Experiments in Philosophy

Experimental Philosophy on YouTube

Joshua Knobe — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:30:06 +0000

Philosopher Ram Neta presents a funny new take on an old example from Aristotle in this new experimental philosophy video. Hope you enjoy it!

Consciousness

Edouard Machery — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:06:01 +0000

How do ordinary people think about their subjective experience? Do they believe in qualia, as many philosophers such as David Chalmers and Ned Block claim? And are we mistaken in believing that our experiences have qualia, as Daniel Dennett asserts?

Justin Sytsma (Pittsurgh, HPS) discusses these issues, in a beautiful talk there.

What Makes an Action Intentional?

Edouard Machery — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:17:42 +0000

A few months ago, I reported on some studies on how people with Asperger think about intentional actions (see my previous post on the topic). Recently, Joshua Knobe and I have been interviewed on the topic of intentional action by Natasha Mitchell in her program All In Mind on the Australian radio ABC.

If you were interested by the original post, you might want to listen to the interview (here).

Are Free-Will Deniers Open to Experience? Are Materialists Extrovert? Help us Find out!

Edouard Machery — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:19:49 +0000

Could it be that people are attracted to different philosophical views because of their temperament? Could it be, for instance, that extroverts tend to be materialists, while people who are open to new experiences tend to deny the reality of free will?

Justin Sytsma, Jonathan Livengood, Adam Feltz, and I are looking at this question, and we'd like to ask you to help us out!

How? Well, that's easy. Just go the PhilosophicalPersonality website (http://www.philosophicalpersonality.com/), and take a free, entirely anonymous personality test, while answering a few questions. It's fun and takes only 5 minutes.

Also, if you want to help us, please, send the link to the PhilosophicalPersonality website to your friends and tell them to send it to their friends!

In addition, you'll learn about yourself! You'll find out whether you are extrovert, open to experience, and so on.

Thanks

Do People of all Cultures Believe in Free Will?

Joshua Knobe — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:48:56 +0000

Imagine a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before. So the things that happened at the very beginning of the universe caused the things that happened next, which caused the things that happened after that... right up until the present day. Now imagine that human decision making in this universe is no different from anything else. Just like anything else that occurs, human decisions are completely caused by whatever happened before them.

Now ask yourself: Is our universe actually like that? Do we live in a universe in which everything is completely caused by whatever happened before it? Or do we live in a universe in which human actions are somehow special and are not completely caused by anything that happened previously?

In a new cross-cultural study, the experimental philosopher Hagop Sarkissian and his colleagues asked this question to people living in India, Hong Kong, Colombia, and the United States. To see Hagop himself explaining the study, you can check out this YouTube video:

Surprisingly, people from all of these different cultures arrived at exactly the same answer! Despite all of their cultural differences, they each concluded that human actions are not simply caused by whatever took place earlier -- that human beings have a special power of free will that allows them to do things that are not just caused by previous events.

So there must be some more general fact about people that makes it the case that, whatever culture they happen to grow up in, they always tend to arrive at this same conclusion. But what could that more general fact be?

[Full paper available here.]

Can an Atheist Believe in Free Will?

Tamler Sommers, Ph.D. — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:40:24 +0000

Here's an interesting 5 minute video accusing Richard Dawkins of being inconsistent in holding that belief in free will and moral responsibility is justified but that belief in God is unjustified. The argument goes like this.

In response to a questioner, Dawkins concedes that if you take a deterministic or mechanistic view of the universe, it seems absurd to think we have free will and that we can go around blaming criminals and praising distinguished authors. The whole idea of blame and praise seems to go out the window. It's like Basil Fawlty blaming his car for not running properly. And since there's likely no one alive who takes a more mechanistic view of human behavior than Dawkins, he should stop going around affirming free will and blaming and praising people. But when asked why he doesn't stop, he says first, that it seems to us that have free will and second, that life would be intolerable if we believed otherwise. In another post, I've challenged the latter point, but that's not the concern here. Let's grant Dawkins those claims. Dawkins concludes that "this is an inconsistency we have to live with" and so we may continue to believe in free will and moral responsibility, and blame and praise people accordingly. (In his defense, he does seem slightly uncomfortable about the tension.)

