Tag: Norms

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: “The Puzzle of Social Behavior – Game Theory and Beyond”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Mantas Radzvilas and Wolfgang Spohn organize a workshop on “The Puzzle of Social Behavior – Game Theory and Beyond” at the University of Bielefeld. It will take place from April 3 to 5, 2025.

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until January 6, 2025. The call reads:

There are up to 5 further slots of 40 minutes (30 minutes talk, 10 minutes discussion) for presentations. Everyone interested in presenting themselves is invited to apply for participation. Early-career researchers and scholars from underrepresented groups are particularly encouraged to apply.

For this purpose, please submit an abstract of your talk of at most 1000 words (2 pages) and a CV till January 6, 2025. Decisions on the submissions will be made within four weeks. Those selected will be invited to participate including a coverage of travel and accommodation costs.

Please send your application both to: mantas.radzvilas@uni-konstanz.de and wolfgang.spohn@uni-konstanz.de

Abstract: The workshop will be co-organized by the Reinhart-Koselleck project “Reflexive Decision and Game Theory” of Wolfgang Spohn at the University of Konstanz and the Center of Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld. Its game-theoretic part is particularly concerned with foundational issues of game theory. Which is hence the topic of the second workshop of this project.

Social reality is built on the capacity of human beings to engage in social behavior – complex forms of intentional, coordinated actions involving more than one individual. For several decades, game theory has served as the primary conceptual framework for developing a variety of theories aiming to explain social behavior, such as social norms, prosocial preferences, virtual bargaining, and team reasoning theories. All of these theories converge on the idea that social behavior is sustained by sufficiently aligned interests and beliefs of the interacting individuals, yet they disagree on how these necessary alignments of interests and beliefs come about. A number of game-theoretic accounts of social behavior can claim substantial amounts of experimental results as supporting evidence. In many cases, experimental evidence supports multiple accounts equally, thus creating a problem of underdetermination. To conclude, after a number of decades of intensive development, a unified mathematical framework of game theory has not been able to produce a unified account of social behavior.

This conceptually unsatisfactory state of affairs raises a number of important questions. Is there a methodology to select among the competing accounts? Should these accounts be viewed as competing theories of social behavior, or rather as theories that complement one another? Are there better unconsidered alternatives to existing theories? Is game theory truly the best approach towards explaining social behavior?

The purpose of the workshop is to advance the discussion on these and other philosophical questions related to the status of game-theoretic explanations of social behavior.

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: “Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

“Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy,” a new entry into the “Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory” series, edited by Hugo Viciana, Antonio Gaitán, and Fernando Aguiar, comprises 17 chapters. See below for the table of contents.

  • 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)

Conference: “Experimental Philosophy – Beyond Armchair Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 32nd “Philosophy Conference” of the University of Valladolid’s Department of Philosophy, organized by José V. Hernández-Conde, will take place from May 16 to 17 in Valladolid, Spain. This year’s instalment is all about experimental philosophy.

May 16, 9:00–18:30 (UTC+2)

  • Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “No Luck for Moral Luck”
  • María Jiménez-Buedo (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia): “What do we Measure in the Dictator Game? Constructs, Validity and the Threat of Methodological Artifacts”
  • Mikel Asteinza (University of the Basque Country): “Epistemic Determinants of Scientific Disclosure and Their Impact on the Legal Audience – The Case of De-Extinction”
  • Andrei Moldovan and Obdulia Torres (University of Salamanca): “Expertisia as a Contextual Property”
  • Fernando Aguiar (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Would You Hire a Person With an Intellectual Disability? An Experimental Study on Action and Compassion”
  • Francisco Calvo (University of Murcia): “Of Seahorses and Plants – An Experimental Journey out of Ignorance”
  • Fernando Sanantonio (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): “External Sanctions, Compliance and Avoidance in Vegetarianism as a Normative System”
  • Daniel Martín (University of Granada): “Attitudes Toward Moral Improvement Based on Virtual Assistance”

May 17, 9:15–14:00 (UTC+2)

  • Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “The Geography of Wisdom”
  • Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada): “What is ‘Consenting’?”
  • Javier Anta (University of Salamanca): “An Experimental Approach to the Ordinary Meaning of ‘Information’”
  • Rodrigo Díaz (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Describing (Erroneously) Recalcitrant Emotions”
  • David Rodríguez-Arias (University of Granada): “Contemporary End-of-Life Bioethics – Empirical and Experimental Contributions”

For more information about the conference, visit https://keama.uva.es/xxxii-philosophy-conference/.