Andrew James Latham

In recent years, medical professionals have noted a concerning rise in lawfully available dietary supplements and various other forms of interventions marketed to broad segments of the population. These products are marketed for an increasing number of conditions and are offered by a growing number of large retailers. Discrepancies in the literature regarding what constitutes pseudomedicine indicate a need for a detailed analysis. In this chapter, systematicity is identified as one characteristic that can be used to demarcate medicine from “folk medicine” and pseudomedicine, drawing on work by Paul Hoyningen-Huene and the earlier application of systematicity to medicine. The chapter shows that systematicity not only helps demarcate medicine but also helps offer a better understanding of the proper role of folk medicine.

Throughout history, theistic thinkers such as Anselm (1080/1998), Aquinas (1485/1947), Descartes (1641/2003), and Plantinga (1993) have argued that our cognitive faculties are innately veridical as a divine creation. However, contemporary findings from cognitive science have exposed our vulnerability to numerous cognitive biases, which many recent authors consider as evidence against divine creation (Fales, 1996; Ramsey, 2002; Childers, 2011; Teehan, 2016; Park, 2018; Lucas, 2018; Launonen, 2021; Kvandal, 2022; contra Loke, 2022). We draw on a point of convergence between the theistic perspective and the naturalistic evolutionary perspective, namely, that we are finite, corporeal beings, and argue that there are good empirical reasons to view our cognitive biases as grounded in reasonable designs within such finitude. The upshot is that the problem lacks a solid empirical foundation. This paper can simultaneously be considered a scientifically grounded exploration on human cognitive finitudes within a theistic context.

This paper empirically probes people’s judgements about whether future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry (TVA for short) are rationally permissible, obligatory, or impermissible. While philosophers are divided about the normative status of these attitudes/preferences, they have typically agreed that non-philosophers will judge that future-bias is at least permissible, and probably obligatory, and will judge that TVA is not permissible. If this is right, it is important for two reasons. First, many researchers have argued that future-bias is a manifestation of TVA. If, however, people make different normative judgements about the two phenomena this tends to undermine this idea. Second, if it is true, it impacts theorising about the normative status of these phenomena: the assumption that future-bias is rational currently guides theorising, in that defenders of the rationality of future-bias tend to argue that its rationality is obvious, and hence must be accommodated, while opponents tend to try to show why, despite not being rational, future-bias appears to us to be rational. Yet no empirical work has been undertaken to test these assumptions about people’s judgements. In the first work of this kind, we confirmed that most people judge future-bias to be rationally obligatory, and TVA to be rationally impermissible.

In recent years, notable figures within the medical community have expressed concerns about the rate of medical progress, suggesting that the rapid advances of medicine’s ‘golden age’ are now giving way to an ‘age of disappointment’. While these pessimistic pronouncements about medical progress must–implicitly if not explicitly–appeal to some criteria for what medical progress would be, the task of explicitly defining medical progress has been notably neglected. We take up this task, drawing on insights from the philosophy of science concerning both scientific progress and the aims of medicine. Among other things, we differentiate between medical scientific progress and progress in medical practice, and suggest that this distinction helps to evaluate the aforementioned concerns about the current rate of medical progress. While it is not our goal to draw conclusions relating to the state of medicine at the present time, we propose a unifying account of medical scientific progress according to which such progress leads, necessarily, to progress in medical practice, and show how this account both plausibly distinguishes between medical scientific progress and other (non-medical) instances of scientific progress, and does justice to the ‘dual character’ of medicine.

Evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias, another is future-bias, and a third is present-bias. Philosophers have argued that, in part, the normative status of these biases depends on the extent to which they tend to promote, or frustrate, wellbeing, where “wellbeing” is taken to be of fundamental value. Since near-bias is thought to be associated with impulsivity, lack of self-control, and poor long-term health and financial outcomes, it has often been supposed that it is associated with lower wellbeing and is therefore rationally impermissible. By contrast, philosophical views about the normative status of future-bias have been mixed, with some arguing that future-bias is impermissible because it frustrates wellbeing, and others arguing that it is at least permissible (and perhaps obligatory) because it is the product of mechanisms whose functioning can be expected to promote wellbeing. However, to date, there are no studies that directly probe how time-biases correlate with wellbeing. We empirically investigate which biases promote or frustrate wellbeing. We find no evidence that near-bias or present-bias frustrate wellbeing, but future-bias is associated with higher measures of wellbeing on several measures.

