Experimental Philosophy

=Welcome to the Experimental Philosophy Wiki= Philosophers often make claims about people’s intuitions regarding particular cases. Experimental philosophy aims to put these claims to the test using standard empirical methods.

If you want to learn about Experimental Philosophy, you can read more here, here and here.

How To Use This Site
 * 1) Add your own papers to the section in which it best fits (or any other papers which have yet to be included). Please link all papers if possible. If there is not already an appropriate section, you can place it under Miscellaneous Papers or create a new heading for a group of papers.
 * 2) Feel free to add any new links (e.g. to a blog related to experimental philosophy) or create any new pages you think are needed (e.g. Experimental Philosophers). Only check to make sure a similar page doesn't already exist and add it to the list of X-Phi wiki pages.
 * 3) Continue the revolution.

Papers on Causation
[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/Knobe-Fraser.pdf Joshua Knobe & Ben Fraser (2008). Causal Judgment and Moral Judgment: Two Experiments. In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology. MIT Press.] "It has long been known that people’s causal judgments can have an impact on their moral judgments. To take a simple example, if people conclude that a behavior caused the death of ten innocent children, they will therefore be inclined to regard the behavior itself as morally wrong. So far, none of this should come as any surprise. But recent experimental work points to the existence of a second, and more surprising, aspect of the relationship between causal judgment and moral..."

[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/causation-hps.pdf Joshua Knobe (forthcoming). Folk Judgments of Causation. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science.] "When scientists are trying to uncover the causes of a given outcome, they often make use of statistical information. Thus, if scientists wanted to know whether there was a causal relationship between attending philosophy lectures and learning philosophy, they might randomly assign students to either attend or not attend certain lectures and then check to see whether those who attended the lectures ended up learning more philosophy than those who did not."

Papers on Consciousness
[http://phonline.org/paper.php?keynum=943 Joshua Knobe & Jesse J. Prinz (2008). Intuitions About Consciousness: Experimental Studies. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (1):67-83.] "When people are trying to determine whether an entity is capable of having certain kinds of mental states, they can proceed either by thinking about the entity from a *functional* standpoint or by thinking about the entity from a *physical* standpoint. We conducted a series of studies to determine how each of these standpoints impact people’s mental state ascriptions. The results point to a striking asymmetry. It appears that ascriptions of states involving phenomenal consciousness are sensitive to physical factors in..."

[http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004074/ Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery (2009). “How to study Folk Intuitions about Phenomenal Consciousness.” Philosophical Psychology, 22(1): 21-35.] "The assumption that the concept of phenomenal consciousness is pretheoretical is often found in the philosophical debates on consciousness. Unfortunately, this assumption has not received the kind of empirical attention that it deserves. We suspect that this is in part due to difficulties that arise in attempting to test folk intuitions about consciousness. In this article we elucidate and defend a key methodological principle for this work. We draw this principle out by considering recent experimental work on the topic by..."

[http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004438/ Justin Sytsma (forthcoming). “Phenomenological Obviousness and the New Science of Consciousness.” Philosophy of Science, 76(5), December 2009.] "Is phenomenal consciousness a problem for the brain sciences? A growing body of researchers not only hold that it is, but that its very existence is a deep mystery. Perhaps not surprisingly, that this problematic phenomenon exists is generally taken for granted. It is asserted that phenomenal consciousness is just phenomenologically obvious. In contrast, I hold that there is no such phenomenon and, thus, that it does not pose a problem for the brain sciences. For this denial to be plausible..."

Papers on Cross-Cultural Differences in Intuitions
[http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ArchiveFolder/Research%20Group/Publications/NEI/NEIPT.html Jonathan Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich. 2001. “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions.”  Philosophical Topics, 29, 429-460.] "In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizeable group of epistemological projects – a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition – would be seriously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empirical hypotheses about epistemic intuitions turns out to be true. The basis for this claim will be set out in Section 2. The second claim is that, while the jury is..."

[http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/SemanticIntuitions.pdf Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich. 2004. “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style.”  Cognition, 92, B1-B12.] "Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases..."

[http://faculty.baruch.cuny.edu/hsarkissian/ChinaPhenomenal083008.pdf Bryce Huebner, Mike Bruno, and Hagop Sarkissian. forthcoming. "What does the nation of China think of phenomenal states?" European Journal of Philosophy.]

