Category: Philosophy of Mind

Priming Effects Are Fake, but Framing Effects Are Real

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

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 for the same larger picture. That larger picture said: People’s judgments are radically unstable, easily pushed around by subtle and almost unnoticeable factors.

Things have changed so much since then. Priming research in social psychology has experienced a series of truly spectacular replication failures, while research on framing effects continues to look very solid. In light of this change, we should rethink our understanding of what framing effects show about human cognition. We shouldn’t see them as part of a larger picture that also includes priming. We need an understanding of framing that allows us to situate it within a larger picture, according to which priming effects are not real.

The priming literature seemed to be showing that people’s judgment and decision-making are highly unstable and can be easily shifted around by small manipulations of the external situation. The thought was that if you just happen to be holding a hot coffee, or sitting at a dirty desk, or in a room that includes a picture of dollar bills, your whole way of thinking about things will be shifted in some fundamental respect. For example, you will end up making deeply different moral judgments.

The key lesson of more recent research is simple: these priming effects do not occur. More generally, we cannot shift people’s moral judgments around in some radical way just by making subtle changes in their situation. Your moral judgments will not shift around completely if you are seated at a dirty desk. That is not how the human mind works.

Okay, with all of that in mind, let’s rethink framing effects. For concreteness, we can focus on a famous study from Tversky and Kahneman (1981). In this study, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Participants in the gain framing condition read the following case:

A disease is expected to kill 600 people. You can choose between two options:

  • If you choose the first option, 200 people will be saved.
  • If you choose the second option, there is one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that 0 people will be saved.

Meanwhile, participants in the loss framing condition read:

A disease is expected to kill 600 people. You can choose between two options:

  • If you choose the first option, 400 people will die.
  • If you choose the second option, there is one-third probability that 0 people will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.

Clearly, the two descriptions are logically equivalent, but they tend to yield very different responses. Participants tend to be risk-averse in the first case, risk-seeking in the second.

During the heyday of priming research, many of us thought that this sort of effect should be understood within a larger picture of the mind that also included priming. Basically, the idea was something like this: “People’s judgments about a case can be shifted around but all sorts of little things, including everything from the decor in the room to the precise words used to describe it.” But in light of everything we know now, we need to revisit this view. Framing effects are very real, but that larger picture seems to be mistaken. We need to understand framing effects within a larger picture of the mind, according to which people’s judgments don’t just shift around randomly as a result of all sorts of little factors.

I’d be very open to different views about what the right picture is, but just as a first step in this direction, let’s consider a picture that emerges not from social psychology but rather from very traditional work in philosophy. This picture says that people often have a collection of different intuitions that are mutually inconsistent. These intuitions need not be unstable in any way. It might be that each individual intuition is completely stable; it’s just that the different intuitions contradict each other.

To illustrate, consider intuitions about free will. I might find myself having the following three intuitions: (a) All human behavior is completely explained by genes and environment, (b) If a person’s behavior is completely explained by genes and environment, that person’s behavior is not performed with free will, (c) Some human behaviors are performed with free will. These three intuitions are mutually inconsistent, so they cannot all be right. However, this does not mean that people’s free will intuitions have to be unstable in any way.

On the contrary, a single individual could easily have all three intuitions at the same time. For example, as a philosopher, I might start out a paper by explaining that each of these three claims seems intuitively to be true, that they are mutually inconsistent and hence cannot all be right, and that we therefore face an interesting philosophical problem. Alternatively, someone might simply have each of these three intuitions, but without noticing that they contradict each other. In such a case, the person would be failing to notice something important, but that would not mean that the person’s intuitions were unstable. Each of the three intuitions might be perfectly stable; it’s just that the three intuitions are not consistent.

Some philosophical problems seem to have very much the structure we see in framing effects. Consider the philosophical problem of moral luck. The problem starts with three intuitions: (a) An agent who doesn’t bring about any bad outcomes deserves relatively little blame, (b) An agent who performs the exact same behavior but who ends up bringing about a bad outcome deserves a lot of blame, (c) If the agent performs the exact same behavior in two cases and the only difference is in the outcome that ends up occurring, that difference by itself cannot be relevant to how much blame the agent deserves. I myself have all three of these intuitions. Since the intuitions are mutually inconsistent, they cannot all be right, but that does not mean that my intuitions are unstable. Each of the three intuitions is completely stable and emerges in all situations; it’s just that the three intuitions are in tension with each other.

Let’s now return to framing effects. In the days when it seemed like priming was real, I totally see why researchers would think that framing was a lot like priming. But in light of subsequent studies, maybe we should see it in a completely different way. Framing does not involve people’s judgments being unstable; it instead involves people having different intuitions that are mutually inconsistent.

Take the example described above. Looking at that example, I have the following three intuitions: (a) The correct answer in the first case is to take the non-risky option, (b) The correct answer in the second case is to take the risky option, and (c) It cannot possibly be the case that the correct answer in the first case is different from the correct answer in the second case. These three intuitions are mutually inconsistent, so they cannot all be right. However, each individual intuition can be perfectly stable. In fact, thinking about the problem right now, I find myself having all three intuitions at the same time.