The concepts of health and disease are fundamental to medical research, healthcare, and public health, and philosophers have long sought to clarify their meaning and implications. Increasingly, it is suggested that progress in this area could be advanced by integrating empirical methods with philosophical reflection. This Element explores the emerging field of experimental philosophy of medicine (XPhiMed), which takes this approach by applying empirical methods to longstanding philosophical debates. It begins with an overview of the philosophical debates and their methodological challenges, followed by an exploration of experimental findings on health, disease, and disorder, along with their implications for philosophy and other fields.

In the philosophical literature, there is growing consensus that while the passage of time alone does not diminish blameworthiness, it can allow agents to undergo changes that mitigate the degree to which they deserve blame and punishment. According to the dilution approach, any notable change to an agent’s psychology alters the degree to which they are blameworthy for past actions. In contrast, the decontamination approach requires agents to alter facts about themselves that are related to their culpability for past wrongs to become less blameworthy. According to these views, wrongdoers must morally improve, experience guilt, and/or offer amends to mitigate their blameworthiness. In this paper, we present a study that investigates the extent to which our responsibility judgments are sensitive to dilution and decontamination changes and why these changes matter. While we found support for both dilution and decontamination approaches, decontamination had a much larger impact on a wider range of responsibility-related judgments than dilution. Our findings indicate that if you want to change people’s minds about how blameworthy you are for past wrongs, altering the facts about yourself that are related to your culpability is often the best way to mitigate the degree to which others blame you.

While philosophers disagree about the permissibility of future-bias, they have typically agreed that non-philosophers will at least judge that future-bias is permissible, and probably judge that it is obligatory as well. Recent empirical work supports this supposition: people overwhelmingly judge that they themselves ought to prefer, of a negative event, that it lies at a certain point in the past rather than an equidistant point in the future. This finding can potentially be marshalled into an argument that people ought to be future-biased, which proceeds via the idea that people’s normative judgments in these matters are a good (if defeasible) guide to the normative facts, or that the best explanation for people having such normative judgements is that there are normative reasons to be future-biased. Such arguments rely on the idea that people’s normative judgements in this regard are consistent. So far, however, the only normative judgements that have been investigated concern people’s judgements about their own first-personal preferences about negative events in conditions of equality. This paper presents the results of a study that probes these judgements much more broadly, including both first- and third-personal judgements, in conditions of equality and inequality, about positive and negative events, as well as people’s normative judgements about other people’s preferences (what we call other-directed normative judgements).

Recent research [Latham, Miller, and Norton 2019. “Is our Naïve Theory of Time Dynamical?” Synthese] reveals that a majority of people represent actual time as dynamical. But do they, as suggested by McTaggart and Gödel, represent time as essentially dynamical? This paper distinguishes three interrelated questions. We ask (a) whether the folk representation of time is sensitive or insensitive: i.e. does what satisfies the folk representation of time in counterfactual worlds depend on what satisfies it actually – sensitive – or not – insensitive, and (b) do those who represent actual time as dynamical, represent time in all possible worlds as dynamical – what we call insensitive dynamism – or do they represent time in all possible worlds as dynamical only conditional on the actual world in fact being dynamical – what we call sensitive dynamism, and (c) do dynamists and non-dynamists deploy two different representations of time, or deploy the same representation, but disagree about what actually satisfies that representation? We found no evidence that the folk representation of time is sensitive, or that the folk representation of time is essentially dynamical in either sense, though we did find evidence of a largely (though not universally) shared representation, on which dynamical features are sufficient, but not necessary, for time.

Moral hazard occurs when the presence or promise of a new technology or policy reduces incentives for responsible behaviour, because the consequences of risky behaviour are perceived to be reduced, transferred, or mitigated. Moral hazard risk has been widely empirically investigated in the case of geoengineering for climate change, but other novel technologies have not been subject to such scrutiny. Ever since de-extinction was announced to the public as a viable possibility with modern biotechnology, a series of commentators have argued that the promise of de-extinction will create a moral hazard. The thought is that extinction has been perceived as permanent. Any change in this belief, such as the idea that species can be brought back, potentially undermines the motivation for current conservation efforts. This is an empirical claim that we investigate. Our study assesses the public's support for conservation in scenarios that promise the use of de-extinction to address actions that are likely to cause extinction. We did not find that people were more likely to accept the extinction of a species if its de-extinction was promised in the future. We did, however, find an association between extinction acceptance and judgments that de-extinction could successfully resurrect species. The findings of this study represent a crucial step in assessing the risks novel biotechnology creates.

