Category: Philosophy of Mind

Call: “Concept Formation”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Italian journal Arkete – Rivista annuale di studi filosofici is planning a special issue on “Concept Formation,” also taking empirical perspectives into account.

Abstracts for articles can be submitted until March 31. The call reads:

The nature and structure of concepts have been a central focus of philosophical inquiry for centuries. Understanding how humans develop and apply concepts is essential for various fields, including language, cognition, and reasoning. In recent times, advancements in cognitive science have revitalized these discussions by providing philosophers with empirical tools to more thoroughly investigate and refine these debates. This blend of philosophical theories and empirical findings has led to new insights and perspectives, deepening the understanding of conceptual structures and how they are formed.

Historically, the study of concepts has evolved through diverse philosophical lenses. From the abstract Forms of Plato to Aristotle’s empirical categorization, through the rationalist and empiricist debates of Descartes, Locke, and Hume, to Kant’s synthesis of innate structures and sensory experiences, each era has reshaped the discussion. In modern philosophy, thinkers such as Wittgenstein further transformed the understanding by linking concepts closely to language and its use within social practices.

In the current context, numerous hypotheses have been proposed to explain the essence and mechanisms of concepts. Philosophers have integrated findings from fields such as experimental psychology, cognitive anthropology, neuroscience, linguistics, and ethology to develop and test these ideas.

The Special Issue of Arkete 2024 aims to enrich this ongoing conversation by presenting diverse research and analyses.

Key questions for exploration in this issue include:

  • How does concept formation occur?
  • What are the primary characteristics of concept formation?
  • What role do empirical findings play in shaping our understanding of concept formation?
  • How does concept formation occur?
  • What are the primary characteristics of concept formation?
  • What role do empirical findings play in shaping our understanding of concept formation?
  • Identifying attributes
  • Grouping objects/events based on similarities and differences
  • Generalization and abstraction
  • Testing and refining hypotheses about categories
  • Impact of linguistic labels on concept acquisition
  • Cross-cultural variations in concept formation
  • Role of memory in concept learning
  • Neural networks and brain regions involved (e.g., prefrontal cortex, hippocampus)
  • Connectionist models
  • Misconceptions and cognitive biases
  • Influence of prior knowledge
  • Difficulty with abstract or counterintuitive concepts

Contributors are invited to submit articles for consideration. Submissions should be in English and must not exceed 40,000 characters, including notes and spaces.

Articles should be sent to: osservatorio.ethos@unisi.it.

Call (Extended): “The Many Faces of Expertise”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

This year’s “Jornadas Novatores” conference will take place at the University of Salamanca from February 27 to 28. This time, it will be all about expertise, and experimental philosophy will also be considered (see below). Invited speakers are Reiner Grundmann (University of Nottingham) and Michel Croce (University of Genoa).

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted before January 7. The call reads:

Jornadas Novatores is an annual 2-day conference dedicated to topics in philosophy of science and technology, but also open to contributions in related branches of philosophy, including epistemology, argumentation theory, philosophy of language and mind, feminist philosophy etc. The next edition of “Jornadas Novatores” invites contributions that advance research on the topic of expertise and its relation to a broad range of issues of social relevance.

The topic of expertise and expert knowledge has gained momentum in the last decade, and it now occupies a central position in philosophy. Many important issues related to the nature and social function of experts have been discussed in depth. The analysis of the concept has led to identifying levels of expert knowledge, and the debate about its nature has distinguished objective (knowledge-based) approaches from reputational or functional approaches, for which the credentials and social role are essential to the attribution of expertise. From an epistemological perspective, expertise is generally understood as a combination of theoretical knowledge, skills and experience, but the exact relation between them is still under discussion. In argumentation theory, the appeal to expert opinion is treated as a special kind of argument, the evaluation criteria and strength of which is a matter of dispute. The many social and political dimensions of the impact of expertise on democratic societies have also been addressed, including the intricate problem of the asymmetry of power and responsibility that comes with the distribution of expertise in society.

