Shaun Nichols

The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivators for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane Journal of Philosophy 96:217–240 1999, Strawson 1986). And a number of recent studies find that people give apparently incompatibilist responses in vignette studies. When participants are presented with a description of a causal deterministic universe, they tend to deny that people are morally responsible in that universe. Although this suggests that people are intuitive incompatibilists, Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray, in a recent series of important papers, have developed an important challenge to this interpretation. They argue that people confuse determinism with bypassing, the idea that one’s mental states lack causal efficacy. Murray and Nahmias present new experiments that seem to confirm the bypassing hypothesis. In this paper, we use structural equation modeling to re-examine the issue. We find support instead for an incompatibilist explanation of the bypassing results, i.e., incompatibilist judgments seem to cause bypassing judgments. We hypothesize that this phenomenon occurs because people think of decisions as essentially indeterministic; thus, when confronted with a description of determinism they tend to think that decisions do not even occur. We provide evidence for this in three subsequent studies which show that many participants deny that people make decisions in a deterministic universe; by contrast, most participants tend to allow that people add numbers in a deterministic universe. Together, these studies suggest that bypassing results don’t reflect a confusion, but rather the depth of the incompatibilist intuition

Placeholder essentialism is the view that there is a causal essence that holds category members together, though we may not know what the essence is. Sometimes the placeholder can be filled in by scientific essences, such as when we acquire scientific knowledge that the atomic weight of gold is 79. We challenge the view that placeholders are elaborated by scientific essences. On our view, if placeholders are elaborated, they are elaborated Aristotelian essences, a telos. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments used by traditional essentialists—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), acquired traits (study 3) and inferences about offspring (study 4)—we find support for the view that essences are elaborated by a telos. And we find evidence (study 5) that teleological essences may generate category judgments.

How might advanced neuroscience—in which perfect neuro-predictions are possible—interact with ordinary judgments of free will? We propose that peoples' intuitive ideas about indeterminist free will are both imported into and intrude into their representation of neuroscientific scenarios and present six experiments demonstrating intrusion and importing effects in the context of scenarios depicting perfect neuro-prediction. In light of our findings, we suggest that the intuitive commitment to indeterminist free will may be resilient in the face of scientific evidence against such free will

How might advanced neuroscience—in which perfect neuro-predictions are possible—interact with ordinary judgments of free will? We propose that peoples' intuitive ideas about indeterminist free will are both imported into and intrude into their representation of neuroscientific scenarios and present six experiments demonstrating intrusion and importing effects in the context of scenarios depicting perfect neuro-prediction. In light of our findings, we suggest that the intuitive commitment to indeterminist free will may be resilient in the face of scientific evidence against such free will.

Many philosophers have claimed that the folk endorse moral universalism. Some have taken the folk view to support moral universalism; others have taken the folk view to reflect a deep confusion. And while some empirical evidence supports the claim that the folk endorse moral universalism, this work has uncovered intra-domain differences in folk judgments of moral universalism. In light of all this, our question is: why do the folk endorse moral universalism? Our hypothesis is that folk judgments of moral universalism are generated in part by a desire to punish. We present evidence supporting this across three studies. On the basis of this, we argue for a debunking explanation of folk judgments of moral universalism. Our results not only further our understanding of the psychological processes underpinning folk judgments of moral universalism. They also bear on philosophical discussions of folk meta-ethics.

Thought experiments have played a central role in philosophical methodology, largely as a means of elucidating the nature of our concepts and the implications of our theories.1 Particular attention is given to widely shared “folk” intuitions – the basic untutored intuitions that the layperson has about philosophical questions.2 The folk intuition is meant to underlie our core metaphysical concepts, and philosophical analysis is meant to explicate or sometimes refine these naïve concepts. Consistency with the deliverances of folk intuitions is a sign that the philosopher is making contact with his object of interest. In order to explore folk concepts, people are often asked to provide their intuitions about a state of affairs in some alternate universe or possible world, one that differs in particular, precise ways from the way things are in the actual world. Here we provide evidence that people’s intuitions about moral responsibility sometimes diverge across worlds even when the facts about these worlds are the same. Which world one considers actual affects at least some philosophical judgments, suggesting that it is not just possible worlds to which our intuitions are tied. We will present several possible explanations for the asymmetry we have identified, and we’ll consider some implications for philosophical intuition.