Empirical evidence suggests that one explanation for a certain sort of time-bias—near-bias—is diminution in self-connectedness between current person-stages and temporally farther future stages. In this paper we extend this research in two directions. First, we explore the association between self-connectedness towards past person-stages and retrospective near-bias, with the aim of determining whether we can explain retrospective near-bias in terms of diminished feelings of connectedness between current person-stages and temporally farther past stages. Second, we explore the association between future-bias and asymmetries in self-connectedness with future stages as compared with equidistant past stages. If current stages feel more connected to future stages than equidistant past ones, then this asymmetry could explain our bias towards future over past person-stages. We aim to determine whether this is so, in part as a way to try and better understand the mechanisms that underlie time-biases, but also in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. That is because on many views, the strength of certain inter-stage connections grounds there being an egoistic concern relation obtaining between stages, whose strength, in turn, determines whether that stage has prudential reason to have (or not) time-biased preferences. Since self-connectedness may be evidence of, or partly constitutive of, such inter-stage connections, it may be that if asymmetries in, or diminution of, self-connectedness, explains time-biased preferences, it also normatively licenses those preferences.

The aim of the paper is to explore how people understand the concepts of health and disease, including the factors that influence their judgments about whether a condition is a disease or a healthy state. The study investigates whether health and disease judgments come apart, and whether they are affected by factors such as typicality, dysfunction, and disvalue. We conclude that the folk concept of health is positive (such that being healthy is consistent with having a disease), while the folk concept of disease is naturalistic (such that value judgments do not play a direct, significant role in determining whether a condition counts as a disease).

Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for negatively valenced events to be located in the past rather than the future, and positively valenced ones to be located in the future rather than the past. Strong risk aversion is the preference to pay some cost to mitigate the badness of the worst outcome. People who are both strongly risk averse and future-biased can face a series of choices that will guarantee them more pain, for no compensating benefit: they will be pain pumped. Thus, combining these preferences is rationally impermissible. Dougherty (2011) argues that this gives us reason to think that future-bias is rationally impermissible. This argument, and a similar one presented by Greene and Sullivan (2015), relies on the idea that if several preferences are not rationally combinable, then in the absence of some explanation of why they are not combinable, we should conclude that (at least) one of them is rationally impermissible. We take up this question by, inter alia, reflecting on the empirical results of a study we ran that probes people’s risk averse and future-biased preferences. We argue that the data, in conjunction with other considerations, suggests that we should not infer from the irrationality of the combination of these preferences to the irrationality of one of the preferences singly. We also argue that given the descriptive data about these preferences, there is no reason to think that, if one of them is rationally impermissible, then it is future-bias. Finally, we reflect on the general issue of whether individual preferences are rationally evaluable.

This book advances a new kind of compatibilist account of free will: indirect compatibilism. It is the first sustained philosophical analysis of the idea that the ordinary concept of free will is a conditional one. Indirect compatibilism is the combination of two theses. The first is that the best understanding of our concept of free will is that it is a conditional concept—that indeterminism or libertarian powers are necessary if they are actual, but not if they are not. The second is indirection—that actions are free either when they are caused by standard conscious psychological processes, or else by sub-personal-level processes influenced in various ways by conscious psychological processes. The book combines traditional philosophical analysis with empirical work—in particular, experimental philosophy and cognitive neuroscience—to produce a detailed description and defence of indirect compatibilism. Indirect compatibilism resolves two important problems in the free will literature: that people as a matter of fact do not accept that free actions can exist in a deterministic universe, and that some simple actions are under the direct control of conscious psychological processes. Indirect Freedom will appeal to researchers and graduate students interested in the metaphysics of free will, experimental philosophy, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience.

With increasing detection of early cancers and precancers, debate over the cancer label has intensified. Although attention focuses on relabeling solid tumors to reduce overtreatment, hematologic precursor conditions remain overlooked. Clonal cytopenia of undetermined significance (CCUS) carries increased risk of progression to myelodysplastic neoplasms and acute myeloid leukemia, with high-risk CCUS having a prognosis similar to that of lower-risk myelodysplastic neoplasms. Because these conditions are managed with surveillance or systemic therapy based on risk, diagnostic labels and linguistic framing may influence decision-making. We investigated whether these factors are associated with changes in risk perceptions and treatment decisions in CCUS.