Now the video turns to his views on belief in God. A questioner asks him why he doesn't think that belief in God is a personal choice, given that some people find great comfort in that belief. Dawkins replies: Look, that's fine if some people find comfort believing in God, but that doesn't mean that belief is true! He says: "I'm afraid that something intolerable may still be true. That's just tough."

Now wait a minute! Didn't Dawkins just say that it's fine for us to go on believing in free will and acting accordingly because life would be intolerable otherwise? By that same reasoning, people who would find life intolerable without belief in God are justified in retaining it. What's sauce for free will goose should be sauce for the God gander, right? Or, on the flip side, why isn't it "just tough" for Dawkins that he would find life without free will intolerable? Why shouldn't he stop affirming it anyway? This seems like a deep inconsistency.

Now granted, Dawkins doesn't find life without God intolerable, nor does it seem to him that God exists. So Dawkins himself wouldn't be justified in believing in God by his own standards. But someone who did meet those conditions-and there are certainly plenty of those people-would seem to be justified in that belief.. After all, I'm someone who doesn't find life without free will intolerable. I see Dawkins on free will the same way he sees people who couldn't bear it if there were no God or afterlife. I don't think he's thought the implications through clearly. In any case, to resolve this consistency, it seems Dawkins has to either (a) think that it's justified for people to believe things that make life tolerable, or (b) repudiate his own belief in free will and moral responsibility as firmly as he thinks that others should repudiate belief in God. I don't see any other way out. Does anyone else?

Apparently I was right about Satoshi Kanazawa, aka the Scientific Fundamentalist.

Tamler Sommers, Ph.D. — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:56:25 +0000

A few weeks ago I commented to a colleague that PT blogger Satoshi Kanazawa only wrote one of his recent posts so that someone would write a parody of that post. There could be no other explanation. Apparently I was right. The point of that comment was not to single out Satoshi Kanazawa, but exactly the opposite. A central claim of my theory of Blogospheriology is that bloggers write obviously absurd posts with fallacies that third graders could identify just so that someone will eventually parody those posts. The point of my comment was that even a superhuman blogger and LSE Reader isn't exempt from the Blogospheriological rule that bloggers do everything they do in order to get parodied.

According to a recent PT Post, following in the footsteps of Michelle Malkin and several bloggers at the Daily Kos, Satoshi Kanazawa has got his wish and a recent post of his has just been parodied.

(What, you say? Just because Satoshi Kanazawa wrote a blog post that was then parodied, it doesn't follow that he wrote the blog post IN ORDER to get parodied. But wait--Michael Phelps won all those gold medals and then got laid. Therefore he won the gold medals IN ORDER to get laid. The logic is impeccable in both cases.)

It's good to know that even a PT demigod like Satoshi Kanazawa isn't exempt from the laws of Blogospheriology.

Comedian Eugene Mirman Explaining Experimental Philosophy

Joshua Knobe — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 05:44:50 +0000

As Edouard mentioned in his recent post, some of the most fascinating discoveries in experimental philosophy have come from work on people's ordinary understanding of human action.

Oddly enough, YouTube is now displaying a video of comedian Eugene Mirman explaining some of these new discoveries. I've included the video below. Hope you enjoy it.

Do You Have Asperger's Syndrome?

Edouard Machery — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:15:41 +0000

How do we think about the intentional nature of actions? And how do people with an impaired mindreading capacity think about it?

