On Monday, November 4, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+2), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Nicolás Lo Guercio’s talk “Maximize Expressivity!” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:
In interpreting utterances language users frequently compare the sentence used by the speaker with a set of alternative sentences that she could have used instead. Arguably, such comparison can have a significant impact on the interpretation, the grammaticality, or the felicity of the utterance. In this talk I focus on scalar inferences, alternative-based inferences that arise as a result of the comparison between sentences mainly in terms of their informativeness. In this regard, a lot of research has focused on scalar implicatures and anti-presuppositions, where the hearer compares alternatives regarding their at-issue and presuppositional content respectively. To my knowledge, however, no attention has been paid to differences in informativeness regarding expressive meaning, arguably a type of non-presuppositional, non-at-issue content. Thus, for example, the sentence “That idiot Nicolás lost his keys” is intuitively more informative than “Nicolás lost his keys” in terms of its expressive content. The question arises whether expressives may license expressive scalar inferences (ESIs) parallel to scalar implicatures and anti-presuppositions, and under what circumstances. In this talk I argue, based on the discussion of epithets and certain honorifics (e.g., the Spanish honorific ‘don’) that expressive utterances may license ESIs under the right circumstances, and I suggest that the data can be accounted for by postulating a principle called Maximize expressivity! Some expressives, however, e.g. expressive adjectives and group pejoratives, do not seem to license ESIs. In the second part of the talk I attempt to account for these apparent counterexamples in a way that is compatible with Maximize expressivity!: on the one hand, I maintain that expressive adjectives do not license ESIs because of the particularities of their semantics; on the other hand, I contend that group pejoratives do not license ESIs because they are (sociolinguistically) marked.
The talk can be joined using Zoom. Please write an email to stalnetwork@gmail.com for the invitation link.
From October 25 to 26, the workshop “Methodological Trends and Challenges in Contemporary Philosophy,” organized by Martin Justin, Maja Malec, Olga Markič, Nastja Tomat, and Borut Trpin, will take place at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The announcement reads:
Contemporary analytic philosophers have expanded their methodological toolkit beyond traditional philosophical inquiry, embracing a wide array of approaches that intersect with various disciplines. These methods include (but are not limited to) experimental approaches, which involve empirical testing and data collection to inform philosophical hypotheses; non-idealized and naturalized epistemology, which considers the real-world complexities of knowledge acquisition and justification; computer simulations and probabilistic modeling, which enable philosophers to explore complex systems and uncertainties in reasoning; neuroscientific methods, which offer insights into the neural underpinnings of cognitive processes and decision-making; formal ontology, which provides rigorous frameworks for analyzing concepts and categories; conceptual engineering, which involves the deliberate design and modification of conceptual frameworks to address philosophical problems; evolutionary modeling, which investigates the emergence and evolution of cognitive capacities and norms; and feminist perspectives, which critically examine power dynamics and social structures in philosophical discourse.
The upcoming workshop aims to delve into these methodological trends, showcasing recent research that employs these diverse approaches and addressing the challenges and opportunities they present for contemporary philosophy. Over the course of two days, the workshop will feature a total of 14 talks, evenly distributed with 7 talks scheduled for each day. Each keynote talk will span 75 minutes, while contributed talks will be allocated 45 minutes. This workshop seeks to enrich our understanding of contemporary philosophical inquiry and inspire new avenues of research.
October 25, 9:00–17:30 (UTC+2)
Jan Sprenger (University of Turin): “Semantic Modeling between Empirical Data and Norms of Rationality”
Olga Markič (University of Ljubljana): “Roles of Philosopher in Interdisciplinary Research”
Timothy Tambassi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice): “Is Extensible Markup Language Perspectivist?”
Thomas Engeland (University of Bonn): “What Would Methodological Naturalism in Ethics Be?”
