Florian Cova

La philosophie expérimentale est un mouvement récent qui tente de faire progresser certains débats philosophiques grâce à l'utilisation de méthodes expérimentales. À la différence de la philosophie conventionnelle qui privilégie l'analyse conceptuelle ou la spéculation, la philosophie expérimentale préconise le recours aux études empiriques pour mieux comprendre les concepts philosophiques. Apparue il y a une dizaine d'années dans les pays anglo-saxons, cette approche constitue actuellement l'une des branches les plus dynamiques de la philosophie contemporaine. L'objectif de cet ouvrage est d'offrir un contact direct avec les travaux les plus connus et les plus discutés des philosophes expérimentaux. Il regroupe ainsi dix textes représentatifs de ce domaine jeune, mais déjà florissant, et couvre une large partie du champ philosophique contemporain (philosophie du langage, théorie de la connaissance, conscience, théorie de l'action, éthique et philosophie des sciences).

This study investigates how the expression ‘critical thinking’ (CT) is understood and used by the general public in the United States, using the tools of experimental philosophy. Based on responses from 288 non‐philosopher participants, our findings suggest that CT is commonly associated with problem solving, decision making and logical analysis. This folk conception aligns more closely with psychological definitions than with philosophical accounts of CT. When compared with results from a parallel study conducted among French‐speaking participants, notable cultural differences emerged, particularly regarding the emphasis placed on scepticism and metacognition. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that conceptual issues long identified in the academic literature—such as the conflation of CT with other notions (e.g., intelligence or rationality), and the reduction of CT to a single component—are also prevalent in lay conceptions. These findings underscore the need for a more coherent conceptual framework and for increased attention to the ways in which CT is understood and appropriated outside academic contexts.

In the past decade, experimental philosophy---the attempt at making progress on philosophical problems using empirical methods---has thrived in a wide range of domains. However, only in recent years has aesthetics succeeded in drawing the attention of experimental philosophers. The present paper constitutes the first survey of these works and of the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy of aesthetics'. We present both recent experimental works by philosophers on topics such as the ontology of aesthetics, aesthetic epistemology, aesthetic concepts, and imagination, as well as research from other disciplines that not only are relevant to philosophy of aesthetics but also open new avenues of research for experimental philosophy of aesthetics. Overall, we conclude that the birth of an experimental philosophy of aesthetics is good news not only for aesthetics but also for experimental philosophy itself, as it contributes to broaden the scope of experimental philosophy.

Why is it that most fictions present one and only one ending, rather than multiple ones? Fictions presenting multiple endings are possible, because a few exist; but they are very rare, and this calls for an explanation. We argue that such an explanation is likely to shed light on our engagement with fictions, for fictions having one and only one ending seem to be ubiquitous. After dismissing the most obvious explanations for this phenomenon, we compare the scarcity of multiple endings in traditional kinds of fiction to their profusion in the case of interactive fictions. This contrast poses a challenge to accounts of our engagement with fictions in terms of games of make-believe. We conclude that solving this puzzle is likely to improve our philosophical understanding of fictions.

In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan (2015) have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue that Feltz and Millan’s error-theory rests on a conceptual confusion: it is perfectly acceptable for a certain brand of compatibilist to judge free will and fatalism to be compatible, as long as fatalism does not prevent agents from being the source of their actions. We then present the results of two studies showing that laypeople’s intuitions are best understood as following a certain brand of source compatibilism rather than a “free-will-no-matter-what” strategy.

Fundamental beliefs about free will and moral responsibility are often thought to shape our ability to have healthy relationships with others and ourselves. Emotional reactions have also been shown to have an important and pervasive impact on judgments and behaviors. Recent research suggests that emotional reactions play a prominent role in judgments about free will, influencing judgments about determinism’s relation to free will and moral responsibility. However, the extent to which affect influences these judgments is unclear. We conducted a metaanalysis to estimate the impact of affect. Our meta-analysis indicates that beliefs in free will are largely robust to emotional reactions.

Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward.

Mystical experiences are generally considered to be rare and special experiences, characterized by feelings of unity and self-loss. Still, certain researchers have recently proposed that mystical experiences could be placed on a continuum with more common and mundane experiences. In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory study, the goal of which was to identify ordinary experiences that might share (though to a lesser degree) the key characteristics of mystical experiences. To this end, we asked participants to report past experiences of unity and self-loss. Our results suggest that everyday experiences of unity, mainly elicited by the feeling of being part of a social group, share many (but not all) features of mystical experiences, such as feelings of unity, insight, and presence of meaning. Moreover, both mystical experiences and everyday unity experiences were characterized by the presence of social emotions. On the basis of these preliminary results, we argue that investigating the continuity between mystical and everyday experiences might contribute to shed light on the psychological mechanisms underlying mystical experiences and on their evolutionary origin.

We present the results of four experiments concerning the evaluation people make of sentences involving “many”, showing that two sentences of the form “many As are Bs” vs. “many As are Cs” need not be equivalent when evaluated relative to a background in which B and C have the same cardinality and proportion to A, but in which B and C are predicates with opposite semantic and affective values. The data provide evidence that subjects lower the standard relevant to ascribe “many” for the more negative predicate, and that judgments involving “many” are sensitive to moral considerations, namely to expectations involving a representation of the desirability as opposed to the mere probability of an outcome. We relate the results to similar semantic asymmetries discussed in the psychological literature, in particular to the Knobe effect and to framing effects.

