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366Not More than a FeelingThought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (1): 41-50. 2022.Affect-based theorists and life satisfaction theorists disagree about the nature of happiness, but agree about this methodological principle: a philosophical theory of happiness should be in line with the folk concept HAPPINESS. In this article, we present two empirical studies indicating that it is affect-based theories that get the folk concept HAPPINESS right: competent speakers judge a person to be happy if and only if that person is described as feeling pleasure/good most of the time. Our s…Read more
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405Which Method(s) for Conceptual Engineering?In Tomas Marvan, Hanne Andersen, Hasok Chang, Benedikt Löwe & Ivo Pezlar (eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology, College Publications. 2022.
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108Empirical Studies on Truth and the Project of Re‐engineering TruthPacific Philosophical Quarterly 2106 (3): 493-517. 2021.Most philosophers have largely downplayed any relevance of multiple meanings of the folk concept of truth in the empirical domain. However, confusions about what truth is have surged in political and everyday discourse. In order to resolve these confusions, we argue that we need a more accurate picture of how the term ‘true’ is in fact used. Our experimental studies reveal that the use of ‘true’ shows substantial variance within the empirical domain, indicating that ‘true’ is ambiguous between a…Read more
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261Separating the evaluative from the descriptive: An empirical study of thick conceptsThought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (2): 135-146. 2021.Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical study, designed to investi…Read more
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65Is there really an omission effect?Philosophical Psychology 29 (8): 1142-1159. 2016.The omission effect, first described by Spranca and colleagues, has since been extensively studied and repeatedly confirmed. All else being equal, most people judge it to be morally worse to actively bring about a negative event than to passively allow that event to happen. In this paper, we provide new experimental data that challenges previous studies of the omission effect both methodologically and philosophically. We argue that previous studies have failed to control for the equivalence of r…Read more
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77What is a colleague? The descriptive and normative dimension of a dual character conceptPhilosophical Psychology 33 (7): 997-1017. 2020.Colleagues are not only an integral part of many people’s lives; empirical research suggests that having a good relationship with one’s colleagues is the single most important factor for being happy at work. However, so far, no one has provided a comprehensive account of what it means to be a colleague. To address this lacuna, we have conducted both an empirical as well as theoretical investigation into the content and structure of the concept ‘colleague.’ Based on the empirical evidence that we…Read more
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733The good, the bad, and the timely: How temporal order and moral judgment influence causal selectionFrontiers in Psychology 5 (1336): 1-10. 2014.Causal selection is the cognitive process through which one or more elements in a complex causal structure are singled out as actual causes of a certain effect. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we investigated the role of moral and temporal factors in causal selection. Our results are as follows. First, when presented with a temporal chain in which two human agents perform the same action one after the other, subjects tend to judge the later agent to be the actual cause. Second…Read more
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301Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental PhilosophyReview of Philosophy and Psychology (1): 1-36. 2018.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 stud…Read more
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210Correction to: Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental PhilosophyReview of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (1): 45-48. 2018.Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.
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Reading Words Hurts: The impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words.In Erica Cosentino, Markus Werning & Kevin Reuter (eds.), Reading Words Hurts: The impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words, . 2015.
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269Reading Words Hurts: The impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related wordsIn D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings & P. P. Maglio (eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. pp. 453-458. 2015.This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people (based on their self-report) associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like syringe, wound, knife, and cactus, are considered to be more pain-related for…Read more
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647Feeling the right way: Normative influences on people's use of emotion conceptsMind and Language 36 (3): 451-470. 2020.It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are exper…Read more
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168Dual character conceptsPhilosophy Compass 14 (1). 2018.Some of philosophy's most central concepts, including art, friendship, and happiness, have been argued to be dual character concepts. Their main characteristic is that they encode not only a descriptive dimension but also an independent normative dimension for categorization. This article introduces the class of dual character concepts and discusses various accounts of their content and structure. A specific focus will be placed on their relation to two other classes of concepts, thick concepts …Read more
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112Causal Attributions and Corpus AnalysisIn Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis (eds.), Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy, Bloomsbury Press. 2019.Although philosophers have often held that causation is a purely descriptive notion, a growing body of experimental work on ordinary causal attributions using questionnaire methods indicates that it is heavily influenced by normative information. These results have been the subject of sceptical challenges. Additionally, those who find the results compelling have disagreed about how best to explain them. In this chapter, we help resolve these debates by using a new set of tools to investigate ord…Read more
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216Unfelt painSynthese 197 (4): 1777-1801. 2020.The standard view in philosophy treats pains as phenomenally conscious mental states. This view has a number of corollaries, including that it is generally taken to rule out the existence of unfelt pains. The primary argument in support of the standard view is that it supposedly corresponds with the commonsense conception of pain. In this paper, we challenge this doctrine about the commonsense conception of pain, and with it the support offered for the standard view, by presenting the results of…Read more
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126Transformative DecisionsJournal of Philosophy 115 (6): 313-335. 2018.Some decisions we make—such as becoming a parent or moving to a different part of the world—are transformative. According to L. A. Paul, transformative decisions pose a major problem to us because they fall outside the realm of rationality. Her argument for that conclusion rests on the premise that subjective value is central in transformative decisions. This paper challenges that premise and hence the overall conclusion that transformative decisions usually are not rational. In the theoretical …Read more