Paweł Polak (Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow) and Roman Krzanowski (Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow): “Ethics in Silico – Computer Modeling of Ethical Concepts in Autonomous AI Systems”
Michal Hladky (University of Geneva): “End of Logical Positivism? #toosoon”
Rafal K. Stepien (Austrian Academy of Sciences): “The Absent Elephant – Non-Western Methods in Contemporary Philosophy”
October 26, 9:00–16:45 (UTC+2)
Borut Trpin (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Maribor, and University of Ljubljana): “Revisiting Epistemic Coherence From A Posterior-Probability Perspective”
Martin Justin (University of Maribor): “The Value of Social Coherence in Science – An Agent-Based-Modelling Exploration”
Raimund Pils (University of Salzburg): “Integrating Empirical Research and Philosophical Theorizing on the Scientific Realism Debate for Science Reporting”
Juan de Jager (University of Ljubljana): “Making Porosity More Porous – An Open Call for Brainstorming After Tanya Luhrmann’s Recent Findings”
Danilo Šuster (University of Maribor): “Open-Mindedness and the Appeal to Ignorance”
Nastja Tomat (University of Ljubljana): “Bounded Epistemic Rationality as a Link Between the Normative and the Descriptive”
Dunja Šešelja (Ruhr University Bochum): “When Expert Judgment Fails – Epistemic Trespassing and Risks to Collective Inquiry”
On Monday, October 14, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+2), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Matteo Colombo and Giovanni Cassani’s talk “In the Thick of It – Do Thick Terms Constitute a Distinctive Class of Affectively-Charged Language?” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:
Words like “courageous”, “clever”, “gullible”, “smelly” and “tasty” are examples of what philosophers call thick terms, which have a significant degree of descriptive content and are evaluatively loaded, too. Thick terms have been contrasted with purely evaluative terms like “good”, “bad”, “positive” and “negative”, and descriptive terms like “Dutch”, “tall” and “pink”. Despite the amount of attention thick terms have received in philosophy, however, it is unclear whether they constitute a homogeneous class of evaluative terms with characteristic psycholinguistic properties, and whether the psycholinguistic properties of thick terms are reducible to their “valence norms” (i.e., the degree of pleasantness/unpleasantness elicited by a word). In this talk, we explore these two questions based on computational modelling and behavioural data in English, Dutch and Italian. Our results indicate that, compared to other affectively-charged words, thick terms have characteristic psycholinguistic and information properties irreducible to valence norms.
The talk can be joined using Zoom. Please write an email to stalnetwork@gmail.com for the invitation link.
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.
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”
On Monday, September 23, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+2), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Bianca Cepollaro, Filippo Domaneschi, and Isidora Stojanovic’s talk “Slurs Across Syntactic Realizations – Experimental Evidence on Predicative vs. Ad-Nominal Uses of Slurs” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:
The research on slurs has been largely striving to understand how slurs encode their pejorative meaning – whether via truth-conditional meaning, or conventional implicature, or presupposition, or otherwise. Less attention has been paid to the question of what kind of pejorative content slurs express or convey. It is the latter question that we undertake in the present talk, and we do so by means of an experimental study conducted over slurring terms in Italian, in line with our earlier studies on pejoratives in Italian (“When is it ok to call someone a jerk? An experimental investigation of expressives”, Synthese 2020, and “Literally ‘a jerk’: an experimental investigation of expressives in predicative position”, Language and Cognition, forthcoming). We explore three options: (1) pejorative content is agent-oriented, that is, reflects the negative attitudes of some salient agent, typically the speaker; (2) pejorative content is target-oriented, that is, brings to salience the negative properties of the person(s) referred to with the slur; (3) pejorative content is intersubjective, that is, reflects the negative attitudes of not only the agent but further conversational participants, or even a larger linguistic community. Crucially, we look at slurs both in predicative position (X is a -slur-) and adnominal position (That -slur- X is Y). Our results show that the agent-oriented option is the preferred one for adnominal uses, while the target-oriented option, for predicative uses: this suggests that the pejorative content encoded by slurs is not uniform but varies along a syntactic dimension.
The talk can be joined using Zoom. Please write an email to stalnetwork@gmail.com for the invitation link.
“Experimental Philosophy for Beginners,” a new entry into the “Springer Graduate Texts in Philosophy” series, just hit the shelves. It provides an essential extension of x-phi-tailored introductions to methods and guides readers through the whole research process using different case studies. The book offers online materials so readers can immediately apply what they have read. See below for the table of contents.
Stephan Kornmesser, Alexander Max Bauer, Mark Alfano, Aurélien Allard, Lucien Baumgartner, Florian Cova, Paul Engelhardt, Eugen Fischer, Henrike Meyer, Kevin Reuter, Justin Sytsma, Kyle Thompson, and Marc Wyszynski: “Introduction – Setting Out for New Shores”
Kornmesser, Stephan, Alexander Max Bauer, Mark Alfano, Aurélien Allard, Lucien Baumgartner, Florian Cova, Paul Engelhardt, Eugen Fischer, Henrike Meyer, Kevin Reuter, Justin Sytsma, Kyle Thompson, and Marc Wyszynski (2024): Experimental Philosophy for Beginners. A Gentle Introduction to Methods and Tools, Cham: Springer. (Link)
In our “Faces of X-Phi” series, experimental philosophers from all around the globe answer nine questions about the past, present, and future of themselves and the field. Who would you like to see here in the future? Just leave a suggestion in the comments! Today, we present Ivar Rodríguez Hannikainen.
