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…
Teaching Experimental Philosophy to Beginners (Part 2)
In a previous post, I wrote about a course (which I taught together with Stephan Kornmesser in the summer term of 2024) for master’s students who had no previous contact with X-Phi at all. After learning some methodological and statistical basics and conducting their own small replication of Knobe (2003), they had the opportunity to…
Call (Extended): “The Many Faces of Expertise”
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…
Call: “Method and Convergence 2025”
Organized by the research project “Appearance and Reality in Physics and Beyond,” this year’s “Method and Convergence” conference will take place at the University of Helsinki from June 25 to 27, bringing “together thinkers exploring philosophical methodology from different viewpoints. The focus is on the question of what kind of methodology could foster progress in…
The 2024 X-Phi Blog Recap
It’s the last day of the year; time for a little recap of the blog. After the “New Experimental Philosophy Blog” by Justin Sytsma, Joe Ulatowski, and Dan Weijers sadly went offline around the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024, this blog stepped in, starting with a repost of The Revolver Case Revisited…
Call: “Basel-Oxford-NUS BioXPhi Summit 2025”
Organized by the University of Basel’s Institute for Biomedical Ethics, the University of Oxford’s Uehiro Oxford Institute, and the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics, next year’s “Experimental Philosophical Bioethics Summit” will take place in Basel from June 25 to 27. Confirmed keynote speakers are Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh) and Edmond Awad…
Call: “New – Experimental – Perspectives on Valence in Language”
Anouch Bourmayan, Pascal Ludwig, and Morgan Moyer are organizing a “Valence in Language” workshop at Sorbonne Université on June 13, 2025. Invited speakers are Diana Mazzarella (Université de Neuchâtel), Joshua Knobe (Yale University), and Nicole Gotzner (University of Osnabrück). Abstracts for talks can be submitted before February 28, 2025. The call reads: It is widely…
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…