Papers on Epistemology
Joshua Alexander and Jonathan M. Weinberg, "Analytic Epistemology and Experimental Philosophy" Philosophy Compass, 2(2007): 56-80 "It has been standard philosophical practice in analytic philosophy to employ intuitions generated in response to thought-experiments as evidence in the evaluation of philosophical claims. In part as a response to this practice, an exciting new movement—experimental philosophy—has recently emerged. This movement is unified behind both a common methodology and a common aim: the application of methods of experimental psychology to the study of the nature of intuitions.  In this paper, we will introduce two different views concerning the relationship that holds between experimental philosophy and the future of standard philosophical practice (what we call, the proper foundation view  and the restrictionist view), discuss some of the more interesting and important results obtained by proponents of both views, and examine the pressure these results put on analytic philosophers to reform standard philosophical practice. We will also defend experimental philosophy from some recent objections, suggest future directions for work in experimental philosophy, and suggest what future lines of epistemological response might be available to those wishing to defend analytic epistemology from the challenges posed by experimental philosophy."

[http://www.fsu.edu/~philo/A%20Stich%20in%20Time.pdf Michael Bishop, "Reflections on Cognitive and Epistemic Diversity: Does a Stich in Time Save Quine?" in D. Murphy & M. Bishop (eds), Stephen Stich and His Critics (Blackwell, in press)]

Adam Feltz, "Problems with the Appeal to Intuition in Epistemology," Philosophical Explorations, 11(2008): 131-141

[http://faculty.schreiner.edu/adfeltz/Papers/Know%20more.pdf Adam Feltz and Chris Zarpentine, "Do You Know More When It Matters Less?" Philosophical Psychology (forthcoming)]

Joshua May, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Jay G. Hull, and Aaron Zimmerman, "Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: An Empirical Study" European Review of Philosophy, special issue on Psychology and Experimental Philosophy (forthcoming) "In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. The cases we focus on are two that are crucial to Stanley’s project: one in which the protagonist does not have practical interest in the truth of the proposition she claims to know (Low Stakes) and one in which the protagonist does have such practical interest (High Stakes). We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to..."

Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich and Jonathan M. Weinberg, "Metaskepticism: Meditations in Ethno-Epistemology" In S. Luper (ed.),  The Skeptics (Ashgate, 2003), pp. 227-247

Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander, and Jonathan M. Weinberg, "The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions: Running Hot and Cold on Truetemp," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming)

Jonathan M. Weinberg, "How to Challenge Intuitions Empirically Without Risking Skepticism" Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 31 (2007): 318-343

Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich, "Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions" Philosophical Topics, 29 (2001): 429-460

Papers on Experimental Philosophy
[http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/ExperimentalPhilosophy.pdf Joshua Knobe. "What Is Experimental Philosophy" from The Philosophers’ Magazine] "Since the earliest days of analytic philosophy, it has been a common practice to appeal to intuitions about particular cases. Typically, the philosopher presents a hypothetical situation and then makes a claim of the form: ‘In this case, we would surely say....’ This claim about people’s intuitions then forms a part of an argument for some more general theory about the nature of our concepts or our use of language. One puzzling aspect of this practice is that it so rarely..."

[http://www.hum.utah.edu/philosophy/faculty/nichols/Papers/FolkconceptsFinal.htm Shaun Nichols. (2004) "Folk Concepts and Intuitions: From Philosophy to Cognitive Science" from Trends in Cognitive Science]

[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/JCCResponses.pdf Joshua Knobe & Arudra Burra (2006). Experimental Philosophy and Folk Concepts: Methodological Considerations. Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):331-342.] "Experimental philosophy is a comparatively new field of research, and it is only natural that many of the key methodological questions have not even been asked, much less answered. In responding to the comments of our critics, we therefore find ourselves brushing up against difficult questions about the aims and techniques of our whole enterprise. We will do our best to address these issues here, but the field is progressing at a rapid clip, and we suspect that it will be..."

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experimental Philosophy. "Some three score years ago, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess found himself dissatisfied with “what are called ‘theories of truth’ in philosophical literature.” “The discussion has already lasted some 2500 years,” he wrote. “The number of participants amounts to a thousand, and the number of articles and books devoted to the discussion is much greater.” In this great ocean of words, he went on, the philosophers had often made bold statements about what “the man in the street” or “Das Volk'..."