The concept of privacy is both significant and contested, with ongoing philosophical debate about whether it is best understood in terms of non-access or as involving some form of control. This paper advances the discussion by employing experimental philosophy to examine folk intuitions about privacy. Our findings show that these intuitions favor a control-based concept of privacy. Additionally, we show that the type of information at stake influences privacy judgments, indicating that privacy concerns are sensitive to not only access and control but also to informational content. Our results enable us to make progress on the question of how to understand the concept of privacy and calls for a new research agenda that pays closer attention to different informational distinctions.

This paper empirically probes people’s judgements about whether future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry (TVA for short) are rationally permissible, obligatory, or impermissible. While philosophers are divided about the normative status of these attitudes/preferences, they have typically agreed that non-philosophers will judge that future-bias is at least permissible, and probably obligatory, and will judge that TVA is not permissible. If this is right, it is important for two reasons. First, many researchers have argued that future-bias is a manifestation of TVA. If, however, people make different normative judgements about the two phenomena this tends to undermine this idea. Second, if it is true, it impacts theorising about the normative status of these phenomena: The assumption that future-bias is rational currently guides theorising, in that defenders of the rationality of future-bias tend to argue that its rationality is obvious, and hence must be accommodated, while opponents tend to try to show why, despite not being rational, future-bias appears to us to be rational. Yet no empirical work has been undertaken to test these assumptions about people’s judgements. In the first work of this kind, we confirmed that most people judge future-bias to be rationally obligatory, and TVA to be rationally impermissible.

One significant project within the philosophy of medicine has been to explore the concepts of health and disease and their conceptual relationship—whether health is the absence of disease (negativism) or the presence of a positive state or capacity (positivism). While some contend that this project is hampered by some limitations of traditional philosophical analysis, this paper employs a multi-method approach, incorporating corpus linguistics, semantic feature production tasks, and vignette studies, to investigate the concept of health. Our principal finding is that adherence to healthy behaviors is one of the key criteria for assessing overall health. This finding not only contributes to the philosophical-medical debate but also has implications for health communication and policy development

The apparent downsides of opaque algorithms has led to a demand for explainable AI (XAI) methods by which a user might come to understand why an algorithm produced the particular output it did, given its inputs. Patients, for example, might find that the lack of explanation of the process underlying the algorithmic recommendations for diagnosis and treatment hinders their ability to provide informed consent. This paper examines the impact of two factors on user perceptions of explanations for AI systems in medical contexts. The factors considered were the stakes of the decision—high versus low—and the decision source—human versus AI. 484 participants were presented with vignettes in which medical diagnosis and treatment plan recommendations were made by humans or by AI. Separate vignettes were used for high stakes scenarios involving life-threatening diseases, and low stakes scenarios involving mild diseases. In each vignette, an explanation for the decision was given. Four explanation types were tested across separate vignettes: no explanation, counterfactual, causal and a novel ‘narrative-based’ explanation, not previously considered. This yielded a total of 16 conditions, of which each participant saw only one. Individuals were asked to evaluate the explanations they received based on helpfulness, understanding, consent, reliability, trust, interests and likelihood of undergoing treatment. We observed a main effect for stakes on all factors and a main effect for decision source on all factors except for helpfulness and likelihood to undergo treatment. While we observed effects for explanation on helpfulness, understanding, consent, reliability, trust and interests, we by and large did not see any differences between the effects of explanation types. This suggests that the effectiveness of explanations may not depend on type of explanation but instead, on the stakes and decision source.

Two important issues in the philosophy of medicine are the evaluative issue (whether the concept of disease is value-laden) and the neutrality issue (whether the concept of dysfunction is value-laden). The aim of this study was to empirically examine whether a person’s evaluation of their own condition (i.e., patient evaluation) influences whether their condition is considered to be a disease and dysfunction. With respect to the evaluative issue, we observed, consistent with previous research, that patient evaluation does not influence people’s disease judgments, but it does influence their health judgments. Further, with respect to the neutrality issue, we observed that while patient evaluation does not influence people’s dysfunction judgments in physical conditions, it does influence their dysfunction judgments in mental conditions. Depending on exactly how these results are interpreted they might have potentially significant implications for dominant positions in the literature, particularly for those that claim to account for lay judgments. Progress in the philosophy of medicine might benefit from a shift in focus from the concepts of disease and health to a more detailed examination of the concept of dysfunction.

