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152Internalisme et externalisme: Le problème de la motivation moraleIn Ophélie Desmons, Stéphane Lemaire & Patrick Turmel (eds.), Manuel de Métaéthique, Hermann. 2019.L'internalisme motivationnel est la théorie selon laquelle il existe une connexion nécessaire entre les jugements moraux et la motivation. Dans ce chapitre, nous distinguons un certain nombre de ses variantes et écartons celles d’entre elles qui sont moins directement intéressantes pour les grands débats métaéthiques. Nous examinons ensuite trois arguments philosophiques qui échouent à établir ou à réfuter l'internalisme. Enfin, nous présentons quelques arguments empiriques, relevant respectivem…Read more
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303What experiments can teach us about justice and impartiality: vindicating experimental political philosophyIn Hugo Viciana, Fernando Aguiar & Antonio Gaitán (eds.), Issues in Experimental Moral Philosophy, Routledge. forthcoming.While psychologists and political scientists have long investigated issues of interest to philosophers, the development of political experimental philosophy has remained limited. This slow progress is surprising, given that political philosophers commonly acknowledge the relevance of empirical data for normative theorizing. In this chapter, we illustrate the importance of empirical data by outlining recent developments in three domains related to theories of justice, where empirical results rein…Read more
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613De gustibus est disputandum: An empirical investigation of the folk concept of aesthetic tasteIn Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou & Dan Zeman (eds.), Perspectives on Taste: Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics, and Experimental Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 77-108. 2022.Past research on folk aesthetics has suggested that most people are subjectivists when it comes to aesthetic judgment. However, most people also make a distinction between good and bad aesthetic taste. To understand the extent to which these two observations conflict with one another, we need a better understanding of people's everyday concept of aesthetic taste. In this paper, we present the results of a study in which participants drawn from a representative sample of the US population were as…Read more
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1266Nothing at Stake in KnowledgeNoûs 53 (1): 224-247. 2019.In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some …Read more
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1157The Gettier Intuition from South America to AsiaJournal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 517-541. 2017.This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong-Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “…Read more
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645Le paradoxe de la fiction: le retourL'expression des Émotions: Mélanges En l'Honneur de Patrizia Lombardo. 2015.Tullmann et Buckwalter (2014) ont récemment soutenu que le paradoxe de la fiction tenait plus de l’illusion que de la réalité. D’après eux, les théories contemporaines des émotions ne fourniraient aucune raison d’adopter une interprétation du terme « existence » qui rende les prémisses du paradoxe incompatibles entre elles. Notre discussion a pour but de contester cette manière de dissoudre le paradoxe de la fiction en montrant qu’il ne prend pas sa source dans les théories contemporaines des ém…Read more
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197The Gettier Intuition from South America to AsiaJournal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 517-541. 2017.This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “…Read more
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‘Where there are villains, there will be heroes’: Belief in conspiracy theories as an existential tool to fulfill need for meaningPersonality and Individual Differences 200. 2022.What leads people to believe in conspiracy theories? In this paper, we explore the possibility that people might be drawn towards conspiracy theories because believing in them might satisfy certain existential needs and help people find meaning in their life. Through two studies (N = 289 and 287 after exclusion), we found that par ticipants higher in the need and search for meaning were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. This relationship was not moderated by participants' feelings …Read more
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11Prescription for Love: An Experimental Investigation of Laypeople’s Relative Moral Disapproval of Love DrugsAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience. forthcoming.New technologies regularly bring about profound changes in our daily lives. Romantic relationships are no exception to these transformations. Some philosophers expect the emergence in the near future of love drugs: a theoretically achievable biotechnological intervention that could be designed to strengthen and maintain love in romantic relationships. We investigated laypeople’s resistance to the use of such technologies and its sources. Across two studies (Study 1, French and Peruvian universit…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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« Je ne pouvais pas faire autrement » : une brève introduction au débat sur le principe des possibilités alternativesRÉPHA, revue étudiante de philosophie analytique 5 81-90. 2012.
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143La philosophie comme « armchair psychology »RÉPHA, revue étudiante de philosophie analytique 1 21-28. 2009.
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15Giving money to others feels good. In the past years, this claim has received strong empirical support from psychology and neuroscience. It is now standard to use the label ‘warm glow feelings’ to refer to the pleasure people take from giving, and many explanations of apparently altruistic behavior appeal to these internal rewards. But what exactly are warm glow feelings? Why do people experience them? In order to further our understanding of the phenomenon, we ran two studies: a recall task in …Read more
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38Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics: Aesthetic JudgmentIn Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, De Gruyter. pp. 393-416. 2023.