[http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00050.x Joshua Knobe (2007). Experimental Philosophy. Philosophy Compass 2 (1):81–92.] "Claims about people's intuitions have long played an important role in philosophical debates. The new field of experimental philosophy seeks to subject such claims to rigorous tests using the traditional methods of cognitive science – systematic experimentation and statistical analysis. Work in experimental philosophy thus far has investigated people's intuitions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Although it is now generally agreed that experimental philosophers have made surprising discoveries about people's intuitions in each of these areas…"

[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/phil-significance.pdf Joshua Knobe (2007). Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance. Philosophical Explorations 10 (2):119 – 121.] "Kauppinen argues that experimental philosophy cannot help us to address questions about the semantics of our concepts and that it therefore has little to contribute to the discipline of philosophy. This argument raises fascinating questions in the philosophy of language, but it is simply a red herring in the present context. Most researchers in experimental philosophy were not trying to resolve semantic questions in the first place. Their aim was rather to address a more traditional sort of question, the sort..."

[http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a779329332&fulltext=713240928 Thomas Nadelhoffer and Eddy Nahmias. (2007) "The Past and Future of Experimental Philosophy" from Philosophical Explorations Volume 10, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 123 – 149] "Experimental philosophy is the name for a recent movement whose participants use the methods of experimental psychology to probe the way people think about philosophical issues and then examine how the results of such studies bear on traditional philosophical debates. Given both the breadth of the research being carried out by experimental philosophers and the controversial nature of some of their central methodological assumptions, it is of no surprise that their work has recently come under attack. In this paper we..."

[http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00133.x Paul E. Griffiths &amp; Karola Stotz (2008). Experimental Philosophy of Science. Philosophy Compass 3 (3):507–521.] "Experimental philosophy of science gathers empirical data on how key scientific concepts are understood by particular scientific communities. In this paper we briefly describe two recent studies in experimental philosophy of biology, one investigating the concept of the gene, the other the concept of innateness. The use of experimental methods reveals facts about these concepts that would not be accessible using the traditional method of intuitions about possible cases. It also contributes to the study of conceptual change in science, which..."

Papers on Folk Psychology
[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/bad-blame.pdf Joshua Knobe & Gabriel Mendlow (2004). The Good, the Bad and the Blameworthy: Understanding the Role of Evaluative Reasoning in Folk Psychology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24:252-258.] "People ordinarily make sense of their own behavior and that of others by invoking concepts like belief, desire, and intention. Philosophers refer to this network of concepts and related principles as 'folk psychology.' The prevailing view of folk psychology among philosophers of mind and psychologists is that it is a proto-scientific theory whose function is to explain and predict behavior."

[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/science-morals.pdf Joshua Knobe (2007). Folk Psychology: Science and Morals. In Daniel Hutto & Matthew Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Reassessed. Springer Press.] "It is widely agreed that folk psychology plays an important role in people’s moral judgments. For a simple example, take the process by which we determine whether or not an agent is morally blameworthy. Although the judgment here is ultimately a moral one, it seems that one needs to use a fair amount of folk psychology along the way. Thus, one might determine that an agent broke the vase intentionally and therefore conclude that she is blameworthy for breaking it."

[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/ReasonExplanations.pdf Joshua Knobe (2007). Reason Explanation in Folk Psychology. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):90–106.] "Consider the following explanation: (1) George took his umbrella because it was just about to rain. This is an explanation of a quite distinctive sort. It is profoundly different from the sort of explanation we might use to explain, say, the movements of a bouncing ball or the gradual rise of the tide on a beach. Unlike these other types of explanations, it explains an agent’s behavior by describing the agent’s own _reasons_ for performing that behavior. Explanations that work in…"

Papers on Intentional Action
[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/folkconcept.html Joshua Knobe & Bertram Malle (1997). The Folk Concept of Intentionality. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 33:101-121.] "When perceiving, explaining, or criticizing human behavior, people distinguish between intentional and unintentional actions. To do so, they rely on a shared folk concept of intentionality. In contrast to past speculative models, this article provides an empirically-based model of this concept. Study 1 demonstrates that people agree substantially in their judgments of intentionality, suggesting a shared underlying concept. Study 2 reveals that when asked to directly define the term intentional, people mention four components of intentionality: desire, belief, intention, and awareness..."