These discussions have also brought to light questions about expertise and expert knowledge that have received less attention. The main aim of our 2-day conference is to advance these discussions by including questions and methods of research that have remained peripheral to the central debates on expertise, as well as to build bridges between philosophical research on the topic and other perspectives. We seek proposals that critically examine topics such as, but not limited to, the following:

  • Gender bias and expertise
  • Cultural and social factors that influence the adscription of expertise
  • Experimental approaches to study of the nature of expertise and its attribution
  • Experts’ disagreement in the context of scientific and technological public controversies
  • Expertise and critical thinking
  • Testimonial injustice and trust in experts
  • The many forms of pseudo-expertise
  • Trust in experts and trust in social institutions
  • The relation between trust, expertise and regulatory science.

Participation

We invite abstract submissions for 30-minute talks (with 10 minutes for discussion in a 40-minute slot). Please send your proposals (around 1000 words long, excluding bibliography, and prepared for blind review) to jornadasnovatores@usal.es before 7th of January.

Second-Order Desires Are Not What Matters

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

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 to do heroin is not part of her true self – that Sandra’s true self is entirely on the other side of this inner conflict.

Now consider a reversed version of the classic thought experiment: Sandra has a visceral aversion to using heroin, but she wishes that she didn’t feel that way. Many of her friends are using heroin, and it’s clearly the easiest way to fit in with the people in her social group, so she wishes that she could stop feeling this aversion and just start using heroin like all her friends are. In this reversed case, do you have the same intuition? Does it seem like Sandra’s aversion to doing heroin is not part of her true self – that her true self is entirely on the other side of this inner conflict?

Within the philosophical literature, the usual view about the original version of this thought experiment is that the agent’s desire does not count as a part of her true self because she completely rejects this desire. Then a lot of the literature is about precisely how to cash out the broad idea that she is somehow rejecting a part of her own self (in terms of second-order desires, or in terms of identification, or in terms of her values, and so forth).

But none of this stuff has anything to do with the actual reason why we have this intuition! The reason we have the intuition that her desire isn’t part of her true self has nothing to do with the fact that she herself rejects this desire. Instead, it has everything to do with the fact that the desire in question is a desire to do heroin. There’s something about this specific desire that makes people think it is not part of the agent’s true self, and if we want to understand the way people ordinarily understand the true self, we need some way of making sense of this.

Within the literature in experimental philosophy and psychology, the usual view is that people think an agent’s true self is drawing that agent toward things that truly are good. Thus, if one part of the agent’s self is drawing the agent to use heroin and another part of the agent’s self is drawing the agent to refrain, people will have a general tendency to think that the part of the agent that is drawing her to use heroin is not her true self. This tendency doesn’t have anything to do with which part of the agent is the part that the agent herself rejects. Independent of anything like that, it is just a very fundamental tendency to think that the deeper essence of the agent is the part of her that is drawing her to the good.

As a result, experimental philosophy research finds that people show a general tendency to think that bad desires are less full part of the agent true self. In cases like the classic philosophical thought experiment, where the desire that the agent rejects is a desire to do something bad, people think that the desire that the agent rejects is not part of her true self. But in cases like the reversed version, where the desire that the agent rejects is a desire to do something good, people tend to think that this desire is a part of her true self.

This effect seems to connect with some much deeper philosophical issues that have nothing to do with second-order desires or anything like that. Basically, it seems like when people are thinking about what is most essential about an object, they tend to pick out what is good about that object. This isn’t just something about how they think about agents; it arises much more generally. For example, if you are reading an academic paper and you think that there is a lot of pointless stuff in it but that there is also an idea of genuine value, you will tend to think that the real essence of the paper is the valuable idea. And when people are thinking about what is most essential about the United States – what the United States is “really all about” – they tend to think about the good things about the United States. This is an important but mysterious phenomenon, and I don’t think we have a good understanding of it quite yet. It seems to involve some important connection in the ways people ordinarily think about essence, teleology and value.

But if we want to understand the role of things like reflective endorsement and second-order desires, then clearly, we need to be wary of looking at cases in which peoples intuition are determined by this other factor. Surely, it is cheating to look at cases in which the agent has a second-order desire not to do something that we ourselves regard as bad. If the action in question is something like doing heroin, then there’s an unrelated psychological process that will lead us to see the desire is not being part of the true self. If we want to understand the role of second-order desires per se, we should look at cases in which the desire itself is not something that we would independently see as particularly bad or good.

