople Think About Different Kinds of Needs,” PLoS ONE 18 (11), e0294572. (Link)
Bauer, Alexander Max (2024): Empirische Studien zu Fragen der Bedarfsgerechtigkeit, Oldenburg: University of Oldenburg Press. (Link)
“The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy,” a new entry into the “De Gruyter Reference” series, brings together experimental philosophers from around the globe to provide interested readers with insights into many topics currently researched in X-Phi. See below for the table of contents.
Part 1 – The Philosophy of Experimental Philosophy
Bauer, Alexander Max, and Stephan Kornmesser (eds.) (2023): The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter. (Link)
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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