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177Is the warm glow actually warm? An experimental investigation into the nature and determinants of warm glow feelingsInternational Journal of Wellbeing 13 (3): 1-23. 2023.Giving money to others feels good. It is now standard to use the label ‘warm glow feelings’ to refer to the pleasure people take from giving. But what exactly are warm glow feelings? And why do people experience them? To answer these questions, we ran two studies: a recall task in which participants were asked to remember a donation they made, and a donation task in which participants were given the opportunity to make a donation before reporting their affective states. Correlational and experim…Read more
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66La Philosophie Expérimentale (edited book)Vuibert. 2012.La philosophie expérimentale est un mouvement récent qui tente de faire progresser certains débats philosophiques grâce à l'utilisation de méthodes expérimentales. À la différence de la philosophie conventionnelle qui privilégie l'analyse conceptuelle ou la spéculation, la philosophie expérimentale préconise le recours aux études empiriques pour mieux comprendre les concepts philosophiques. Apparue il y a une dizaine d'années dans les pays anglo-saxons, cette approche constitue actuellement l'un…Read more
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22“One more time”: time loops as a tool to investigate folk conceptions of moral responsibility and human agencySynthese 202 (3): 1-33. 2023.In the past 20 years, experimental philosophers have investigated folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, and their compatibility with determinism. To determine whether laypeople are “natural compatibilists” or “natural incompatibilists”, they have used vignettes describing agents living in deterministic universes. However, later research has suggested that participants’ answers to these studies are plagued with comprehension errors: either people fail to really accept that the…Read more
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13The Folk Concept of Intentional ActionIn Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell. 2016.This chapter provides a critical though comprehensive review of the empirical literature on the folk concept of intentional action. Recently, experimental evidence suggested that authors’ judgments about whether an action counts as intentional are sensitive to normative, or evaluative, factors. Evidence for the putative influence of such considerations on ascriptions of intentionality arises from the study of two phenomena, both discovered by Joshua Knobe, namely the Knobe effect and the skill e…Read more
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133Of Hosts and Men: Westworld and SpeciesismIn James South & Kimberly Engels (eds.), Westworld and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2018.People's attitude to animals is similar to the attitude Westworld has people adopt vis‐a‐vis the hosts: People often deem animal suffering acceptable because it improves their well‐being but still feel upset when an animal is mistreated just for the sake of it. Speciesism is the view that human well‐being matters more than that of other creatures. One justification for this view attempts to ground human beings’ special moral status in their membership in the human species itself. Some of Westwor…Read more
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93RETRACTED: Beyond moral dilemmas: The role of reasoning in five categories of utilitarian judgmentCognition 209 (C): 104572. 2021.Over the past two decades, the study of moral reasoning has been heavily influenced by Joshua Greene’s dual-process model of moral judgment, according to which deontological judgments are typically supported by intuitive, automatic processes while utilitarian judgments are typically supported by reflective, conscious processes. However, most of the evidence gathered in support of this model comes from the study of people’s judgments about sacrificial dilemmas, such as Trolley Problems. To which …Read more
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568On Doing Things IntentionallyMind and Language 27 (4): 378-409. 2012.Recent empirical and conceptual research has shown that moral considerations have an influence on the way we use the adverb 'intentionally'. Here we propose our own account of these phenomena, according to which they arise from the fact that the adverb 'intentionally' has three different meanings that are differently selected by contextual factors, including normative expectations. We argue that our hypotheses can account for most available data and present some new results that support this. We…Read more
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125An empirical investigation of guilty pleasuresPhilosophical Psychology 32 (7): 1129-1155. 2019.In everyday language, the expression ‘guilty pleasure’ refers to instances where one feels bad about enjoying a particular artwork. Thus, one’s experience of guilty pleasure seems to involve the feeling that one should not enjoy this particular artwork and, by implication, the belief that there are norms according to which some aesthetic responses are more appropriate than others. One natural assumption would be that these norms are first and foremost aesthetic norms. However, this suggestion ru…Read more
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581The Puzzle of Multiple EndingsJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (2): 105-114. 2015.Why is it that most fictions present one and only one ending, rather than multiple ones? Fictions presenting multiple endings are possible, because a few exist; but they are very rare, and this calls for an explanation. We argue that such an explanation is likely to shed light on our engagement with fictions, for fictions having one and only one ending seem to be ubiquitous. After dismissing the most obvious explanations for this phenomenon, we compare the scarcity of multiple endings in traditi…Read more
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862Moral Evaluation Shapes Linguistic Reports of Others' Psychological States, Not Theory-of-Mind JudgmentsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 334-335. 2010.We use psychological concepts (e.g., intention and desire) when we ascribe psychological states to others for purposes of describing, explaining, and predicting their actions. Does the evidence reported by Knobe show, as he thinks, that moral evaluation shapes our mastery of psychological concepts? We argue that the evidence so far shows instead that moral evaluation shapes the way we report, not the way we think about, others' psychological states.
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50Two kinds of respect for two kinds of contempt: Why contempt can be both a sentiment and an emotionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 40. 2017.Gervais & Fessler argue that because contempt is a sentiment, it cannot be an emotion. However, like many affective labels, it could be that “contempt” refers both to a sentiment and to a distinct emotion. This possibility is made salient by the fact that contempt can be defined by contrast with respect, but that there are different kinds of respect.
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1359Judgments about moral responsibility and determinism in patients with behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia: Still compatibilistsConsciousness and Cognition 21 (2): 851-864. 2012.Do laypeople think that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Recently, philosophers and psychologists trying to answer this question have found contradictory results: while some experiments reveal people to have compatibilist intuitions, others suggest that people could in fact be incompatibilist. To account for this contradictory answers, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have advanced a ‘performance error model’ according to which people are genuine incompatibilist that are sometimes bi…Read more
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1680Experimental Philosophy of AestheticsPhilosophy Compass 10 (12): 927-939. 2015.In the past decade, experimental philosophy---the attempt at making progress on philosophical problems using empirical methods---has thrived in a wide range of domains. However, only in recent years has aesthetics succeeded in drawing the attention of experimental philosophers. The present paper constitutes the first survey of these works and of the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy of aesthetics'. We present both recent experimental works by philosophers on topics such as the ontology o…Read more
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1632Why compatibilist intuitions are not mistaken: A reply to Feltz and MillanPhilosophical Psychology 29 (4): 550-566. 2016.In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first arg…Read more
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University of GenevaPost-doctoral fellow
Geneva, Switzerland
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
PhilPapers Editorships
Experimental Aesthetics |