Ron Mallon

Perhaps the most visible trend in philosophical ethics over the first years of the twenty‐first century has been the remarkable number of moral philosophers referencing, and producing, empirical work. In moral psychology and experimental philosophy, the fields where this “empirical turn” is most evident, papers, anthologies, and monographs are appearing at a dizzying clip. Among the philosophers and scientists involved, the tone is often exuberant, with partisans claiming progress in debates that have been ossified for many a year (e.g., Stich, Doris, and Roedder 2010: 202).

This chapter focuses on arguments that derive philosophically significant conclusions from the assumption of one or another theory of reference—what are called “arguments from reference.” It first considers the structure of arguments from reference, and reviews a number of projects in several areas of philosophy that employ such arguments. It then shows that while intuitions about reference are central in the philosophy of language for finding the correct theory of reference, the recent empirical work of Machery and colleagues suggests that intuitions about reference vary both within and across cultures. Next, it takes the variation suggested by this empirical work for granted and considers its implications for arguments from reference. It concludes that arguments from reference ought to be relinquished.

This chapter focuses on the dispute between evolutionary psychology and social constructionist approaches to the emotions. The emotions are a crucial case, both because they play a central role in discussions of other social and psychological phenomena. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 gives a brief overview of the social constructionist approach. Section 3 reviews work on emotions in the evolutionary psychology tradition and sets out a model of the psychological mechanisms. Section 4 answers yes to the question of whether social constructionists and evolutionary psychologists have anything left to disagree about. Section 5 discusses how social constructionists and evolutionary psychologists have a deep though largely hidden philosophical disagreement about the meaning and the reference of the emotion terms that ordinary folk use, words like “anger,” “fear,” and “song.” Section 6, begins by asking which account of the meaning and reference of emotion terms is correct, and goes on to suggest that no one really knows and that the question itself may not be clear enough to have a determinate answer. It also argues that it really doesn't matter which side is right since it is easy to see how this dispute can be bracketed and set aside.

This chapter considers the phenomenon of “stereotype threat”: the perceived threat of confirming a deleterious stereotype about a group to which one belongs. While most work on stereotype threat interprets it as an implicit, automatic response to a social situation, I explore the possibility of understanding the phenomenon as an intentional, strategic response of persons to their situations. Explanations adverting to persons and their reasons are intimately bound up with our treating persons as persons, for example, in holding them to be reason-governed and responsible. I explore and articulate both personal and subpersonal interpretations of stereotype threat, and I suggest that subpersonal accounts of stereotype threat are incomplete: they fail to account for phenomena better explained by a personalist interpretation.

There are two ways of understanding experimental philosophy's process of appealing to intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical claims: the positive and negative programs. This chapter deals with how the positivist method of conceptual analysis is affected by the results of the negative program. It begins by describing direct extramentalism, semantic mentalism, conceptual mentalism, and mechanist mentalism, all of which argue that intuitions are credible sources of evidence and will therefore be shared. The negative program challenges this view by questioning if there can be in fact a shared intuition about a specific hypothetical case, as conflicting intuitions are as likely to arise. The chapter then discusses other issues raised by the negativists such as the limits of surveys and the proper domain problem.

Theories of meaning and reference have been at the heart of analytic philosophy since the beginning of the twentieth century. Two views have dominated the field: the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference. The common wisdom in philosophy is that Kripke has refuted the traditional descriptivist theories of reference by producing some famous stories which elicit intuitions that are inconsistent with these theories. Recent work in cultural psychology has indicated the possibility that the intuitions that guide theorizing in this domain might differ between members of East Asian and Western cultures. This chapter presents evidence that intuition probes, closely modeled on Kripke's stories, elicit significantly different responses from East Asians (Hong Kong undergraduates) and Westerners (American undergraduates). It discusses the significance of this finding for the philosophical pursuit of a theory of reference.

This chapter argues that current work on racial cognition is relevant to many of philosophers' concerns about race. It first examines several positions within the philosophy of race, pointing out where facts about the psychology of race could have an impact upon the feasibility of reform proposals offered by philosophers. It then reviews two relatively separate sets of psychological literature. The first shows that the content of racial thought is not a simple product of one's social environment, but is also shaped by the operation of certain evolved psychological mechanisms. After drawing out implications of this work for several types of proposals made by philosophers, it turns to the question of racial evaluation. Recent studies suggest that implicit racist biases can exist and influence behavior even in persons sincerely professing tolerant or even anti-racist views, and that implicit racial evaluations can be insulated in important ways from more explicitly held beliefs. The chapter then argues that these findings bear on the feasibility of proposals made in the philosophical literature on race, and may be useful in shaping novel proposals.