Turning the traditional view about framing effects upside down, one might even see framing effects as an extreme case of stability. Just as we continue to experience a visual illusion even when we know that it is illusory, we continue to have the inconsistent intuitions that together constitute a framing effect even when we know that they cannot all be right.

[I discuss this issue in this paper, but please feel free to respond to this blog post even if you haven’t looked at the full paper.]

Do People Think That Free Will Is Incompatible with Determinism?

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

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 right before that… all the way back to the very beginning of the universe. In this universe, can anyone ever be morally responsible for anything they do?

If you just ask people this question, the overwhelming majority say “No.” This answer seems to align with the philosophical view called incompatibilism – the view that no one can ever be morally responsible for anything they do in a deterministic universe. So the most straightforward way of understanding this result is that people have an incompatibilist intuition.

But some of my fellow experimental philosophers reject this straightforward interpretation. They say that what’s really going on in this case is that people are misunderstanding the question. On this view, when people get a little story about a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by what happened before, they don’t correctly understand what is going on in the story. So the take-home message is not that people have incompatibilist intuitions; it is that we need to change our experimental materials so that people understand them better.

The experimental philosophers who argue for this claim have conducted an impressive program of research. Basically, the key findings come from studies in which researchers present participants with a story about a deterministic universe and then ask questions about what life would be like in the universe. If you do this, you find that people give very extreme answers. People say that life in a deterministic universe would be radically different in all sorts of ways. Most philosophers think that these extreme answers are not true, meaning that people are going wrong in some important respect here.

Okay, so far, so good. If you give people a story about a deterministic universe and ask them what life would be like in that universe, they say some very extreme things that we have good reason to regard as false. But what does that show when it comes to the question about what people really think?

In my opinion, it does not show that we should switch over to different experimental materials. Instead, it suggests that people genuinely do have very extreme views about determinism. If we found a way to switch over to different materials that did not yield these extreme views, we would be switching over to materials that were less accurate in giving us an understanding of what people really think.

Let’s consider an analogy. Suppose we are running studies to understand people’s attitudes about abortion. Now suppose some of our participants say that abortion results in the fetus’s soul going straight to hell, to be tortured for all eternity. We might think that this is a catastrophically false understanding of what abortion is like, but we should not change our study materials to make people stop giving this response. This response is accurately revealing what some people believe about abortion. My point is that the results we get in studies about free will and determinism should be understood in much the same way.

Looking at the actual experimental results, what one sees is that when people are given a story about a deterministic universe, they think that nothing even approaching normal human agency would be possible in this universe. Most strikingly, if you ask them whether the actions of people in this universe depend on their beliefs and values, they explicitly say “No.” In other words, they seem to have a sense that a person living in a deterministic universe would do exactly the same thing even if she had different beliefs and values. (This is such an interesting result! It was first uncovered in the classic paper by Murray and Nahmias linked above, but it has subsequently been replicated in tons of further research.)

Importantly, people only apply this intuition to human actions and not to other types of objects. For example, suppose you instead tell them about a computer and ask whether the computer’s output depends on its data and code. You then get the opposite response. Although people say that a human being’s actions would not depend on her beliefs and values, they say that a computer’s output would depend on its data and code.

The most natural way to interpret this result is that people think that the processes underlying human action are radically different from the processes underlying a computer’s output. If everything were determined, the computer could still work fine, but human action would be fundamentally disrupted.

Further studies suggest that people think certain kinds of actions would be possible in a deterministic universe while others would not. For example, people think it would be possible in a deterministic universe for someone to have a craving for ice cream and then give into it and buy some ice cream, but people think it wouldn’t be possible for someone to have a craving but then resist it and not buy the ice cream.

The most natural way to understand this pattern of judgments is that people have a very extreme incompatibilist view. Not only do they think that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility, they think that determinism is incompatible with the ordinary sort of human agency you might show in resisting a craving for ice cream. To really get to the bottom of this, we should be running further studies that help us understand why people see human agency in this way.

In saying this, I am departing from the usual view within my field. That usual view is that if we find people saying stuff like this, we must be making some kind of error in the way we are designing our studies. So the thought is that we should keep adjusting our experimental materials until we can get people to espouse a view about them that seems more philosophically kosher.

This reaction seems so mistaken to me! We are finding something super interesting here. It might not be what we expected to find when we first started working on these issues, but that just makes it all the more intriguing.

Call: “ESPP 2025”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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:

  1. A list of 3 or 4 speakers which indicates representation of at least two disciplines (individual speakers may also represent multiple disciplines).
  2. A general abstract of up to 500 words, laying out the topics to be addressed and indicating connections among the talks.
  3. 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.

Job: “PhD Scholarships in Neurophilosophy” (Munich, Germany)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Graduate School of Systemic Neuroscience (GSN) at the University of Munich offers PhD scholarships in neurophilosophy.

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:

In addition to the application form, please submit a short exposé (max. 3000 words) that

  • gives an outline of your main project
  • explains how your project fits with the focus topic or one of the other topics listed in the call for applications
  • names two or three potential supervisors (at least two in the GSN faculty)
  • sketches an interdisciplinary cooperation project (an empirical study that relates to your theoretical work)

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.