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220On Second Thought: Reflections on the Reflection DefenseIn Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 4, . 2021.This chapter sheds light on a response to experimental philosophy that has not yet received enough attention: the reflection defense. According to proponents of this defense, judgments about philosophical cases are relevant only when they are the product of careful, nuanced, and conceptually rigorous reflection. The chapter argues that the reflection defense is misguided: Five studies (N>1800) are presented, showing that people make the same judgments when they are primed to engage in careful re…Read more
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The normative sense : What is universal? What varies?In Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones & Mark Timmons (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology, Routledge. forthcoming.
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293De Pulchritudine non est Disputandum? A cross‐cultural investigation of the alleged intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgmentMind and Language 34 (3): 317-338. 2019.Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment.…Read more
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276Estimating 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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196Correction 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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1098No luck for moral luckCognition 182 (C): 331-348. 2019.Moral philosophers and psychologists often assume that people judge morally lucky and morally unlucky agents differently, an assumption that stands at the heart of the Puzzle of Moral Luck. We examine whether the asymmetry is found for reflective intuitions regarding wrongness, blame, permissibility, and punishment judg- ments, whether people’s concrete, case-based judgments align with their explicit, abstract principles regarding moral luck, and what psychological mechanisms might drive the eff…Read more
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The normative sense : What is universal? What varies?In Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones & Mark Timmons (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology, Routledge. 2018.
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41Experimental Philosophy of Language: Proper Names and PredicatesIn Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, De Gruyter. pp. 183-210. 2023.
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28Is evidence of language-like properties evidence of a language-of-thought architecture?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.We argue that Quilty-Dunn et al.'s commitment to representational pluralism undermines their case for the language-of-thought hypothesis as the evidence they present is consistent with the operation of the other representational formats that they are willing to accept.
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34Editorial: Cultural Variation and CognitionReview of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2): 339-347. 2023.
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636Against Arguments from ReferencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (2). 2009.It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such 'arguments from reference.' Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture (Machery et al. 2004). We argue that accommodating this variation within a the…Read more
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250If Folk Intuitions Vary, Then What?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (3): 618-635. 2012.We have recently presented evidence for cross-cultural variation in semantic intuitions and explored the implications of such variation for philosophical arguments that appeal to some theory of reference as a premise. Devitt (2011) and Ichikawa and colleagues (forthcoming) offer critical discussions of the experiment and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. In this response, we reiterate and clarify what we are really arguing for, and we show that most of Devitt’s and Ichikawa and colleagu…Read more
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380Gettier Across CulturesNoûs 645-664. 2015.In this article, we present evidence that in four different cultural groups that speak quite different languages there are cases of justified true beliefs that are not judged to be cases of knowledge. We hypothesize that this intuitive judgment, which we call “the Gettier intuition,” may be a reflection of an underlying innate and universal core folk epistemology, and we highlight the philosophical significance of its universality.
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78On the Alleged Inadequacies of Psychological Explanations of RacismThe Monist 93 (2): 228-254. 2010.