Mark Siderits has been one of the sharpest, clearest philosophers working on Buddhism in the last several decades. His work has also been strikingly wide-ranging. In this chapter, we will focus on two themes in his work that we find particularly interesting. First, Siderits makes a strong case that Abhidharma Buddhists promote mereological nihilism – the view that only simple entities are ultimately real, and aggregates (like a chariot or a heap) are at best useful fictions. Mereological nihilism grounds an argument against the existence of selves, which of course, is central to the tradition. But Siderits draws out a further, bracing conclusion from mereological nihilism – that consciousness isn’t ultimately real. We think this conclusion so antithetical to other commitments of Buddhism that it provides reason to doubt whether Buddhists should sustain the commitment to mereological nihilism. There is another important argument for the no-self view, however, Vasubandhu’s causal-efficacy argument; on this argument, real things must enter in cause-and-effect relations, and when we turn to cause-and-effect, there is no place where the self plays a necessary role. This argument informs our exploration of the second theme from Siderits – his defense of the “personalist” view that person (unlike self) is a useful fiction. We challenge this claim, first by noting that Vasubandhu himself uses the causal-efficacy argument against both selves and persons, and second by arguing that selves and persons are also on a par when it comes to whether they are useful fictions.

The basis of property rights is a central problem in political philosophy. The core philosophical dispute concerns whether property rights are natural facts, independent of human conventions. In this article, we examine adult judgments on this issue. We find evidence that familiar property norms regarding external objects (e.g., fish and strawberries) are treated as conventional on standard measures of authority dependence and context relativism. Previous work on the moral/conventional distinction indicates that people treat property rights as moral rather than conventional (e.g., Dahl & Waltzer, 2020; Nucci & Turiel, 1993; Tisak & Turiel, 1984). However, these studies explicitly assume that one person owns property that another steals. Study 1 explores judgments of authority dependence regarding ownership in cases that explicitly appeal to stealing and prior ownership as compared to cases that omit such explicit appeals. We find that participants tend to treat ownership as authority dependent when explicit appeals to stealing are absent, but not when the explicit appeals are present. Study 2 examines intuitions about authority dependence of ownership violations as compared to canonical conventional and harm-based moral violations. We find that ownership violations are treated as more authority dependent than harm-based moral violations. This all suggests that some central property norms are treated as conventional. However, we also find that the conventionality of property norms is restricted in several ways. In study 3, we find that people do not treat norms of self-ownership as conventional. Other people cannot take your hair or skin cells even if the teacher says it's okay. Study 4 uses a measure of context relativism to examine the conventionality of ownership norms, comparing different possible norms of ownership. We find that participants regard takings that are violations in their own culture as permissible in other cultures; however, only some foreign norms are deemed acceptable. In study 5 we find another limitation – participants think it's impermissible to take resources from someone based on a new property norm that is retrospectively imposed. Finally, in study 6 we explore whether some takings might be judged to be morally (non-conventionally) wrong as a function of scarcity. We find that when asked about another culture that allows taking, participants tend to say that taking a food item from the person who caught it is permissible when the food is plentiful, but not when the food is scarce.

Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of the dhamma and the saṅgha. However, the prominence of vows in the Buddhist tradition seems at odds with another central part of the doctrine. For vows, like other promises, seem to involve representing a persisting self as the individual who undertakes the vow. And to explicitly appeal to a persisting self conflicts with one of the most important philosophical commitments of Buddhism – the no self view. We argue though that once we articulate the details of how vows generate behavior that conforms to them, we can see that no appeal to the self is required to internalize and act on vows.

When social psychologists talk about the concept of self, they generally mean a collection of psychological traits. Philosophers have been interested in another conception of self, one that is not defined in terms of psychological traits at all. Some philosophers draw on this thin conception of self to support the view that the self is the soul (Reid, Butler); others suggest that this thin conception of the self is at the basis of an illusion of personal identity (Kant). Although this thin conception of self seems implicated in some of the deepest issues in the philosophy of agency, it has been almost entirely ignored in contemporary cognitive science. This chapter argues that ordinary people exploit both the psychologist’s trait conception and a very thin conception of self. The thin conception of self is delivered by episodic memory. Even after dramatic trait changes, episodically recollecting a past experience still issues a sense of identity with the past person. In addition, episodic recollection of misdeeds can trigger the feeling of guilt even after massive trait changes. While this might be irrational in some sense, it is also, the chapter argues, functionally beneficial.