[http://cogprints.org/3116/2/IntentionalAction.pdf Joshua Knobe (2003). Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63 (3):190–194.] "There has been a long-standing dispute in the philosophical literature about the conditions under which a behavior counts as 'intentional.' Much of the debate turns on questions about the use of certain words and phrases in ordinary language. The present paper investigates these questions empirically, using experimental techniques to investigate people's use of the relevant words and phrases."

[http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8284.2004.00481.x Joshua Knobe (2004). Intention, Intentional Action and Moral Considerations. Analysis 64 (2):181–187.]

[http://www.udel.edu/Philosophy/papers/adams2006.pdf Fred Adams. (2006). Intentions Confer Intentionality Upon Actions: A Reply to Knobe and Burra. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 6, 132-146.] "Is intentionally doing A linked to the intention to do A? Knobe and Burra believe that the link between the English words ‘intention’ and ‘intentional’ may mislead philosophers and cognitive scientists to falsely believe that intentionally doing an action A requires one to have the intention to do A. Knobe and Burra believe that data from other language..."

[http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/PhilStudies.pdf Joshua Knobe. (2006). “The Concept of Intentional Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psychology.” Philosophical Studies 130 (2):203-231.] "It is widely believed that the primary function of folk psychology lies in the prediction, explanation and control of behavior. A question arises, however, as to whether folk psychology has also been shaped in fundamental ways by the various other roles it plays in people’s lives. Here I approach that question by considering one particular aspect of folk psychology – the distinction between intentional and unintentional behaviors. The aim is to determine whether this distinction is best understood as a tool..."

[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/hindi.pdf Joshua Knobe (2006). The Folk Concepts of Intention and Intentional Action: A Cross-Cultural Study. Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):113-132.] "Recent studies point to a surprising divergence between people's use of the concept of _intention_ and their use of the concept of _acting intentionally_. It seems that people's application of the concept of intention is determined by their beliefs about the agent's psychological states whereas their use of the concept of acting intentionally is determined at least in part by their beliefs about the moral status of the behavior itself (i.e., by their beliefs about whether the behavior is morally good..."

[http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/NadelhofferExplorations.pdf Thomas Nadelhoffer. (2006). “Bad acts, blameworthy agents, and intentional actions: Some problems for juror impartiality.” Philosophical Explorations 9 (2):203 – 219.] "In this paper, I first review some of the recent empirical work on the biasing effect that moral considerations have on folk ascriptions of intentional action. Then, I use Mark Alicke's affective model of blame attribution to explain this biasing effect. Finally, I discuss the relevance of this research - both philosophical and psychological - to the problem of the partiality of jury deliberation. After all, if the immorality of an action does affect folk ascriptions of intentionality, and all serious..."

[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/Feltz.pdf Adam Feltz (2007) The Knobe Effect: A Brief Overview. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 28, 265-277.] "Joshua Knobe (2003a) has discovered that the perceived goodness or badness of side effects of actions influences people's ascriptions of intentionality to those side effects. I present the paradigmatic cases that elicit what has been called the Knobe effect and offer some explanations of the Knobe effect. I put these explanations into two broad groups. One explains the Knobe effect by referring to our concept of intentional action. The other explains the Knobe effect without referring to our concept of intentional..."

Gilbert Harman, Intending, Intention, Intent, Intentional Action, and Acting Intentionally: Comments on Knobe and Burra. "There has been considerable controversy about whether this last entailment always holds. Ordinary subjects may judge that (4) and (5) are appropriate in cases in which none of (1)-(3) are—cases in which Jack’s breaking the base is a foreseen but undesired consequence of Jack’s intentionally doing something else. It is currently debated what the best explanation of such ordinary reactions might be. It is also debated what to make of the fact that ordinary judgments using the adjective intentional or the..."

[http://alelanteri.googlepages.com/Lanterietal2008_web.pdf Alessandro Lanteri, Chiara Chelini, and Salvatore Rizzello (2008). “An Experimental Investigation of Emotions and Reasoning in the Trolley Problem”. Journal of Business Ethics, 83 (4): 789-804.]

