A few decades ago, it was pretty common to mush together priming effects and framing effects and see them as two closely connected parts of a single Bigger Truth about the human mind. Of course, everyone understood that the effects themselves were a bit different, but one common view was that they were providing evidence…
Author: Joshua Knobe
Do People Think That Free Will Is Incompatible with Determinism?
Imagine a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by the things that happened before. Suppose, for example, that Mia has a bagel for breakfast. Her act of having a bagel for breakfast would be caused by the way things were right before that, which would be caused by the way things were…
Call: “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy”
The “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy” series, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Ángel Pinillos, Joshua Knobe, and Shaun Nichols, is now calling for papers for its sixth volume. The series joins other successful series in the “Oxford Studies in…” collection, which bring together original articles on all aspects of their respective topics. “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy” features…
How People Cite Old Papers in Philosophy vs. Psychology
Philosophers and psychologists have very different practices when it comes to citing papers that were written decades ago. In philosophy, the norm is that you are supposed to carefully read those papers and accurately explain what they say. By contrast, in psychology, people typically make less of an effort to accurately summarize the ideas in…
In What Sense are Generics Normative?
Suppose you see a teacher speaking to a student in an insulting or degrading way. You might go up to the teacher and say: “What are you doing? That’s not what a teacher does when students are having trouble.” And then you might say: Here you are using a special type of sentence called a…
Second-Order Desires Are Not What Matters
Here’s a classic philosophical thought experiment: Sandra is struggling with an addiction to heroin. She desperately wants another hit, but she wishes she didn’t. She wishes that she could stop craving heroin and that she could start living a very different life. Faced with this thought experiment, many people have the intuition that Sandra’s desire…
The Power of Norms
In many communities, there is a shared sense that if someone disses you, it is pretty normal to react by punching them. But academia is not like that. In academia, if someone disses your research, it would be considered wildly abnormal to react by punching them. This shared understanding then has a very large impact…
Changing Explanatory Theories vs. Changing Norms
Suppose you want to do something to decrease the amount of sexist behavior in the world. One thing you might do is try to change people’s explanatory theories. Perhaps you think that sexism is caused in part by people seeing certain outcomes as the result of a biological essence. You might then try an intervention…
Philosophy of Mind is Very Different Now
A few decades ago, it felt like almost the entire field of philosophy of mind was focused on a pretty narrow range of questions (the mind-body problem, consciousness, the nature of intentionality, etc.). Insofar as anyone wanted to work on anything else, they often justified those interests by trying to explain how what they are…
Brief Changes to the Situation Don’t Have Much Impact on Judgments
There’s a certain kind of study we used to see all the time. The researchers ask all participants to make a judgment regarding the exact same question, but then they vary something in the external situation. They change the temperature in the room. Or the song that is playing in the background. Or they do…