Using a framework from recent metaphysics and philosophy of science, according to which we have two concepts of cause, producer and necessary condition, we investigate causal notions in Antiphon’s Second Tetralogy, which concerns the unintentional homicide of a boy by a javelin-throwing youth. The prosecution maintains that the youth, having produced the boy’s death, is legally responsible; the defense argues, first, that the youth is patient, not agent, of a missing-the-target, and second, that the boy’s death depends on his running into the javelin’s path, so that identifying the cause requires evaluating the contrasts implicit in any causal claim.

The new field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field. It features papers by philosophers, papers by psychologists, and papers co-authored by people in both disciplines. The series heralds the emergence of a truly interdisciplinary field in which people from different disciplines are working together to address a shared set of questions. This new volume of Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy showcases the continuing development of the field. The submitted papers go ever more deeply into some of the issues that have long been central topics of experimental philosophy research (epistemic intuitions, metaethical intuitions, intuitions about causation) but also venture into new topics that illustrate the broadening the scope of experimental philosophy research (slurs, experimental economics, Socratic questionnaires). The volume concludes with three specially commissioned essays reviewing recent work on three central topics: causal judgment, knowledge ascription, and the experimental philosophy of consciousness.

When people learn normative systems, they do so based on limited evidence. Many of the possible actions that are available to an agent have never been explicitly permitted or prohibited. But people will often need to figure out whether those unspecified actions are permitted or prohibited. How does a learner resolve this incompleteness? The learner might assume if an action-type is not expressly forbidden, then acts of that type are permitted. This closure principle is one of Liberty. Alternatively, the learner might assume that if an action-type is not expressly permitted, then acts of that type are prohibited. This closure principle would be one of Residual Prohibition (Mikhail, 2011). On the basis of principles of pedagogical sampling (e.g., Shafto, Goodman, & Griffiths, 2014), we predicted that participants would infer the Liberty Principle (LP) when trained on prohibitions, and they would infer the Residual Prohibition Principle when trained on permissions. This is exactly what we found across several experiments. We also found a bias in favor of Liberty insofar as participants trained on both a prohibition and a permission rule tended still to infer the LP. However, we also found that if an action is potentially harmful, this diminishes the tendency to infer the LP.

Do young children have a teleological conception of the essence of natural kinds? We tested this by examining how the preservation or alteration of an animal’s purpose affected children’s persistence judgments (N = 40, ages 4 - 12, Mean Age = 7.04, 61% female). We found that even when surface-level features of an animal (e.g., a bee) were preserved, if the entity’s purpose changed (e.g., the bee now spins webs), children were more likely to categorize the entity as a member of a different natural kind (e.g., a spider) and these effects were similar in magnitude to altering the surface-features of a natural kind. Our results suggest that we might view teleological properties as partially constitutive of the essence of natural kinds.

Self-control is essential to the Buddhist soteriological project, but it is not immediately clear how we can make sense of it in light of the doctrine of no-self. Exercising control over our actions, thoughts, volitions, and emotions seems to presuppose a conception of self and agency that is not available to the Buddhist. Thus, there seems to be a fundamental mismatch in the practical instructions for exercising control in the Buddhist texts and the doctrine of no-self. In this paper, we develop and defend a general account of self-control that coheres with Abhidarma Buddhism. We defend the Buddhist against recent arguments that self-control depends on an executive self; instead, for the Buddhist, the psychology of self-control must be ‘horizontal’ (for example, one desire winning out over another). However, the characterization of the psychological process isn’t sufficient for a Buddhist theory of self-control. For the Buddhist account is substantive. According to Buddhism, a paradigmatic instance of self-control is an episode in which the desire that wins is a desire that conforms to Buddhist values; by contrast, an episode is not an instance of self-control if the desire that wins is opposed to Buddhist values. We also argue that there are significant resources on which the Buddhist can draw for enhancing self-control despite the denial of self.