Psychedelics are known to elicit intense and meaningful subjective experiences. These subjective experiences are supposed to play a major role in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. However, not much attention has been paid to the role played by emotions in these experiences. In this paper, we argue that typical psychedelic-induced experiences share many phenomenological features with two emotions: awe (which involves a reduced sense of the self, need for cognitive accommodation, and alterations of temporal perception) and being moved (which involve feelings of insight, meaningfulness, and connectedness). On the basis of this comparison, we argue that these two emotions might play an important role in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and put forward a two-process model of the role of emotions in psychedelic-assisted therapy. Based on this model, we propose several testable hypotheses that can be derived from this model.

Experimental philosophers have been investigating folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, wondering whether our intuitive understanding of free will and moral responsibility make them compatible or incompatible with determinism. However, methodological worries have been raised concerning such studies: some have claimed that participants in such studies are simply unable to understand the materials they are presented with. To bypass such methodological worries, we investigated “educated” folk intuitions, that is: intuitions of people who are not philosophers but have enough personal interest in philosophy to have a good grasp of philosophical concepts, and to which the vignettes and their context have been explained before they answer. To this end, we took the opportunity of a video and online survey (N = 4385) released by a popular French philosophy youtuber. The results suggest that, even in this context, the results of previous surveys replicate, suggesting that participants’ inclination toward compatibilism is not the mere product of a comprehension error.

Do people have the intuition that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism? To find out, experimental philosophers have presented participants with vignettes describing agents in deterministic universes and probed their intuitions about the free will and moral responsibility of these agents. However, these debates soon got embroiled around the difficulty of assessing whether participants correctly understood the vignettes and the concepts of determinism and free will and the extent to which different comprehension errors plagued participants’ answers. In this chapter, we clarify those debates by using the results of a brand new study (N = 772) on participants’ intuitions about free will. We introduce readers to correlations, regressions, multiple regressions, mediation analyses, and multiple mediation analyses through the use of structural equation modeling to show how different techniques may give different interpretations of folk intuitions on free will. We explain how to run these different analyses in R and provide detailed R code.

This graduate textbook provides a basic introduction to experimental philosophy (x-phi). In nine chapters, different methods and tools used in X-Phi are explained, spanning quantitative vignette studies, interactive experiments, corpus analysis, psycholinguistic experiments as well as qualitative interview studies. Each chapter introduces a specific experimental method by means of a case study in an easily accessible way and covers the whole research process from the development of a research question to the interpretation of the data.

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “reflective” thinking.

Past research on people's moral judgments about moral dilemmas has revealed a connection between utilitarian judgment and reflective cognitive style. This has traditionally been interpreted as reflection is conducive to utilitarianism. However, recent research shows that the connection between reflective cognitive style and utilitarian judgments holds only when participants are asked whether the utilitarian option is permissible, and disappears when they are asked whether it is recommended. To explain this phenomenon, we propose that reflective cognitive style is associated with a greater moral leniency—that is, a greater tendency to be tolerant of moral violations, and that moral leniency predicts utilitarian judgment when utilitarian judgment is measured through permissibility. In Study 1 (N = 192), we design a set of vignettes to assess moral leniency. In Studies 2 and 3 (N = 455, 428), we show that reflective cognitive style is indeed associated with greater moral leniency, and that moral leniency mediates the connection between cognitive style and utilitarian judgment. We discuss the implication of our results for the interpretation of the relationship between utilitarianism and reflective cognitive style.

We sometimes say about certain things (such as philosophical questions) that they are ‘deep’ or ‘profound’. But what does it mean exactly? Surprisingly, philosophers have been quite silent on this topic and there is neither consensual nor prominent conceptual analysis of ‘depth’. After surveying different proposals that have tried to capture depth in terms of explanatory depth, subject matter, emotional impact, understanding or complexity, we present the results of three studies in which we combine qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the everyday concept of ‘depth’. Our results suggest that depth and profundity are generally characterized as (i) something with a meaning, (ii) that stimulates cognitive activity, to (iii) promote epistemic progress about (iv) important issues, thus (v) having an emotional impact. Based on these findings, we propose a first characterization of the ordinary concepts of depth and profundity.

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism.

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “reflective” thinking.

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong-Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “reflective” thinking.

In the past 20 years, experimental philosophers have been investigating folk intuitions about the compatibility of determinism with free will and moral responsibility using vignettes depicting agents in deterministic universes. However, recent research suggests that participants massively fail to understand these vignettes. Moreover, it has also been proposed that these comprehension errors might even be systematic and thus unavoidable, threatening the project of probing folk intuitions about free will and determinism through vignettes. Through five studies, we suggest that past studies have overestimated participants’ failure to understand vignettes depicting deterministic universes, mainly by relying on unreliable samples and by using non-validated measures. We also show that using new vignettes that take more time to better describe what determinism is substantially reduces comprehension errors and their impact on participants’ intuitions. We conclude that, at least in the current state of the art, skepticism about the possibility to probe folk intuitions about the compatibility of determinism with free will and moral responsibility through the use of vignettes is premature.

Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project (XRP) to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy (osf.io/dvkpr). Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward.

Past philosophical analyses of bullshit have generally presented bullshit as a formidable threat to truth. However, most of these analyses also reduce bullshit to a mere symptom of a greater evil (e.g. indifference towards truth). In this paper, I introduce a new account of bullshit which, I argue, is more suited to understand the threat posed by bullshit. I begin by introducing a few examples of “truth-tracking bullshit”, before arguing that these examples cannot be accommodated by past, process-based accounts of bullshit. I then introduce my new, output-based account of bullshit, according to which a claim is bullshit when it is presented as or appears as interesting at first sight but is revealed not to be that interesting under closer scrutiny. I present several arguments in favor of this account, then argue that it is more promising than past accounts when it comes to explaining how bullshit spreads and why it is a serious threat to truth.