Consider the following probes:

The Free-Cup Case
Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that if he bought a Mega-Sized Smoothie he would get it in a special commemorative cup. Joe replied, ‘I don't care about a commemorative cup, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie in a commemorative cup. Did Joe intentionally obtain the commemorative cup?
The Extra-Dollar Case
Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that the Mega-Sized Smoothies were now one dollar more than they used to be. Joe replied, ‘I don't care if I have to pay one dollar more, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie and paid one dollar more for it. Did Joe intentionally pay one dollar more?

You surely think that paying an extra dollar was intentional, while getting the commemorative cup was not. So do most people (Machery, 2008).

But Tiziana Zalla and I have found that if you had Asperger Syndrome, a mild form of autism, your judgments would be very different: You would judge that paying an extra-dollar was not intentional, just like getting the commemorative cup (Zalla and Machery ms).

Why is that? Why do people with Asperger Syndrome understand intentional actions differently from people without this syndrome?

Do Atheists Pose a Threat to Morality?

Jesse Prinz, Ph.D. — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:47:19 +0000

Atheism is said to pose a major threat to morality. Some theists claim that disbelief leads to moral relativism and undermines a major factor motivating prosocial behavior. Recent research can help us see what is true and false about these anxieties.

These issues have special resonance in the United States. A new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reveals that 92% of Americans believe in some kind of god. Other research suggests that atheists are among the least trusted minority groups. Consider a recent paper in the American Sociological Review by Minnesota researchers Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann. They report that 39.6% of people polled say that atheist do "not at all agree with my vision of American Society." This score is higher than any other group by a considerable margin. A 2007 Gallup poll shows that 53% of Americans would not vote for an atheist president, and another Gallup poll suggests that 84% of Americans think the nation is not ready for an atheist in the White House. The major source of concern inmorality. Many people worry that the faithless lack a moral rudder. Without God, morality loses its foundation.

Is this concern really justified? Many philosophers will say it is not. It has been a common philosophical refrain since Plato wrote his dialogue the Euthyphro, which takes up the topic of piety, that morality cannot depend on divine decree. Suppose "good" just meant "commanded by God"; it would follow that "God is good" means only that "God does what he commands," which is faint praise. Belief in a benevolent God is substantive only if one believes that God acts in accordance with some independent moral standard. On this view, even theists should accept that morality is independent of religion. But what standard could do the trick? There have been two thousand years of work by philosophers (mostly theists) trying to answer this question. The two most famous answers owe to John Stuart Mill and Immanual Kant. Very roughly, Mill says that happiness is intrinsically good, so we should try to maximize happiness, and Kant says that it is rational to recognize the common dignity of all people, and irrational to pursue actions that would undermine our own interests if others were to act similarly.

Research suggests that the independence of morality and religion is actually widely recognized outside of academic philosophy, even among staunch theists. For example, developmental psychologist Larry Nucci interviewed highly religious children from a wide range of backgrounds (including Catholics, Mennonites, and Orthodox Jews), and he found that they were overwhelmingly likely to judge that stealing would be wrong even if God were to say that stealing is permissible (see his Education in the Moral Domain). The aforementioned Pew study also reveals that fewer than a third of Americans cite religion as the major source of their moral values, and more than half claim that practical experience and common sense are the major source.

The independence of morality and religion can also be characterized in evolutionary terms. Under the influence of Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism, it was once believed that evolution leads to selfishness, but this supposition was rejected decades ago. Evolutionists now think we evolved to be altruistic, because helping others can increase fitness (helping kin spreads our genes and helping strangers promotes beneficial reciprocity and cooperation). These evolutionary models enjoy some psychological support. Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello have shown that 14 month-old infants exhibit helpful behavior, even in the absence of reward. And even if altuism were not innate, it might be a precondition on stable society, so it might emerge inevitably through the course of "cultural evolution." A moral code of some kind is likely to emerge regardless of religious outlook. Indeed, the moral values of major religions may be products of cultural evolution. Of course, cultural evolution does not guarantee that every society will be peaceful or egalitarian. War and hierarchy seem to be features of most social systems, whether religiously grounded or not.

