Kevin Reuter

Pejoration describes semantic change whereby words shift from neutral or positive to negative over time. We propose the Evaluative Absorption Model, both to characterize a specific pejoration phenomenon and to operationalize it by tracking (1) an initial rise in explicit negative modifiers in attributive position as a word acquires a negative sense, and (2) a subsequent decline in such modifiers once that sense becomes conventionalized. We illustrate this trajectory for four nouns — “propaganda”, “manipulation”, “harassment”, and “discrimination” — using diachronic corpus data from Google Ngram. Our model offers a transparent method for quantifying semantic pejoration.

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a methodological naturalist approach to philosophy that is distinguished by practitioners employing empirical methods for philosophical purposes. Both the methods employed and the purposes they are put to are diverse. As such, the practice cannot be adequately equated with any single approach, philosophical target, or argumentative gambit. With this diversity in mind, this entry will detail the broad practice of experimental philosophy. While experimental philosophy is highly diverse, there are nonetheless prominent themes. Most notably, this includes that experimentalists have often aimed to study “intuitions” concerning concepts of philosophical interest, usually by investigating the judgments of laypeople (or “the folk”). In line with this target, there is also a correspondingly prominent method in x-phi—the use of questionnaires soliciting judgments about short stories (or “vignettes”) based on philosophical thought experiments. After introducing and motivating the practice of experimental philosophy (§1), this entry will discuss the most common methods employed by experimental philosophers (§2) and illustrate how they have been applied to some particularly fruitful topics in contemporary philosophy (§3). In addition to the direct contributions that experimentalists have made to a variety of first-order philosophical debates, experimental philosophy has also had a notable impact on metaphilosophical debates concerning the boundaries of philosophy and the methods that philosophers should employ. Most directly, the practice challenges the presumption of a clean methodological divide between the sciences and philosophy. More critically, some advocates of experimental philosophy have challenged aspects of non-empirical philosophical methodology, prominently including the use of intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical accounts. As such, this entry will conclude with a discussion of the primary ways in which experimental philosophy has featured in the metaphilosophical discussions, while contextualizing this portrayal with regard to the broader practice (§4).

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a methodological naturalist approach to philosophy that is distinguished by practitioners employing empirical methods for philosophical purposes. Both the methods employed and the purposes they are put to are diverse. As such, the practice cannot be adequately equated with any single approach, philosophical target, or argumentative gambit. With this diversity in mind, this entry will detail the broad practice of experimental philosophy. While experimental philosophy is highly diverse, there are nonetheless prominent themes. Most notably, this includes that experimentalists have often aimed to study “intuitions” concerning concepts of philosophical interest, usually by investigating the judgments of laypeople (or “the folk”). In line with this target, there is also a correspondingly prominent method in x-phi—the use of questionnaires soliciting judgments about short stories (or “vignettes”) based on philosophical thought experiments. After introducing and motivating the practice of experimental philosophy (§1), this entry will discuss the most common methods employed by experimental philosophers (§2) and illustrate how they have been applied to some particularly fruitful topics in contemporary philosophy (§3). In addition to the direct contributions that experimentalists have made to a variety of first-order philosophical debates, experimental philosophy has also had a notable impact on metaphilosophical debates concerning the boundaries of philosophy and the methods that philosophers should employ. Most directly, the practice challenges the presumption of a clean methodological divide between the sciences and philosophy. More critically, some advocates of experimental philosophy have challenged aspects of non-empirical philosophical methodology, prominently including the use of intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical accounts. As such, this entry will conclude with a discussion of the primary ways in which experimental philosophy has featured in the metaphilosophical discussions, while contextualizing this portrayal with regard to the broader practice (§4).