The Past
(1) How did you get into philosophy in the first place?
I started out studying music as an undergrad. I loved playing guitar but then quickly became disillusioned with the prospect of a career in music. Then I took a couple of philosophy classes and found myself really enjoying them. But the kind of philosophy I was attracted to then was pretty different from what I most enjoy now: It involved diagnosing the ills of present-day capitalism and calling for a radical ontological/metaphysical shift to uproot the cause of all social and political evils.
(2) And how did you end up doing experimental philosophy?
I had been doing theoretical metaethics during my MA in Madrid, writing about whether moral judgments are inherently motivating or not. Then, in my first week as a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, I was extremely lucky that Stephen Laurence had organized a conference with a line-up of excellent philosophers, psychologists, and economists. I asked Fiery Cushman a few questions after his talk, and that developed into the opportunity to visit the Moral Psychology Research Lab at Harvard. I had no experience whatsoever running experiments, but Fiery was the best mentor you could possibly ask for. Then, back in Sheffield, Steve would get me thinking about how the empirical work we were doing brought to bear on questions in philosophy. So, it was a combination of luck and Steve and Fiery’s diligence and mentorship.
(3) Which teachers or authors have influenced you the most on your philosophy journey – and how?
Besides Steve and Fiery, Blanca Rodríguez López and Noel Struchiner had a huge influence on me. Blanca turned me on to empirically-informed ethics when I was an MA student in Madrid and I wasn’t sure whether there was a place for me in philosophy. Years later, Noel proposed many of the ideas about how moral psychology underpins the law that have become a focus of my research and helped to establish what we now call experimentaljurisprudence.
The Present
(4) Why do you consider experimental philosophy in its present form important?
For two reasons.
The first has to do with communication and understanding. We all know the disappointing feeling of sitting through a talk (or being halfway through a paper) thinking, “I have no idea what this is about,” and being unable to engage. Then there is its mirror image: the frustration at the end of your own talk as you realize that, despite your best efforts, you did not make yourself understood. It’s sad because we all devote so much time and energy to carrying out this work, and a big reason to do so is so we can share it with our peers. In my opinion, experimental philosophy helps overcome this problem (as do many other disciplines) by establishing a regimented language. This language allows people to convey hours upon hours of intellectual labor in a 20-minute talk pretty effectively. It’s kind of miraculous and very rewarding to participate in that kind of exchange.
The second reason is the democratizing aspect of experimental philosophy. There are many influential publications authored by scholars from underrepresented countries and lower-ranking institutions – and I suspect this is because there is less weight placed on the name tag and the institution, and more on the ideas and the work themselves. Though, of course, things could always be better in this regard.
(5) Do you have any critical points to make about experimental philosophy in its current state?
My criticisms are along the lines of this, this, and this. These are criticisms I direct at my own research, and I think many experimental philosophers are already acutely aware of these issues. But maybe it’s worth saying anyway.
Experimental philosophy grew out of a concern about the limitations of the introspective (N = 1) method of elaborating on one’s own philosophical intuitions. As experimental philosophers, most of us probably rehash this concern over and over again when we introduce students to experimental philosophy or answer questions about what X-Phi is. That’s all well and good, but what are the limitations of that study you or I are working on right now in 2024? For the field to continue to develop, we should remain vigilant in this sense.
Here are just three examples of how people are doing this already:
There is the concern that our experiments may not accurately capture how people use concepts spontaneously, which has led to an uptick in natural language processing research (see the work of Lucien Baumgartner or Piotr Bystranowski).
There is the concern that what we have learned about folk morality, for example, based on people’s self-reports, may not have much to do with their actual behavior. Work by Kathryn Francis and Eric Schwitzgebel, among others, has contributed greatly to this question.
And, of course, the concern that existing studies, most of which nowadays are conducted in English on Prolific, may not represent people’s intuitions and philosophical concepts in other languages or in non-Western cultures. As everyone knows, the cross-cultural work of Steve Stich and Edouard Machery (together with dozens of collaborators around the world) has been extremely fruitful in this regard.