[http://faculty.baruch.cuny.edu/hsarkissian/The%20Folk%20Strike%20Back%20-%20PS.pdf Mark Phelan and Hagop Sarkissian. (2008). “The folk strike back: Or, why you didn’t do it intentionally, though it was bad and you knew it.” Philosophical Studies, 138(2): 291-298.] "Recent and puzzling experimental results suggest that people’s judgments as to whether or not an action was performed intentionally are sensitive to moral considerations. In this paper, we outline these results and evaluate two accounts which purport to explain them. We then describe a recent experiment that allegedly vindicates one of these accounts and present our own findings to show that it fails to do so. Finally, we present additional data suggesting no such vindication could be in the offing and..."

[http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/120120984/PDFSTART Frank Hindriks (2008). “Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry”. Philosophical Quarterly, 58 (233): 630-641.]

[http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117997268/home Alessandro Lanteri (2009). “Elusive Lay Judgments of Intentionality and Moral Worth”. Philosophical Quarterly, forthcoming.]

[http://faculty.baruch.cuny.edu/hsarkissian/Trading%20for%20the%20Trade-Off%20Hypothesis.pdf Mark Phelan and Hagop Sarkissian. (2009). "Is the Trade-off Hypothesis worth trading for?" Mind &amp; Language 28(2): 164-80.] "Abstract: Recently, the experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe has shown that the folk are more inclined to describe side effects as intentional actions when they bring about bad results. Edouard Machery has offered an intriguing new explanation of Knobe's work—the 'trade-off hypothesis'—which denies that moral considerations explain folk applications of the concept of intentional action. We critique Machery's hypothesis and offer empirical evidence against it. We also evaluate the current state of the debate concerning the concept of intentionality, and argue that..."

Papers on Responsibility, Determinism, and Lay Intuitions
[http://gfp.typepad.com/online_papers/files/is_incompatibilism_intuitive_for_ppr_prepub.doc Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer,and Jason Turner. (forthcoming). “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.]

[http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/Nichols-Knobe.pdf Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe. (2007). “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions.” Noûs 41 (4):663–685.] "An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way."

[http://gfp.typepad.com/online_papers/files/moral_cognition.doc Robert Woolfolk, John Doris, and John Darley. (forthcoming). “Attribution and Alternate Possibilities: Identification and Situational Constraint as Factors in Moral Cognition.” Cognition.]

Manuel Vargas (2006) "Philosophy and the Folk: On Some Implications of Experimental Work for Philosophical Debates on Free Will" The Journal of Cognition and Culture 6: 1 & 2, pp. 249-264

[http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121647697/PDFSTART Adam Feltz, Edward T. Cokely & Thomas Nadelhoffer (2009). Natural Compatibilism Versus Natural Incompatibilism: Back to the Drawing Board. Mind and Language 24 (1):1-23.] "In the free will literature, some compatibilists and some incompatibilists claim that their views best capture ordinary intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility. One goal of researchers working in the field of experimental philosophy has been to probe ordinary intuitions in a controlled and systematic way to help resolve these kinds of intuitional stalemates. We contribute to this debate by presenting new data about folk intuitions concerning freedom and responsibility that correct for some of the shortcomings of previous studies..."

[http://faculty.baruch.cuny.edu/hsarkissian/Is%20Belief%20in%20Free%20Will%20a%20Universal_final.pdf Hagop Sarkissian, Amita Chatterjee, Felipe De Brigard, Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols, Smita Sirker (forthcoming). "Is belief in free will a cultural universal?" Mind & Language] "Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of participants said that..."

Miscellaneous Papers
[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/SPP.pdf Joshua Knobe (2005). Ordinary Ethical Reasoning and the Ideal of 'Being Yourself'. Philosophical Psychology 18 (3):327 – 340.] "The psychological study of ethical reasoning tends to concentrate on a few specific issues, with the bulk of the research going to the study of people's attitudes toward moral rules or the welfare of others. But people's ethical reasoning is also shaped by a wide range of other concerns. Here I focus on the importance that people attach to the ideal of being yourself. It is shown that certain experimental results - results that seemed anomalous and inexplicable to researchers who..."

[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/tics.pdf Joshua Knobe (2005). Theory of Mind and Moral Cognition: Exploring the Connections. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9:357-359.] "An extremely brief (3 page) review of recent work on the ways in which people's moral judgments can influence their use of folk-psychological concepts."

Chad Gonnerman, (2008) "Reading Conflicted Minds: An Empirical Follow-up to Knobe and Roedder," Philosophical Psychology, 21: 1-13 "Recently Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder found that folk attributions of valuing tend to vary according to the perceived moral goodness of the object of value. This is an interesting finding, but it remains unclear what, precisely, it means. Knobe and Roedder argue that it indicates that the concept MORAL GOODNESS is a feature of the concept VALUING. In this article, I present a study of folk attributions of desires and moral beliefs that undermines this conclusion. I then propose the..."