So far, all this is good news with respect to the atheist threat. But there may be some truth to the anxieties mentioned at the outset. Atheists may be more prone to relativism and, perhaps, less prone to acting in accordance with widespread moral norms.

Let's begin with relativism. The Pew study found atheists are much less likely than theists to believe that there are "absolute standards of right and wrong." 58% of atheists believe in such standards, as compared to 63% of Jews, 72% of Moslems, 78% of Catholics, and 81% of Protestants. These findings are consistent with a new paper by Princeton social psychologists Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley. The authors found that grounding one's ethical beliefs in the notion of a divine being predicts greater moral objectivism, and it was the only variable to do so. It must be noted that the majority of atheists are not relativists, but these studies do suggest that atheists are more prone to relativism than those who attribute morality to God.

What about moral motivation? A recent book by Arthur Brooks, called Who Really Cares, has sparked controversy by arguing that religious people are more charitable than their irreligious counterparts. Brooks also examines handouts to homeless people, donations of blood, and other measures of charitable giving. Even when he controls for income and excludes donations to religious causes, religious people appear more generous than atheists. For example, Brooks shows that families in South Dakota, a highly religious state, give the same amount of money to charities as families in irreligious San Francisco, even though people in San Francisco earn almost twice as much.

Admittedly, there are some serious problems with Brooks' research. First, he relies on survey data and theists may be more inclined to report charitable efforts. Second, he does not carefully control for cost of living. The average price of a home in California is more than 2.5 times higher than the average home cost in South Dakota. Third, Brooks' own data show that atheists are much more likely to support government programs that give to the needy, and they are more likely to favor tax increases to pay for such programs, so the differences in charity may reflect a preference for centralized strategies rather than relying on what George Herbert Walker Bush called "a thousand points of light." Finally, a reply to Brooks in Scientific American cites a study by Gregory S. Paul, which documents an inverse correlation between religiosity and social health. For example, religious communities have higher homicide rates. Thus, it may not turn out to be the case that religious people are more moral across the board.

Still, the atheists who denounce Brooks may protesteth too much. Theists do seem to make more personal contributions to charity, and this pattern should not be ignored. It is not as if atheists are against such contributions; they just do it less often. This suggests that there is something about religion that promotes giving, and it would be useful to figure out what that is.

Does atheism promote relativism and stinginess? Preliminary evidence suggests that the answer might be yes, at least to some degree. Is this a serious concern? Perhaps not. With respect to relativism, the atheist might say that false beliefs in moral absolutes are a recipe for trouble. Perhaps relativism could increase tolerance and international understanding. The challenge for the relativist is to identify constraints on tolerance. This is a place where some philosophy might come in handy, since philosophers have spent many centuries trying to identify secular foundations for morality. What about stinginess? Here one factor may have to do with the fact that religious institutions create conditions that promote charity. Religious institutions have pledge drives, run soup kitchens, pass around donation cups, raise awareness, and provide weekly reminders to give. They also create social pressure to be charitable, and they draw attention to self-sacrificing role models. Atheists need to work at creating an infrastructure that is conducive to charity. One good thing about the Brooks book is that it may make atheists conclude that they need to do more in order to overcome the accusation of being moral monsters. There is no reason to think that theological beliefs are a precondition for moral motivation-even theists admit that their own moral values and actions do not depend on God. But atheism typically involves a departure from institutions that grease the motivational gears, and that means atheists might want to find alternative institutional mechanisms for facilitating prosocial behavior.

The upshot is that atheism does not undermine morality, but atheists' conception of morality may depart from traditional theistic conceptions. Rather than condemning atheism, we might work to build institutions that promote charity more effectively among those who do not participate in organized religion, and we might try to develop secular foundations for morality to help guide people who do not consider God to be the source of moral rules. Both these efforts would serve atheists and theists alike.