Chad Gonnerman

This chapter reviews research in the experimental philosophy of consciousness. It discusses recent debates about how to characterize experimental philosophy in general. It then gives an origins story for the experimental philosophy of consciousness, emphasizing work that could be taken to support the claim that there is no folk concept of phenomenal consciousness. It then gets into two strands of subsequent research: work on the folk psychology of group phenomenal minds and work on the cognitive systems responsible for ordinary attributions of phenomenal states in general.

Philosophical dialogue has the power to improve interdisciplinary scientific research. The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) conducts workshops that foster philosophical dialogue among interdisciplinary researchers. This chapter focuses on 20 of these workshops, all of which used the Toolbox STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) instrument and were conducted with interdisciplinary research teams of scientists. We analyze data from some of these workshops and demonstrate that philosophical dialogues conducted using the Toolbox method have two salutary effects. First, they lead to a significant increase in belief formation about philosophical topics relevant to interdisciplinary science. Scientists sometimes do not have preconceived commitments on issues in philosophy of science, and Toolbox workshops tend to prompt them to adopt views on these topics. Second, these philosophical …