[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/Doing-Allowing.pdf Joshua Knobe, Fiery Cushman & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (2008). Moral Appraisals Affect Doing/Allowing Judgments. Cognition 108 (2):353-380.] "An extensive body of research suggests that the distinction between doing and allowing plays a critical role in shaping moral appraisals. Here, we report evidence from a pair of experiments suggesting that the converse is also true: moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgments. Specifically, morally bad behavior is more likely to be construed as actively ‘doing’ than as passively ‘allowing’. This finding adds to a growing list of folk concepts influenced by moral appraisal, including causation and intentional action. We therefore suggest..."

Joshua Knobe & Dean Pettit, The Pervasive Impact of Moral Judgment. "Shows that the very same asymmetries that arise for intentionally also arise from deciding, desiring, in favor of, opposed to, and advocating. It seems that the phenomenon is not due to anything about the concept of intentional action in particular. Rather, the effects observed for the concept of intentional action should be regarded as just one manifestation of the pervasive impact of moral judgment."

Joshua Knobe, Paul Bloom & David Pizarro, College Students Implicitly Judge Interracial Sex and Gay Sex to Be Morally Wrong. "College students implicitly judge interracial sex and gay sex to be morally wrong Some moral intuitions arise from psychological processes that are not fully accessible to consciousness. For instance, most people disapprove of consensual adult incest between siblings, but are unable to articulate why—they just feel that it is wrong (Haidt, 2001). More generally, there is evidence for at least two sources of moral judgment: explicit conscious reasoning and tacit intuitions, which are motivated by emotional responses (Greene et al., 2001)..."

[http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/Knobe-Doris.pdf Joshua Knobe & John Doris (forthcoming). Strawsonian Variations: Folk Morality and the Search for a Unified Theory. In John Doris & Et Al (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology.] "Much of the agenda for contemporary philosophical work on moral responsibility was set by Strawson’s (1962) essay ‘Freedom and Resentment.’ In that essay, Strawson suggests that we focus not so much on metaphysical speculation as on understanding the actual practice of moral responsibility judgment. The hope is that we will be able to resolve the apparent paradoxes surrounding moral responsibility if we can just get a better sense of how this practice works and what role it serves in people’s lives..."

[http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004806/ Justin Sytsma (forthcoming). “The Proper Province of Philosophy: Conceptual Analysis and Empirical Investigation.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology.] "It is not uncommon for those engaged in the study of mind to react adversely to many of the claims coming out of the neuroscientific study of the brain. One prominent line of attack in these boundary disputes is that neuroscientists (often) misappropriate and misuse mentalistic vocabulary. In particular, Max Bennett and Peter Hacker (2003, 2007) have charged neuroscientists with committing the “mereological fallacy”; they claim that psychological predicates only apply to whole animals, that neuroscientists often apply them to other..."

Critiques of Experimental Philosophy
[http://www.helsinki.fi/~amkauppi/phil/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Experimental_Philosophy.pdf Antti Kauppinen. (2007). The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy. Philosophical Explorations. 10: 95-118.] "In disputes about conceptual analysis, each side typically appeals to pre-theoretical 'intuitions' about particular cases. Recently, many naturalistically oriented philosophers have suggested that these appeals should be understood as empirical hypotheses about what people would say when presented with descriptions of situations, and have consequently conducted surveys on non-specialists. I argue that this philosophical research programme, a key branch of what is known as 'experimental philosophy', rests on mistaken assumptions about the relation between people's concepts and their linguistic behaviour…"

[http://www.smatthewliao.com/texts/liaointuitions.htm S. Matthew Liao. (2008). A Defense of Intuitions. Philosophical Studies 140 (2):247-262.] "Radical experimentalists argue that we should give up using intuitions as evidence in philosophy. In this paper, I first argue that the studies presented by the radical experimentalists in fact suggest that some intuitions are reliable. I next consider and reject a different way of handling the radical experimentalists’ challenge, what I call the Argument from Robust Intuitions. I then propose a way of understanding why some intuitions can be unreliable and how intuitions can conflict, and I argue that on..."