It is an old and venerable idea in philosophy that morality is built into us, and this nativist view has seen a resurgence of late. Indeed, the prevailing systematic account of how we acquire complex moral representations is a nativist view inspired by arguments in Chomskyan linguistics. In this article, I review the leading argument for moral nativism – the poverty of the moral stimulus. I defend a systematic empiricist alternative that draws on the resources of statistical learning. Such an empiricist account, I argue, promises to explain much of the complexity of people’s moral and other normative attitudes.

It is well-known that people will adjust their first-order beliefs based on observations of others. We explore how such adjustments interact with second-order beliefs regarding universalism and relativism in a population. Across a range of simulations, we show that populations where individuals have a tendency toward universalism converge more quickly in coordination problems, and generate higher total payoffs, than do populations where individuals have a tendency toward relativism. Thus, in contexts where coordination is important, belief in universalism is advantageous. However, we also show, across a range of simulations, that universalism will enshrine inequalities and eliminate diversity, and in these cases it seems that relativism has its own advantages.

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 still out, there is now a substantial body of evidence suggesting that some of those empirical hypotheses are true. Much of this evidence derives from an ongoing series of experimental studies of epistemic intuitions that we have been conducting. A preliminary report on these studies will be presented in Section 3. In light of these studies, we think it is incumbent on those who pursue the epistemological projects in question to either explain why the truth of the hypotheses does not undermine their projects, or to say why, in light of the evidence we will present, they nonetheless assume that the hypotheses are false. In Section 4, which is devoted to Objections and Replies, we’ll consider some of the ways in which defenders of the projects we are criticizing might reply to our challenge. Our goal, in all of this, is not to offer a conclusive argument demonstrating that the epistemological projects we will be criticizing are untenable. Rather, our aim is to shift the burden of argument

Many philosophers maintain that causation is to be explicated in terms of a kind of dependence between cause and effect. These “dependence” theories are opposed by “production” accounts which hold that there is some more fundamental causal “oomph”. A wide range of experimental research on everyday causal judgments seems to indicate that ordinary people operate primarily with a dependence-based notion of causation. For example, people tend to say that absences and double preventers are causes. We argue that the impression that commonsense causal discourse is largely dependence-based is the result of focusing on a very narrow class of causal verbs. Almost all of the vignette-based experimental work on causal judgment has been prosecuted using the word “cause”. But much ordinary causal discourse involves special causal verbs, such as “burn” and “crack”. We find that these verbs display a quite different pattern from the verb “cause”. For instance, for absences and double preventers (Studies 1-3), we find that while people are inclined to say that X caused Y to burn, turn, crack or start, they are less inclined to think that X burned, turned, cracked or started Y. In Study 4, we find that for chains involving a distal and proximal event, people are inclined to say that the distal event is not a special cause of the outcome, though it is a “cause” of the outcome. Together, we find a surprising double dissociation between “cause” and a stock of special causal verbs. We conclude by suggesting that much commonsense causal judgment, which heavily trades in special causal verbs, might be better captured by production-based accounts of causation.

We develop a partial solution to the meta-problem of consciousness that builds on our previous psychological account of an apparent explanatory gap. Drawing from empirical work on explanatory cognition and conceptual development, we sketch a profile of cognitive systems for which primitive concepts facilitate explanatory gaps. This account predicts that there will be multiple explanatory gaps. We suggest that this is borne out by the existence of primitivist theories in multiple philosophical domains.

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism.

A central goal of contemporary cognitive science is the explanation of cognitive abilities or capacities. [Cummins 1983] During the last three decades a wide range of cognitive capacities have been subjected to careful empirical scrutiny. The adult's ability to produce and comprehend natural language sentences and the child's capacity to acquire a natural language were among the first to be explored. [Chomsky 1965, Fodor, Bever & Garrett 1974, Pinker 1989] There is also a rich literature on the ability to solve mathematical problems [Greeno 1983], the ability to recognize objects visually [Rock 1983, Gregory 1970, Marr 1982], the ability to manipulate and predict the behavior of middle sized physical objects [McClosky 1983, Hayes 1985], and a host of others