So let’s introduce a third case in which you have no independent ideas about whether the desire is good or bad: Sandra is an undergraduate student who is caught between two different majors, A and B. She has a strong desire to focus on major A, but when she reflects about what she is doing, she thinks that she should focus entirely on major B. Sometimes she finds herself staying up at night reading books related to A or writing in her journal about questions related to A, but when she thinks about it, she always concludes that this is a big mistake. She wants to stop wanting to study A so that she can focus on what she think she really ought to do, which is B. In this case, which of the two desires would you see as coming from Sandra’s true self? 

If you are like most people, then when faced with cases of this type, you specifically have the opposite of the intuition aligned with the traditional view. That is, when there are two desires such that one align with the agent’s unreflective urges and the other with the agent’s reflective endorsement, the desire associated with more reflective endorsement is seen as less part of her true self.

Given all this, why might people have had thought that there was some special connection between reflective endorsement and the true self? I don’t know the answer, but in closing, I want to briefly mention one speculative hypothesis. Perhaps the issue is that it just generally happens in life that we more often encounter cases like the classic philosophical experiment in the first paragraph of this post than cases like the reversed version in the second paragraph. That is, when we see an agent who has an unreflective urge toward a behavior but who completely rejects that behavior at a reflective level, we very frequently think that the behavior is something bad. As a result, we normally think that the desires that the agent rejects on reflection are not part of her true self.

But this is just a statistical correlation. Ultimately, second-order desires are not what matters. It’s not as though we have the intuition that these desires are not part of the agent’s true self because the agent wishes she didn’t have them. Rather, we have that intuition because the desires have a certain other quality, and that other quality happens to frequently arise in cases where people reject their own desires.

Changing Explanatory Theories vs. Changing Norms

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

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 in which you change people’s beliefs about gender and biology. A very different strategy would be to try to change prevailing norms. Some overtly sexist things were considered normal in the America of fifty years ago but are considered highly abnormal in America right now. So in a culture like today’s America, there might be certain sexist behaviors that almost never even come to mind as possible options.

The difference between these two approaches (theories vs. norms) is a very fundamental one. In this quick post, I want to focus on bringing out just one of the key differences. Changing people’s theories is the kind of thing one might be able to do in, say, 10 minutes. But changing norms is not like that. If you want to change the norms in a community, you can’t do it in 10 minutes. It’s the sort of thing you would hope to accomplish over the course of 10 years.

First, consider the point about theories. We are all familiar with times where we are wondering why something is happening, we read something that tells us the answer, and then we immediately adjust our explanatory theory. That’s just how theories work. The same point then arises for theories about social issues. At the moment, I have no idea why it is that such a high percentage of chess grandmasters are male. So if you presented me with a magazine article that provided strong evidence for a particular explanation, there’s a very good chance you could convince me. Over the course of 10 minutes or so, I might go from a state of having no idea why this happens to a state of being convinced by your explanatory theory. One might wonder whether this intervention would have any deep effect on my behavior, but at a minimum, it would successfully change my beliefs.

Changing norms is a fundamentally different type of process. If a given community has a norm of telling lots of sexist jokes, there’s no way you could possibly change that norm through a 10 minute intervention. That’s just not the way norms work. The process of changing a norm requires much more time and effort. As a simple illustration, there has recently been a change of norms that led to the use of preregistration, open data and open code, but that change took around a decade or so.

Of course, one might think it could be possible to have a quick intervention that led to a big change in people’s perceptions of the norms in their community, but studies indicate that this hope is also not warranted. There has been a lot of research about interventions that briefly tell people about the percentage of folks in their community who perform a particular behavior, but research finds that this sort of quick intervention rarely works. Presumably, the reason is that quickly telling people about certain percentages is not something that can change their representation of the community norm in the relevant sense.

With all this in the background, let’s now consider a very general hypothesis. I’m not sure whether the hypothesis is true, but I do think it is very much worth considering.

The hypothesis is that quick interventions like changing people’s explanatory theories just fundamentally do not work. If you want to do something that changes someone’s psychological states in a way that would lead that person to engage in less sexist behavior, there is no way you can do that through an intervention that lasts 10 minutes. The only things that work are large interventions like changing the norms within a community, which typically take years to complete.