This study investigates the influence of evaluative judgments, specifically regarding an individual's moral character, on judgments of health and disease. Though it might seem that assessments judgments of health and disease should be impervious to evaluative judgments, two hypotheses suggest that health and disease judgments might be influenced by evaluative judgments: the "naturalization hypothesis" which centers on our inclination to assign blame, and the "pathologization hypothesis" rooted in the belief of a just world. These hypotheses lead to opposing predictions about how someone with a perceived negative moral character might have their condition categorized. Employing a fictional vignette and the methodologies of experimental philosophy, our research provides evidence in favor of the "pathologization hypothesis." While this phenomenon likely carries real-world implications, especially in healthcare, it also has potential for offering insights into the dynamics of medicalization and stigma.

Empirical evidence shows that while some people report that it seems to them, in experience, as though time robustly passes, others report that this is not how things seem. The question then arises as to why we find such different reports. Previously research has shown that beliefs about the future being open (in one of several ways) vary across the population. While to date no association has been found regarding people’s beliefs about time robustly passing, and their beliefs about the future being open, no work has probed the connection between people’s beliefs about the future being open and their reports regarding their temporal experiences. We empirically investigate the experiential open-future hypothesis, according to which people are more inclined to report that it seems to them as though time robustly passes if they have certain beliefs about the future being open, and that this at least partially explains why we find differential reporting regarding temporal experiences. We failed to find any evidence in favour of the experiential open-future hypothesis. However, we suggest that given other recent evidence regarding the connection between people’s sense of agency and their reports regarding robust passage, there is reason to investigate the idea that differences in people’s experiences of future openness may explain the variation in their reports regarding time’s robust passage.

Using experimental philosophy methodologies, this paper explores standing to blame and praise, specifically within respect to health and health advice. Our primary aim is to contribute insights to the literature on standing, while also addressing work in medical ethics on the appropriate roles of doctors. Two main principles regarding standing emerge from these areas: the Differential Relationship Principle and the Hypocrisy Principle. To propel the debates and test these principles, we investigate whether standing judgments are affected by factors such as relationship (whether the person giving health advice is a friend or a doctor), advisor consistency (whether the advisor themselves follow the health advice they offer), and advisee consistency (whether the advice-recipient follows the advice). Moreover, we explore how participants perceive the degree of blame or praise individuals deserve for following health advice or for their health outcome. Our main findings indicate that, surprisingly, doctors are judged to have a higher standing compared to friends, and that hypocritical behavior does not significantly reduce the perceived standing of either doctors or friends. We conclude by discussing the significance of our findings and outlining potential directions for future research.

Prior research has unveiled a pathologization effect where individuals perceived as having bad moral character are more likely to have their conditions labeled as diseases and are less often considered healthy compared to those viewed as having a good moral character. Moreover, these individuals are perceived as less unlucky in their affliction and more deserving of it. This study explores the broader impacts of moral character on such judgments, hypothesizing that these effects reach deeper and extend to both negative and positive moral evaluations. The pathologization effect also raises concerns about potential discrimination and the overmedicalization of normal health variations, so we also examine whether providing more detailed descriptions of conditions mitigates the influence of judgments of moral character. The methodology and broader implications of our findings are discussed, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of how moral judgments might influence patient care.

Debates about the genuine disease status of controversial diseases rely on intuitions about a range of factors. Adopting tools from experimental philosophy, this paper explores some of the factors that influence judgments about whether low sexual desire should be considered a disease and whether it should be medically treated. Drawing in part on some assumptions underpinning a divide in the literature between viewing low sexual desire as a genuine disease and seeing it as improperly medicalized, we investigate whether health and disease judgments are affected by factors such as an individual’s gender, the cause of the low desire, whether the desire is high or low, and both personal and societal valuations of the condition. Our main findings indicate that (a) the cause of a condition influences whether it is judged a disorder, (b) how the individual values the condition influences whether the condition is seen as a proper target of medical intervention, and (c) perceived dysfunction influences judgments regarding health, disorder classification, medicalization, and medical intervention. Our findings help further illuminate the intricate interplay of factors that influence judgments about health and disease in controversial conditions.