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105Experimental Philosophy of PainJournal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 611-628. 2017.The standard view of pains among philosophers today holds that their existence consists in being experienced, such that there can be no unfelt pains or pain hallucinations. The typical line of support offered for this view is that it corresponds with the ordinary or commonsense conception of pain. Despite this, a growing body of evidence from experimental philosophers indicates that the ordinary understanding of pain stands in contrast to the standard view among philosophers. In this paper, we w…Read more
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107Putting pain in its proper placeAnalysis 79 (1): 72-82. 2019.In a series of articles in this journal, Michael Tye (2002) and Paul Noordhof (2001, 2002) have sparred over the correct explanation of the putative invalidity of the following argument: the pain is in my fingertip; the fingertip is in my mouth; therefore, the pain is in my mouth. Whereas Tye explains the failure of the argument by stating that “pain “creates an intensional context, Noordhof maintains that the “in” in ‘the pain is in my fingertip’ is not spatial, but has state-attributing charac…Read more
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271No knowledge requiredEpisteme 16 (3): 303-321. 2018.Assertions are the centre of gravity in social epistemology. They are the vehicles we use to exchange information within scientific groups and society as a whole. It is therefore essential to determine under which conditions we are permitted to make an assertion. In this paper we argue and provide empirical evidence for the view that the norm of assertion is justified belief: truth or even knowledge are not required. Our results challenge the knowledge account advocated by, e.g. Williamson (1996…Read more
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37How Not to Characterise a Hard ChoiceRatio 30 (4): 494-521. 2017.People are often faced with so called hard choices – also known as hard cases of comparison. In trying to characterize these hard choices, philosophers have made two central claims. First, failure of transitivity underlies hard cases of comparison. Second, using a random procedure is considered inappropriate in order to arrive at a decision in hard cases. While having some argumentative support, both claims primarily rely on expert intuitions. The results of the experiments we present in this pa…Read more
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342Stereotypes, Conceptual Centrality and Gender Bias: An Empirical InvestigationRatio 30 (4): 384-410. 2017.Discussions in social psychology overlook an important way in which biases can be encoded in conceptual representations. Most accounts of implicit bias focus on ‘mere associations’ between features and representations of social groups. While some have argued that some implicit biases must have a richer conceptual structure, they have said little about what this richer structure might be. To address this lacuna, we build on research in philosophy and cognitive science demonstrating that concepts …Read more
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600Dual Character Concepts in Social Cognition: Commitments and the Normative Dimension of Conceptual RepresentationCognitive Science 41 (S3). 2017.The concepts expressed by social role terms such as artist and scientist are unique in that they seem to allow two independent criteria for categorization, one of which is inherently normative. This study presents and tests an account of the content and structure of the normative dimension of these “dual character concepts.” Experiment 1 suggests that the normative dimension of a social role concept represents the commitment to fulfill the idealized basic function associated with the role. Backg…Read more
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232Hard cases of comparisonPhilosophical Studies 174 (9): 2227-2250. 2017.In hard cases of comparison, people are faced with two options neither of which is conceived of as better, worse, or equally good compared to the other. Most philosophers claim that hard cases can indeed be distinguished from cases in which two options are equally good, and can be characterized by a failure of transitive reasoning. It is a much more controversial matter and at the heart of an ongoing debate, whether the options in hard cases of comparison should be interpreted as incomparable, o…Read more
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193Distinguishing the Appearance from the Reality of PainJournal of Consciousness Studies 18 (9-10): 94-109. 2011.It is often held that it is conceptually impossible to distinguish between a pain and a pain experience. In this article I present an argument which concludes that people make this distinction. I have done a web-based statistical analysis which is at the core of this argument. It shows that the intensity of pain has a decisive effect on whether people say that they 'feel a pain'(lower intensities) or 'have a pain' (greater intensities). This 'intensity effect'can be best explained by people's va…Read more
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95Hallucinating PainIn Justin Sytsma (ed.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind, Bloomsbury. pp. 75-100. 2014.The standard interpretation of quantum mechanics and a standard interpretation of the awareness of pain have a common feature: Both postulate the existence of an irresolvable duality. Whereas many physicists claim that all particles exhibit particle and wave properties, many philosophers working on pain argue that our awareness of pain is paradoxical, exhibiting both perceptual and introspective characteristics. In this chapter, we offer a pessimistic take on the putative paradox of pain. Specif…Read more
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139Is Imagination Introspective?Philosophia 39 (1): 31-38. 2011.The literature suggests that in sensory imagination we focus on the imagined objects, not on the imaginative states themselves, and that therefore imagination is not introspective. It is claimed that the introspection of imaginative states is an additional cognitive ability. However, there seem to be counterexamples to this claim. In many cases in which we sensorily imagine a certain object in front of us, we are aware that this object is not really where we imagine it to be. So it looks as if i…Read more
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422Where is your pain? A Cross-cultural Comparison of the Concept of Pain in Americans and South KoreaStudia Philosophica Estonica 9 (1): 136-169. 2016.Philosophical orthodoxy holds that pains are mental states, taking this to reflect the ordinary conception of pain. Despite this, evidence is mounting that English speakers do not tend to conceptualize pains in this way; rather, they tend to treat pains as being bodily states. We hypothesize that this is driven by two primary factors—the phenomenology of feeling pains and the surface grammar of pain reports. There is reason to expect that neither of these factors is culturally specific, however,…Read more
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74The Developmental Challenge to the Paradox of PainErkenntnis 82 (2): 265-283. 2017.People seem to perceive and locate pains in bodily locations, but also seem to conceive of pains as mental states that can be introspected. However, pains cannot be both bodily and mental, at least according to most conceptions of these two categories: mental states are not the kind of entities that inhabit body parts. How are we to resolve this paradox of pain? In this paper, I put forward what I call the ‘Developmental Challenge’, tackling the second pillar of this paradox, i.e. the introspect…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language |
Experimental Philosophy |
Concepts |
Pain |
Areas of Interest
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Epistemology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Language |
Experimental Philosophy |
Concepts |
Pain |
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Experimental Philosophy: Corpus Analysis |
Introspection and Introspectionism |