Health is widely treated as multidimensional, yet little is known about how these dimensions are structured in lay thinking or how such structures guide health-related judgments. We used a conceptual scaling approach to derive participant-specific conceptual maps that position the term unhealthy relative to three clusters of related concepts reflecting Disease, Lifestyle, and Functional Ability aspects of health. Participants’ conceptual understanding of unhealthy was most closely aligned with a Lifestyle interpretation of health, followed by Disease, while Functional Ability played a comparatively minor role. We also observed substantial inter-individual differences in pluralism. Dominant alignment in participants’ conceptual maps predicted how they applied the concept in a subsequent vignette task, with higher accuracy among participants expressing stronger beliefs. These findings indicate that lay understandings of unhealthy are not neutral reflections of medical definitions but are typically anchored in lifestyle-related considerations while varying substantially across individuals. Crucially, predicting concept application from conceptual organization alone suggests that the structure of lay concepts meaningfully constrains how they are used in judgment. Accounting for the dominant alignment and heterogeneity may inform psychological theories of health, contribute to philosophical debates about its nature, and support more effective health communication.

Philosophers, psychologists and linguists routinely use truth-value judgments as a source of evidence for the meaning of specific expressions. This method presupposes that truth-value judgments track whether what was said corresponds with facts. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that ordinary people’s behavior on the truth-value judgment task is sensitive to a range of factors beyond correspondence with facts. In this paper, we investigate how judgments of truth are influenced by considerations of truthfulness. In a series of three experiments, we present results indicating that the truth-truthfulness entanglement is at the heart of the debate over the semantics of color predicates. We use these findings to challenge contextualism about color predicates. While our substantive contribution is quite targeted, we show that the methodological lessons are likely to generalize broadly to other areas of research in cognitive science.

A traditional view holds that ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge. This view has recently been challenged by the Normative Account, which sees ignorance as involving a normative failure. In this paper, we argue that both perspectives capture important insights. Drawing on three empirical studies, we propose a two-senses account of ignorance, according to which there exist two notions of ignorance: one normative, the other non-normative. We also offer a new explanation of the normative aspect. Our findings suggest that what is negative in being ignorant lies in the expectation that one ought to know the relevant fact.

Conceptual engineering is the practice of revising concepts to improve how people talk and think. Its ability to improve talk and thought ultimately hinges on the successful dissemination of desired conceptual changes. Unfortunately, the field has been slow to develop methods to directly test what barriers stand in the way of propagation and what methods will most effectively propagate desired conceptual change. In order to test such questions, this paper introduces the masked time-lagged method. The masked time-lagged method tests people’s concepts at a later time than the intervention without participant’s knowledge, allowing us to measure conceptual revision in action. Using a masked time-lagged design on a content internalist framework, we attempted to revise planet and dinosaur in online participants to match experts’ concepts. We successfully revised planet but not dinosaur, demonstrating some of the difficulties conceptual engineers face. Nonetheless, this paper provides conceptual engineers, regardless of framework, with the tools to tackle questions related to implementation empirically and head-on.

This article examines whether the folk concept of DISCRIMINATION is inherently evaluative or purely descriptive. Two corpus analyses reveal a historical shift, with “discrimination” evolving from a neutral to an evaluative term. The results of a cancelability test show that denying the evaluative aspect of “discriminatory” leads to contradictions, indicating the communication of moral judgment by default. In a vignette study, we demonstrate that cases often cited as examples of descriptive discrimination are judged either non-discriminatory or morally wrongful. These results support the Moralized View, challenging the Descriptive View, and propose DISCRIMINATION to be a thick concept blending descriptive and evaluative content.

Most researchers agree that emotions have two core features. First, emotions have intentionality. That is, emotions are about something. Second, emotions have phenomenology. In other words, emotions are felt. It is commonly assumed that emotional intentionality and phenomenology cannot be separated into two distinct emotional states. Against this, we propose to divide emotions into (non-phenomenal) emotional attitudes and (non-intentional) emotional feelings. We argue that this proposal is theoretically fruitful and descriptively adequate. Its theoretical fruitfulness includes explaining away the challenge of merging emotional intentionality and phenomenology, and providing a straightforward account of emotional states that lack intentionality (such as moods) or phenomenology (such as unconscious and standing emotions). Its descriptive adequacy is supported by three new empirical studies, which suggest that people distinguish to some extent emotional intentionality and phenomenology by using different verbs: to be afraid/angry/etc. vs. to feel afraid/angry/etc.