(6) Which philosophical tradition, group, or individual do you think is most underrated by present-day philosophy?
Possibly every philosophical tradition that developed outside the mainstream European and English-speaking countries. There has to be so much neglected philosophy throughout history simply because it was written in a minority language. The Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy draw attention to a related problem that affects contemporary scholars. It also impacts up-and-coming students of philosophy who may be discouraged from going into academia by the thought that they won’t be able to convey their ideas as eloquently as they’d like.
The Future
(7) How do you think philosophy as a whole will develop in the future?
That is a hard question, so my answer is probably wrong, but I can offer some wild speculation: Philosophy will shift from being thought of as a discipline with a proprietary set of topics to being thought of as an approach or as a set of questions that can arise about many other existing academic disciplines and non-academic pursuits.
If we think of philosophy in the first way, it is tempting to give in to the idea that science is intruding in philosophy and philosophy is receding and surrendering its intellectual terrain. But when thinking of philosophy as an approach to existing disciplines or even specific phenomena, there is no reason to think that we will need less philosophy in the future: within artificial intelligence, a philosophy of artificial intelligence or a theory of personhood; within sustainability studies, an environmental or moral philosophy, and so on.
(8) What do you wish for the future of experimental philosophy?
Most of all, I would like to avoid The Bleak Future. The bleak future I’m thinking of is one where philosophy has been swept into the downward spiral of the humanities and plays an ever-smaller role in public affairs. The few remaining philosophers watch from the sidelines as teams of computer scientists and engineers – with the help of a few natural and social scientists – shape the future, generate awesome knowledge, and improve society.
So, my wish for the future is for experimental philosophers to help establish the value of philosophy within academia and beyond. I’m hopeful that this can be done; we have good exemplars already!
(9) Do you have any interesting upcoming projects?
Together with colleagues in the Psychology Department in Granada, Neele Engelmann and I are studying how people apply rules using the letter vs. spirit framework, asking whether participants’ decisions can be modeled using the same tools that cognitive psychologists use to explain behavior on simple visual interference tasks like the Stroop or Flanker test.
I’m also excited about the research a group of us at the University of Granada is doing on how law and morality mutually influence each other by triangulating legal corpora, experiments, and time-series data. So far, we have focused specifically on euthanasia, but the long-term goal is to pursue this question in a more general way.
A third, early-stage project is inspired by research on action understanding as inverse planning. We know that when people do something bad, we quite naturally want to infer whether they did so intentionally (“Given that they did x, did they have bad intentions?”), perhaps as a step in deciding whether they are to blame. Applying the “inverse planning” idea, we are examining whether these intentionality inferences are themselves carried out by spontaneously inverting the conditional probability and asking oneself, “Supposing they did have bad intentions, would they do x?” as a form of Bayesian reasoning.
Antonio Gaitán, Fernando Aguiar, and Hugo Viciana: “The Experimental Turn in Moral and Political Philosophy”
Part 1 – Methods and Foundations
Ivar R. Hannikainen, Brian Flanagan, and Karolina Prochownik: “The Natural Law Thesis Under Empirical Scrutiny”
Philipp Schoenegger and Ben Grodeck: “Concrete Over Abstract – Experimental Evidence of Reflective Equilibrium in Population Ethics”
Dana Kay Nelkin, Craig R. M. McKenzie, Samuel C. Rickless, and Arseny Ryazanov: “Trolley Problems Reimagined – Sensitivity to Ratio, Risk, and Comparisons”
Lieuwe Zijlstra: “The Psychology of Metaethics – Evidence For and Against Folk Moral Objectivism”
Thomas Pölzler: “The Explanatory Redundancy Challenge to Moral Properties”
Cuizhu Wang: “Belief Distributions and the Measure of Social Norms”
Mariìa Jimeìnez Buedo: “Coming Full Circle – Incentives, Reactivity, and the Experimental Turn”
Part 2 – Normative Ethics and Legal and Political Philosophy
Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola: “Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians”
Aurélien Allard and Florian Cova: “What Experiments Can Teach Us About Justice and Impartiality – Vindicating Experimental Political Philosophy”
Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg and Yuval Feldman: “A Behavioral Ethics Perspective on the Theory of Criminal Law and Punishment”
Douglas Husak: “Behavioral Ethics and the Extent of Responsibility”
François Jaquet: “Against Moorean Defences of Speciesism”
Part 3: Applied Issues
Blanca Rodrìguez: “Experimental Bioethics and the Case for Human Enhancement”
Norbert Paulo, Leonie Alina Möck, and Lando Kirchmair: “The Use and Abuse of Moral Preferences in the Ethics of Self-Driving Cars”
Urna Chakrabarty, Romy Feiertag, Anne-Marie McCallion, Brain McNiff, Jesse Prinz, Montaque Reynolds, Sukhvinder Shahi, Maya von Ziegesar, and Angella Yamamoto: “Adaptive Preferences – An Empirical Investigation of Feminist Perspectives”
Anastasia Chan, Marinus Ferreira, and Mark Alfano: “Reactionary Attitudes – Strawson, Twitter, and the Black Lives Matter Movement”
Literature
Viciana, Hugo, Antonio Gaitán, and Fernando Aguiar (eds.) (2023): Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy, New York: Routledge. (Link)
This text was first published at xphiblog.com on February 28, 2019.
