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178The 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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286Estimating 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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205Correction 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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103La 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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34Experimental 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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165Is 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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63La 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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10“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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105Of 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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90RETRACTED: 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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845On 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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118An 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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568The 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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822Moral 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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1351Judgments 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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1647Experimental 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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1882Why 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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1777Is the Paradox of Fiction Soluble in Psychology?Philosophical Psychology 29 (6): 930-942. 2016.If feeling a genuine emotion requires believing that its object actually exists, and if this is a belief we are unlikely to have about fictional entities, then how could we feel genuine emotions towards these entities? This question lies at the core of the paradox of fiction. Since its original formulation, this paradox has generated a substantial literature. Until recently, the dominant strategy had consisted in trying to solve it. Yet, it is more and more frequent for scholars to try to dismis…Read more
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Beyond intersubjective validity : recent empirical investigations into the nature of aesthetic judgmentIn Florian Cova & Sébastien Réhault (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2018.
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311Utilitarianism and the Moral Status of Animals: A Psychological PerspectiveEthical Theory and Moral Practice 1-19. forthcoming.Recent years have seen a growing interest among psychologists for debates in moral philosophy. Moral psychologists have investigated the causal origins of the opposition between utilitarian and deontological judgments and the psychological underpinnings of people’s beliefs about the moral status of animals. One issue that remains underexplored in this research area is the relationship between people’s disposition to engage in utilitarian thinking and their attitudes towards animals. This gap is …Read more
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22Retraction notice to “ Beyond moral dilemmas: The role of reasoning in five categories of utilitarian judgment” Cognition 209 (2021) 104572 (review)Cognition 216 (C): 104860. 2021.
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426Experimental philosophy of aestheticsIn Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, De Gruyter. 2023.In this chapter, I present a comprehensive review of the literature on experimental philosophy of aesthetics.
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50What makes a life meaningful? Folk intuitions about the content and shape of meaningful livesPhilosophical Psychology 36 (3): 477-509. 2023.It is often assumed that most people want their life to be “meaningful”. But what exactly does this mean? Though numerous research have documented which factors lead people to experience their life as meaningful and people’s theories about the best ways to secure a meaningful life, investigations in people’s concept of meaningful life are scarce. In this paper, we investigate the folk concept of a meaningful life by studying people’s third-person attribution of meaningfulness. We draw on hypothe…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 |