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

Mit der kognitiven Wende in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts nahm die empirische Erforschung des Bewusstseins Fahrt auf und hat sich mittlerweile als unverzichtbarer Teil der Psychologie und Neurowissenschaften etabliert. Dieses Kapitel beginnt mit einer Erörterung von drei zentralen Herausforderungen, die die empirische Untersuchung des Bewusstseins besonders schwierig machen: die subjektive Natur des Bewusstseins, die Verschränkung von phänomenalem und Zugriffsbewusstsein und die Komplexität des Gehirns. Anschließend werden innovative Methoden und Schlüsselerkenntnisse der empirischen Bewusstseinsforschung beleuchtet. Abschließend wird der wachsende Einfluss der empirischen Erkenntnisse auf philosophische Debatten um das Bewusstsein erörtert – ein Zeugnis dafür, wie empirische Daten und theoretische Reflexion Hand in Hand fortschreiten können.

Corpus analysis allows researchers to inform, illuminate, and investigate many problems. This chapter provides easy access to some of the central tools commonly used in corpus linguistics. After a short exploration of pre-built corpora and a brief literature review surveying corpus-analytic studies in philosophy, we illustrate these tools by running several corpus analyses on the term “conspiracy theory.” These analyses show that “conspiracy theory” is a strongly evaluative term. The reader of this chapter can follow each of the steps of the corpus analyses using the online material that is freely available.

This graduate textbook provides a basic introduction to experimental philosophy (x-phi). In nine chapters, different methods and tools used in X-Phi are explained, spanning quantitative vignette studies, interactive experiments, corpus analysis, psycholinguistic experiments as well as qualitative interview studies. Each chapter introduces a specific experimental method by means of a case study in an easily accessible way and covers the whole research process from the development of a research question to the interpretation of the data.

A traditional view holds that ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge. This view has recently been challenged by the Normative Account, which sees ignorance as involving a normative failure. In this paper, we argue that both perspectives capture important insights. Drawing on three empirical studies, we propose a two-senses account of ignorance, according to which there exist two notions of ignorance: one normative, the other non-normative. We also offer a new explanation of the normative aspect. Our findings suggest that what is negative in being ignorant lies in the expectation that one ought to know the relevant fact.

The concept of health has long been debated in philosophy and medicine, with discussions often centering on whether health is merely the absence of disease (negativism) or requires the presence of some positive state or ability (positivism). Empirical studies on the folk concept remain scarce and inconclusive. This paper investigates the folk concept of health through implication and contradiction tests. Our findings reveal that while people often infer that health entails both a disease-free state and lifestyle-related factors, interpretations of ‘health’ vary significantly depending on context, with participants associating health primarily with the absence of disease in medical settings while emphasizing lifestyle factors like diet and activity in personal training scenarios. These results suggest that the meaning of the folk concept of health is strongly context-dependent.

The meaning of being healthy is widely debated, with many suggesting it is a multidimensional concept encompassing key dimensions such as the absence of disease, the presence of well-being, and a healthy lifestyle. While recent studies indicate that lifestyle may be a dominant dimension, it remains unclear whether this holds true across populations or if significant differences exist, particularly between laypeople and healthcare professionals. Our studies reveal a difference, but surprisingly, in the opposite direction of what the literature would predict: medical professionals are substantially more likely than laypeople to frame discussions of “healthy” and “unhealthy” in lifestyle contexts. This result challenges prevailing assumptions about the biomedical focus of healthcare professionals and has implications for improving health communication.

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory.

Some of philosophy's most central concepts, including art, friendship, and happiness, have been argued to be dual character concepts. Their main characteristic is that they encode not only a descriptive dimension but also an independent normative dimension for categorization. This article introduces the class of dual character concepts and discusses various accounts of their content and structure. A specific focus will be placed on their relation to two other classes of concepts, thick concepts and natural kind concepts. The study of dual character concepts not only demonstrates that a wide range of concepts is inherently normative, but it also reveals new possibilities for investigating gender biases, generics, and social roles.

The pseudosciences often bear a striking resemblance to the sciences. Using a mimicry account as a framework, this paper investigates how the appearance of social media posts influences people’s perception of the content of such posts as scientific. We present the results of two empiri- cal studies. The first, preparatory study identifies typical characteristics of “scientificness” in social media posts to inform feature manipulations for the main study. The main study then examines what happens if the features are systematically manipulated. The findings support the hypothesis that pseudoscientific digital content benefits from using features of scientificness. We discuss implications for understanding the appeal and persistence of pseudoscience.

Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and developmentally early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work suggests that generics display a unique asymmetry between the prevalence levels required to accept them and the prevalence levels typically implied by their use. This asymmetry effect is thought to have serious social consequences: if speakers use socially problematic generics based on prevalence levels that are systematically lower than what is typically inferred by their recipients, then using generics will likely exacerbate social stereotypes and biases. This paper presents evidence against the popular hypothesis that this asymmetry effect is unique to generics. Correcting for various shortcomings of previous studies, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics and various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’). In addition, to better understand the conditions under which generalized asymmetry effects may exacerbate biases, we examine whether speakers choose generalizing sentences based simply on their acceptance conditions, or are systematically sensitive to the implications likely drawn by their typical recipients. In support of the latter view, we found that, in neutral or cooperative scenarios, speakers reliably choose generalizing sentences whose implied prevalence levels closely match the actual ones. In non-cooperative scenarios, speakers exploit asymmetry effects to further their own goals by choosing generalizing sentences that are strictly true but likely to mislead their recipients. These results refine our understanding of the source of asymmetry effects and the conditions under which they may introduce biased beliefs into social networks.

Several studies in experimental philosophy and semantics have shown that a substantial number of English speakers consider a statement true even if it does not align with the facts, as long as it is justified from the speaker's perspective. These findings challenge the prevailing view among philosophers that truth in the empirical domain is uniformly based on a statement's correspondence to reality. In this study, we explore how perspective-taking influences truth assessments by showing that this influence depends on how the critical question assessing the statement’s truth is phrased. Our results show that when the question targets only the proposition, e.g., “Is it true that [the uttered proposition]?”), participants typically apply a correspondence view of truth—consistent with philosophical convention. But when the question also highlights the speaker (e.g., “Is [the speaker]’s answer true?”), many participants shift toward judging the statement from the speaker’s perspective. We discuss four possible explanations for this behavior and examine the implications of the findings for other philosophical discussions concerning truth and lying, the theory of reference, and norms of assertion.

Several studies in experimental philosophy and semantics have shown that a substantial number of English speakers consider a statement true even if it does not align with the facts, as long as it is justified from the speaker's perspective. These findings challenge the prevailing view among philosophers that truth is uniformly based on a statement's correspondence to reality and suggest that for some speakers truth is sensitive to epistemic perspectives. In this study, we show that this behavior depends on how the critical question assessing the statement's truth is phrased. When participants were asked whether the proposition itself is true (e.g., "Is it true that [the uttered proposition]?"), almost everyone answered negatively. It is when the original speaker was mentioned in the question (e.g., "Is what [the speaker] said true?" or "Is [the speaker]’s answer true?") that around half of the participants answered positively. We explore four possible explanations for this behavior: (1) "true" might be ambiguous between a basic correspondence sense and a coherence sense, which may be activated in some people by the explicit mentioning of the speaker; (2) "true" could be a context-sensitive expression with an implicit perspective parameter such that some speakers shift to the speaker’s perspective when prompted by the question; (3) those who select "true" might ad hoc relativize the term to the speaker’s perspective; (4) those who select "true" might unconsciously substitute it with "truthful". In addition, we discuss the implications of the findings for other philosophical discussions concerning norms of assertion, sincerity, and the theory of reference.

In this paper, we confront two prevailing views of rationality—reason- and coherence-based theories—with empirical facts. While the experimental resolution of the debate between both theories is challenging, we examine two cases in which these theories make distinct predictions regarding whether an agent is deemed rational or not. By directly pitting reason-based against coherence-based theories, our findings indicate that reasons play a more influential role in shaping people's attributions of rationality than coherence.

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity.

The present studies offer a detailed look at how different features influence our intuitions about choice under motivational constraints. The data of Study 1 suggest that children might reason conditionally about free will: six-year-olds succeed in consistently answering affirmatively that they could have done otherwise only if at least two conflicting desires are implied, which are compatible with their own desires. We also demonstrate (Study 2) that adults are likely not to conceive of themselves as agent causationists. When participants are questioned about the possibility of having done otherwise (rather than their ability to have done otherwise), they deny, in the main, that any such possibility exists.