Discussions of moral luck usually start by presenting a pair of agents who engage in the same behavior but bring about very different outcomes. Drunk driving is the usual example. One driver – the lucky driver – arrives home without harming anyone. The second driver – the unlucky driver – hits a passerby. The question is then posed: are they equally blameworthy? Much ink has been spilled on that question (and rightly so). But an interesting issue arises even before we get there, namely, what’s going on with our attributions of luck. It seems odd to call the second driver unlucky. An accident caused by drunk driving seems to be the very opposite of a case in which a bad outcome is simply due to luck. What drives this intuition?
Philosophical accounts of luck often point to features such as lack of control, modal fragility and low probabilities as central to luck attributions. We can fill in the details in the case above in such a way as to have all three features present. And yet, it still seems unintuitive to claim that the accident was due to (bad) luck.
In a new paper, I argue that this is because the folk concept of luck is sensitive to normative considerations. In particular, it is influenced by a normative evaluation of an agent’s action and its relation to the ensuing outcome. Roughly, luck attributions are sensitive to whether the valence of the action matches the valence of the outcome. The idea is that when the valences do not match, we are more inclined to attribute luck (explaining why it seems fitting to describe the first driver as lucky, for it’s a case of bad action/good outcome). And similarly, we are less likely to attribute luck when the valences do match (e.g., bad action/bad outcome, as with the “unlucky” driver).
I tested this hypothesis across five different studies. In one study, I manipulated both the valence of the action and the valence of the outcome, and measured luck attributions. Here is an example of one vignette.
Negligent Action
About to perform a complicated procedure, a surgeon forgets to wash his hands. As a result, the chances of a failed [successful] procedure rise [drop] to about 30%.
As a matter of fact, the procedure fails [succeeds].
Virtuous Action
About to perform a complicated procedure, a surgeon takes special precautions, reviewing each part of the procedure carefully. As a result, the chances of a successful [failed] procedure rise [drop] to about 30%.
As a matter of fact, the procedure succeeds [fails].
Participants indicated their agreement with the following statement, “It was due to luck that the procedure failed [succeeded]” using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “disagree” to “agree”.
Here are the results:
The results followed the predicted pattern: luck attributions were highly sensitive to whether the valence of the outcome matched the valence of the action. (It’s worth saying that this effect remained significant after controlling for judgments about subjective probabilities, modal fragility, causality, and lack of control).
In a different study, the perceived valence of the action was not manipulated across conditions but rather depended on the moral views of the participants themselves. Participants read a story about a university president faced with the task of deciding whether or not to cancel an upcoming talk by a controversial speaker. The perceived valence of the president’s action, and hence the normative relation to the outcome (success or failure at creating a positive environment at the university), thus varied with individual differences in judgments about what the president should do.
Here are the results:
Luck attributions differed significantly among participants with different moral views responding to the same scenario. For example, when the president decided to let the speaker give the talk and the decision led to a good outcome, participants who disagreed with the decision judged the outcome as lucky. Those who judged the president’s action as morally right, however, did not attribute the success to luck.
It thus seems that normative considerations are an important element in our folk notion of luck. That is to say, describing the first driver as lucky already involves a normative evaluation of her action and the ensuing outcome. And our refusal to attribute luck to the second driver can be partly explained by the fact that we are not inclined to attribute luck when bad actions bring about bad outcomes.
Any thoughts you might have would be very much appreciated!
Literature
Attie-Picker, Mario (2021): “Is the Folk Concept of Luck Normative?,” Synthese 198, 1481–1515. (Link)
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