One proposed explanation for a particular kind of temporal preference lies in a disparity between the emotional intensity of memory compared to anticipation. According to the memory/anticipation disparity explanation, the utility of anticipation of a particular event if that event is future, whether positive or negative, is greater than the utility of retrospection of that same event if it is past, whether positive or negative, and consequently, overall utility is maximised when we prefer negative events to be located in the past rather than the future, and positive ones in the future rather than the past. To have this preference is to be (at least apparently) future biased. If this explanation is correct, it would tend to confer rational justification upon these preferences. This paper empirically investigates this explanation. Our results suggest that, at most, this explanation might be a partial one of some people’s preferences some of the time, rather than a general explanation of future bias. In turn, this lends some indirect support to a competing explanation that appeals to temporal asymmetries in emotion and attention. Since that explanation would arguably tend not to confer rational justification upon (apparently) future-biased preferences, we argue that our findings provide some reason to be sceptical that these preferences are, in general, rationally justified.

There are two kinds of time bias: near bias and future bias. While philosophers typically hold that near bias is rationally impermissible, many hold that future bias is rationally permissible. Call this normative hybridism. According to arbitrariness objections, certain patterns of preference are rationally impermissible because they are arbitrary. While arbitrariness objections have been leveled against both near bias and future bias, the kind of arbitrariness in question has been different. In this article we investigate whether there are forms of arbitrariness that are common to both kinds of preferences and, hence, whether there are versions of the arbitrariness objection that are objections to both near bias and future bias. If there are, then this might go some way toward undermining normative hybridism and to defending thoroughgoing time-neutralism.

Empirical evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias, another is future-bias, and a third is present-bias. Philosophers are concerned with the normative status of these time-biases. They have argued that, at least in part, the normative status of these biases depends on the extent to which they tend to promote, or frustrate, wellbeing, where “wellbeing” is taken to be of fundamental value. Since near-bias is thought to be associated with impulsivity, lack of self-control, and poor long-term health and financial outcomes, it has often been supposed that it is associated with lower wellbeing. On those grounds, philosophers have argued that near-bias is rationally impermissible. By contrast, philosophical views about the normative status of future-bias have been mixed, with some arguing that future-bias is impermissible because, they think, it frustrates wellbeing, and others arguing that it is at least permissible (and perhaps obligatory) because it is the product of mechanisms whose functioning can be expected to promote wellbeing. However, to date there are no studies that have directly probed how time-biases correlate with wellbeing. Since it's not a settled matter which psychological mechanisms underlie time-biases, it is not uncontroversial which things serve as proxies for these preferences. We directly empirically investigate the connection between time-biases and measures of wellbeing, to see which of these biases is associated with promoting, or frustrating wellbeing. Contrary to expectation, we found no evidence that near-bias or present-bias are associated with frustrating wellbeing on any of the constructs we measured. On the other hand, and contrary to what some philosophers have supposed, we found that future-bias was associated with higher measures of wellbeing on several measures. We consider the implications of these findings for the evaluation of the normative status of these time biases.

Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects persist by enduring rather than perduring. Second, that most people have a view of change on which enduring but not perduring objects count as changing. Third, that one reason why the folk represent time as dynamical is because it seems to them, and they believe that, they endure through time. We found no evidence to support these claims. While there are certainly plenty of ‘folk’ endurantists in the population we tested, there are also plenty of ‘folk’ perdurantists. We did not find robust evidence that a majority of people believed that, or it seemed to them as though, objects endure rather than perdure. We conclude that many arguments in favour of endurantism that appeal to folk beliefs about, or experiences of, persisting objects and change rest on views about those beliefs and experiences that are empirically unsupported. There is no evidence to suggest that endurantism is the folk friendly view of persistence, and so we should stop treating it as such without argument.

Many philosophers have become sceptical of the use of thought experiments in theorising about personal identity. In large part, this is due to work in experimental philosophy that appears to confirm long‐held philosophical suspicions that thought experiments elicit inconsistent judgements about personal identity and hence judgements that are thought to be the product of cognitive biases. If so, these judgements appear to be useless at informing our theories of personal identity. Using the methods of experimental philosophy, we investigate whether people exhibit inconsistent judgements and, if they do, whether these judgements are likely to be the source of cognitive bias or, instead, sensitivity to some relevant factor. We do not find that people's judgements are sensitive to any of the factors we investigate (relevant or irrelevant), nor that people have inconsistent judgements across cases. Rather, people's judgements are best explained by them having a very minimal account of what it takes for a person to survive. Since this pattern of judgements is no reason to think that we are subject to cognitive bias, we see no reason, as things stand, to be sceptical of our judgements.