[http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/ludwig/mws2007ludwig.pdf Kirk Ludwig. (2007). The Epistemology of Thought Experiments: First vs. Third Person Approaches. Midwest Studies in Philosophy. 31:128-159.]

[http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/Sosa.pdf Ernest Sosa. (2006). Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Intuition. Philosophical Studies. 132:99-107.] "The topic is experimental philosophy as a naturalistic movement, and its bearing on the value of intuitions in philosophy. This paper explores first how the movement might bear on philosophy more generally, and how it might amount to something novel and promising. Then it turns to one accomplishment repeatedly claimed for it already: namely, the discrediting of armchair intuitions as used in philosophy."

=Books=

Edited Volumes
Experimental Philosophy. (Oxford University Press, 2008).
 * Reviews
 * Review in Metapsychology 12 (33)

"This anthology mixes together previously published and new work in experimental philosophy, by many of its leading figures (among whom the editors feature prominently). Experimental philosophy is a burgeoning movement that urges philosophers to leave their armchairs and test their philosophical claims empirically. It builds upon but goes further than the movement that Jesse Prinz, in his contribution, calls empirical philosophy; philosophy that turns to existing scientific literature to find evidence for philosophical claim. Experimental philosophy involves philosophers actually getting their..."
 * Review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews by Frank Jackson, December 6, 2008

Books Related to X-Phi
Kwame Anthony Appiah: Experiments in Ethics (Mary Flexner Lecture Series of Bryn Mawr College) "Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to philosophical ethics. He elaborates a vision of naturalism that resists both temptations and traces an intellectual genealogy of the burgeoning discipline of 'experimental philosophy'."

Moral Psychology, Volume 1: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness (Bradford Books)

Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (Bradford Books)

Moral Psychology, Volume 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development (Bradford Books)

=Press Coverage= The New New Philosophy
 * Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times

The X-Philes Philosophy meets the real world
 * Jon Lackman, Slate

Against Intuition
 * Christopher Shea, Chronicle of Higher Education

Next Big Thing
 * Anthony Appiah, Talk of the Nation on National Public Radio

=Useful Links=

Websites
Joshua Knobe's Page

X Phi Surveys

The X-Phi Facebook Group

The X-Phi MySpace Page

Wikipedia: Experimental Philosophy

Bristol Experimental Philosophy Page

X-phi on Twitter
Follow xphilosopher

X-Phi Blogs
Experimental Philosophy Page
 * http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/atom.xml|short|max=3

Psychology Today's Experiments in Philosophy 
 * http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/experiments-in-philosophy/feed|short|max=3

YouTube
Xphilosophy YouTube Channel


 * 0dTQh__09ro
 * Experimental Philosophy on Freedom


 * tt5Kxv8eCTA&feature=channel_page
 * The Experimental Philosophy Anthem by Alina Simone


 * CS4DdLikfPk&feature=channel
 * Jesse Prinz on Experimental Philosophy


 * sHoyMfHudaE&feature=channel
 * Experimental Philosophy and Intentional Action w/ Eugene Mirman


 * rrtMAwGmNOo&feature=channel
 * Experimental Philosophy and Free Will

X-Phi Related Blogs
Fragments of Consciousness
 * David Chalmers
 * http://fragments.consc.net/djc/atom.xml|short|max=3

My Mind is Made Up!
 * Justin Sytsma
 * http://mymindismadeup.net/feed/index.php|short|max=3

Natural Rationality
 * Benoit Hardy-Vallée
 * http://naturalrationality.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default|short|max=3

The Splintered Mind
 * Eric Schwitzgebel
 * http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/atom.xml|short|max=3

Think Tonk
 * Clayton Littlejohn
 * http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/atom.xml|short|max=3

Journals
Analysis
 * Published five articles on intentional action, then went on to reject all the later experimental philosophy papers that were submitted.

Cognition
 * Published a series of articles on moral cognition and on the relation between moral cognition and causal judgment.

Cognitive Science
 * No experimental philosophy articles yet but it seems like a good bet.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences
 * Publishes reviews of existing literature, including one on moral grammar and on the Knobe Effect.

Societies
XPS (Experimental Philosophy Society)

Cognitive Science Society

Philosophy of Science Association

Society for Philosophy and Psychology

The Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology

X-Phi Secrets
Experimental Philosophy T-Shirts

The Official Experimental Philosophy Mixed Tape

=References=