Before the replication crisis, it certainly seemed as though we had lots of evidence that quick interventions on explanatory theories could yield large effects on behavior – but most of that evidence seems to be evaporating. Growth mindset interventions designed to change people’s explanatory theories about achievement don’t seem to lead to higher achievement. Interventions designed to change beliefs about free will don’t seem to impact cheating behavior. Interventions designed to change beliefs about genetics don’t seem to have much impact on judgments about punishment. Some recent studies indicate that interventions designed to reduce genetic essentialism don’t have any impact on prejudice.

One possible reaction to all of this would be that we haven’t yet found the exact right interventions on explanatory theories or the exact right downstream behaviors to measure… but another possible reaction would be that we are just fundamentally not looking in the right place.

Philosophy of Mind is Very Different Now

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

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 doing could be connected back to this “core” of the field.

Clearly, things have changed a lot. These days, people are working on all sorts of different things that don’t connect back in any obvious way to the short list of topics that so dominated the field a few decades ago.

But if you look at various institutions that govern the field, it seems that there is a lag. Many of the norms and institutions we have in place don’t really make sense given the way the field is right now. They are just holdovers from the way the field used to be.

I bet that many readers will agree with the very general point I’ve been making thus far, but there’s room for lots of reasonable disagreement about exactly where our norms are showing a lag and where things need changing. I thought it might be helpful to write this post just to start that conversation. I’m going to suggest a few specific things, but I’d be very open to alternative views.

1. These days, many people in philosophy of mind are engaged in a broadly empirical inquiry into questions about how some specific aspect of the mind actually works: how visual perception works, how racism works, how memory works, how emotions work, and so forth.

When these people apply for jobs in philosophy of mind, it feels like there’s often a vague feeling that what they are doing is somehow “marginal” or “peripheral,” that it doesn’t really fall in the core of the field. But this no longer makes any sense! Contrast a person who is an expert on all the latest experimental studies about implicit bias with a person who is doing purely a priori work in the metaphysics of mind. Given the way the field works right now, there is no sense in which the former is less at the core of things than the latter. To the extent that the latter is seen as having a special status, this is just a residue from the way things were decades ago.

2. People working in philosophy of mind often want to learn about the history of the philosophy of mind. But what exactly is this history? For example, of all the things that Spinoza wrote, what should we call “Spinoza’s philosophy of mind”?

The traditional answer was basically: Of all the things that people in the history of philosophy wrote about the mind, the only ones that count as “history of philosophy of mind” are the ones that relate to the narrow list of questions discussed in late 20th century analytic philosophy. This involved excluding almost everything that figures in the history of philosophy said about the mind.

But again, this doesn’t make sense anymore. If people want to look at Spinoza’s philosophy of mind, I fear they would tend to look only at the discussion of the mind-body problem in Ethics, Book 2, i.e., the part that connects to this stuff discussed in 20th century philosophy of mind. But this is such a narrow way of thinking about discussions of the mind in the history of philosophy. Surely, Spinoza’s contributions to philosophy of mind go way beyond that; it’s just that most of his contributions are about how various specific things in the mind work. So these contributions might not be very closely related to things that philosophers of mind were working on in 1994, but they are extremely closely related to various things that philosophers of mind are working on in 2024.

3. Knowledge of mathematical or formal work is often helpful in philosophy, but we recognize that philosophers cannot possibly master all of the different formal methods that might be relevant to them in their work. So we always face questions of the form: Given that philosophers can’t know everything that would possibly be relevant, which methods do they absolutely need to know?

Now consider a graduate student working in philosophy of mind, and suppose that this student could either (a) take a course in logic but never take any courses in statistics or (b) take a course in statistics but never take any courses in logic.

It feels like there’s a norm in the field that (a) is more acceptable than (b). But does that really make sense anymore? I certainly agree that this is the background that would have been more essential a few decades ago, but if you look at what philosophers of mind are doing right now, it seems that statistics is used much more often than logic.