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272The vernacular concept of innatenessMind and Language 24 (5): 605-630. 2009.The proposal that the concept of innateness expresses a 'folk biological' theory of the 'inner natures' of organisms was tested by examining the response of biologically naive participants to a series of realistic scenarios concerning the development of birdsong. Our results explain the intuitive appeal of existing philosophical analyses of the innateness concept. They simultaneously explain why these analyses are subject to compelling counterexamples. We argue that this explanation undermines t…Read more
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884Semantics, cross-cultural styleCognition 92 (3): 1-12. 2004.Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some wor…Read more
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106Linguistic and metalinguistic intuitions in the philosophy of languageAnalysis 69 (4): 689-694. 2009.Machery et al. reported some preliminary evidence that intuitions about reference vary within and across cultures, and they argued that if real, such variation would have significant philosophical implications. In a recent article, Genoveva Martí argues that the type of intuitions examined by Machery and colleagues is evidentially irrelevant for identifying the correct theory of reference, and she concludes that the variation in the relevant intuitions about reference within and across cultures …Read more
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272Linguistic and metalinguistic intuitions in the philosophy of languageAnalysis 69 (4): 689-694. 2009.Machery et al. (2004) reported some preliminary evidence that intuitions about reference vary within and across cultures, and they argued that if real, such variation would have significant philosophical implications (see also Mallon et al. 2009). In a recent article, Genoveva Martı´ (2009) argues that the type of intuitions examined by Machery and colleagues (‘metalin- 10 guistic intuitions’) is evidentially irrelevant for identifying the correct theory of reference, and she concludes that the …Read more
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1162Demoralizing causationPhilosophical Studies (2): 1-27. 2013.There have recently been a number of strong claims that normative considerations, broadly construed, influence many philosophically important folk concepts and perhaps are even a constitutive component of various cognitive processes. Many such claims have been made about the influence of such factors on our folk notion of causation. In this paper, we argue that the strong claims found in the recent literature on causal cognition are overstated, as they are based on one narrow type of data about …Read more
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339Epistemic Intuitions in Fake-Barn Thought ExperimentsEpisteme 11 (2): 199-212. 2014.In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether non-philosophers share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-bar…Read more
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74Pour une approche évolutionniste de la cognition animaleDialogue 43 (4): 731-746. 2004.Cet article recense et discute le récent livre de Joëlle Proust, Les animaux pensent-ils ?. Proust s'appuie sur les récents développements en psychologie animale et en éthologie pour fournir des réponses nouvelles à des questions philosophiques traditionnelles, comme « les animaux pensent-ils » ou « les animaux parlent-ils ? ». Ce livre est à recommander aussi bien aux étudiants qu'aux chercheurs confirmés. Toutefois, malgré son intérêt, je souligne une limite critique de l'approche de Proust : …Read more
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57Is Identity Essentialism a Fundamental Feature of Human Cognition?Cognitive Science 47 (5). 2023.The present research examines whether identity essentialism, an important component of psychological essentialism, is a fundamental feature of human cognition. Across three studies (Ntotal = 1723), we report evidence that essentialist intuitions about the identity of kinds are culturally dependent, demographically variable, and easily malleable. The first study considered essentialist intuitions in 10 different countries spread across four continents. Participants were presented with two scenari…Read more
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230How to study folk intuitions about phenomenal consciousnessPhilosophical Psychology 22 (1). 2009.The assumption that the concept of phenomenal consciousness is pretheoretical is often found in the philosophical debates on consciousness. Unfortunately, this assumption has not received the kind of empirical attention that it deserves. We suspect that this is in part due to difficulties that arise in attempting to test folk intuitions about consciousness. In this article we elucidate and defend a key methodological principle for this work. We draw this principle out by considering recent exper…Read more
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89P-curving x-phi: Does experimental philosophy have evidential value?Analysis 79 (4): 669-684. 2019.In this article, we analyse the evidential value of the corpus of experimental philosophy. While experimental philosophers claim that their studies provide insight into philosophical problems, some philosophers and psychologists have expressed concerns that the findings from these studies lack evidential value. Barriers to evidential value include selection bias and p-hacking. To find out whether the significant findings in x-phi papers result from selection bias or p-hacking, we applied a p-cur…Read more
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216Deep trouble for the deep selfPhilosophical Psychology 25 (5). 2012.Chandra Sripada's (2010) Deep Self Concordance Account aims to explain various asymmetries in people's judgments of intentional action. On this account, people distinguish between an agent's active and deep self; attitude attributions to the agent's deep self are then presumed to play a causal role in people's intentionality ascriptions. Two judgments are supposed to play a role in these attributions?a judgment that specifies the attitude at issue and one that indicates that the attitude is robu…Read more
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29Truetemp cooled down: The stability of Truetemp intuitionsSynthese 201 (3): 1-19. 2023.In this paper, we report the results of three high-powered replication studies in experimental philosophy, which bear on an alleged instability of folk philosophical intuitions: the purported susceptibility of epistemic intuitions about the Truetemp case (Lehrer, Theory of knowledge. Westview Press, Boulder, 1990) to order effects. Evidence for this susceptibility was first reported by Swain et al. (Philos Phenomenol Res 76(1):138–155, 2008); further evidence was then found in two studies by Wri…Read more
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University of PittsburghHistory and Philosophy of Science
Center for Philosophy of ScienceDistinguished Professor
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
General Philosophy of Science |