4. We have certain norms about which things philosophers are allowed to remain ignorant about and which they absolutely have to know. For example, a moral philosopher might say: “I am a consequentialist, and I think that non-consequentialist theories are mistaken.” But we would find it completely unacceptable for a moral philosopher to say: “I am a consequentialist, so I don’t know anything about recent work in non-consequentialist theories. I couldn’t even teach those theories at an undergraduate level.”

A question now arises about which norms would make sense in contemporary philosophy of mind. In many parts of philosophy of mind, the majority of people are using some kind of empirical approach, while a minority are using purely a priori approaches. We can imagine a person saying: “I am pursuing these questions using purely a priori methods, and I think it is a mistake to use empirical methods to address them.” But suppose someone said: “I don’t know anything about recent empirical studies on these questions. In fact, I couldn’t even teach a class about these studies at an undergraduate level.” Should we regard this sort of ignorance as acceptable? And if we do regard it as acceptable right now, might that just be a holdover from norms that really did make sense thirty years ago?

Again, I certainly don’t mean to be dogmatic about any of these four points, and I also don’t mean to suggest that these are the four most important areas in which we are facing a lag. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree about these for specific things, it does seem that the field has changed considerably, and I would love to hear your thoughts about how our norms should be evolving in light of that.

Call: “Agency and Intentions in Language”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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.

Workshop: “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, continues. They write:

We are looking forward to the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The workshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. Except for the opening keynote session, all sessions will have two presentations. Please email to register and receive the links (by the day before the session you hope to attend would be ideal).

October 9, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Shaun Nichols (Cornell University): “The PSR and the Folk Metaphysics of Explanation”

November 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Monica Ding (King’s College London): “Non-Factive Understanding – Evidence from English, Cantonese, and Mandarin”
  • María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “Digital Interventions to Boost Vaccination Intention – A Report”

December 11, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Elis Jones (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research): “The Problem of Baselining – Philosophy, History, and Coral Reef Science”
  • April H. Bailey (University of Edinburgh) and Nicholas DiMaggio (University of Chicago Booth School of Business): “Of Minds and Men”

January 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Ajinkya Deshmukh (The University of Manchester) and Frederique Janssen-Lauret (The University of Manchester): “Reincarnation and Anti-Essentialism – An Argument Against the Essentiality of Material Origins”
  • Ethan Landes (University of Kent) and Justin Sytsma (Victoria University of Wellington): “LLM Simulated Data – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

February 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė (University of Cambridge), Jasmina Stevanov (University of Cambridge), Ryan P. Doran (University of Cambridge), Katherine A. Symons (University of Cambridge), and Simone Schnall (University of Cambridge): “Transformed by Beauty – Exploring the Influence of Aesthetic Appreciation on Abstract Thinking”
  • Poppy Mankowitz (University of Bristol): “Experimenting With ‘Good’”

March 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Kathryn Francis (University of Leeds), Maria Ioannidou (University of Bradford), and Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh): “Does Dietary Identity Influence Moral Anthropocentrism?”
  • Jonathan Lewis (University of Manchester), James Toomey (University of Iowa), Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada), and Brian D. Earp (National University of Singapore): “Normative Authority, Epistemic Access, and the True Self”

Hot Off The Press: “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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”
  • Rebecca Zhu, Mariel Goddu, and Alison Gopnik: “Providing Explanations Shifts Preschoolers’ Metaphor Preferences”
  • Adrian Ziólkowski and Tomasz Zyglewicz: “Truth-Conditional Variability of Color Ascriptions”
  • Joshua Alexander and Jonathan M. Weinberg: “Practices Make Perfect – On Minding Methodology When Mooting Metaphilosophy”
  • Nat Hansen, Kathryn Francis, and Hamish Greening: “Socratic Questionnaires”
  • N. Ángel Pinillos: “Bank Cases, Stakes and Normative Facts”
  • Jon Bebb and Helen Beebee: “Causal Selection and Egalitarianism”
  • Kevin Reuter: “Experimental Philosophy of Consciousness”

Literature

Knobe, Joshua, and Shaun Nichols (eds.) (2024): Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, volume 5, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Link)

Hot Off The Press: “The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

“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

Part 2 – Topics from Theoretical Philosophy

Part 3 – Topics from Practical Philosophy

Literature

Bauer, Alexander Max, and Stephan Kornmesser (eds.) (2023): The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter. (Link)