This chapter examines whether morality really evolved, as many philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists claim. It distinguishes three possible versions of this claim and reviews the evidence in support of each. It concludes that two versions of the claim that morality evolved are relatively well supported, but that they are unlikely to have significant philosophical consequences, while the stronger version, which is of real interest to philosophers, is in fact empirically unsupported.

Experimental philosophy is an extension of the Naturalists’ Challenge to the use of intuitions in philosophy. This chapter explores this challenge and traditional or “armchair” responses to it, focusing especially on the case of reference. It first considers the role and nature of intuitions, along with two kinds of experimental philosophical challenges to their use: the challenge from irrelevant determination and the challenge from diversity. It then explores using the challenge from diversity to undermine the reliability of intuitions as evidence for the truth of philosophical claims, and examines critical responses to the challenge from diversity. The chapter concludes by evaluating the possibility that diversity in responses to thought experiments occur even within individuals, and the implications of this for the Naturalists’ Challenge.

Human social intelligence comprises a wide range of complex cognitive and affective processes that appear to be selectively impaired in autistic spectrum disorders. The study of these neuro- developmental disorders and the study of canonical social intelligence have advanced rapidly over the last twenty years by investigating the two together. Specifically, studies of autism have provided important insights into the nature of ‘theory of mind’ abilities, their normal development and underlying neural systems. At the same time, the idea of impaired development of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying ‘theory of mind’ has shed new light on the nature of autistic disorders. This general approach is not restricted to the study of impairments but extends to mapping areas of social intelligence that are spared in autism. Here we investigate basic moral judgment and find that it appears to be substantially intact in children with autism who are severely impaired in ‘theory of mind’. At the same time, we extend studies of moral reasoning in normal development by way of a new control task, the ‘cry baby’ task. Cry baby scenarios, in which the distress of the victim is ‘unreasonable’ or ‘unjustified,’ do not elicit moral condemnation from normally developing preschoolers or from children with autism. Judgments of moral transgressions in which the victim displays distress are therefore not likely the result of a simple automatic reaction to the distress and more likely involve moral reasoning. Mapping the cognitive co-morbidity patterns of disordered development should encompass both impairments and sparings because both will be needed to make sense of the neural and genetic levels.

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 has shown systematic differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases. In light of these findings on cultural differences, two experiments were conducted which explored intuitions about reference in Westerners and East Asians. Both experiments indicate that, for certain central cases, Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view. These results constitute prima facie evidence that semantic intuitions vary from culture to culture, and that paper argues that this fact raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference.

Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human minds are designed to operate within a social environment. This leads to a neglect of _norms_ and the processes of _social_ _transmission_ which have an important effect on scientific cognition and cognition more generally

Is it wrong to torture prisoners of war for fun? Is it wrong to yank on someone’s hair with no provocation? Is it wrong to push an innocent person in front of a train in order to save five innocent people tied to the tracks? If you are like most people, you answered "yes" to each of these questions. A venerable account of human moral judgment, influential in both philosophy and psychology, holds that these judgments are underpinned by internally represented principles or rules and reasoning about whether particular cases fall under those rules. Recently, this view has come under sustained attack from multiple quarters, and now looks to be in danger of being discarded. In this chapter we consider this evidence, and find that it does not support the elimination of rules from moral psychology

Recently, the fields of empirical and experimental philosophy have generated tremendous excitement, due to unexpected results that have challenged philosophical dogma. Responding to this trend, Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental Readings is the first introductory philosophy reader to integrate cutting-edge work in empirical and experimental philosophy with traditional philosophy. Featuring coverage that is equal parts historical, contemporary, and empirical/experimental, this topically organized reader provides students with a unique introduction to both the core and the vanguard of philosophy

This chapter summarizes much of the recent work in experimental philosophy. It begins with some background, introducing the philosophical dispute between descriptivists and causal‐historical accounts of reference that has served as the primary focus of experimental work. The chapter also reviews some reasons to think that understanding reference may have very general philosophical implications. It introduces preliminary experimental work on reference by Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich, which suggested the existence of cultural diversity in judgments about the reference of proper names in a classic case. The chapter explains a range of responses to this work; responses that themselves advance and clarify the central issues at stake. The chapter briefly considers the related empirical research, some of it recent, some of it decades old, into the reference of kind terms rather than proper names. Finally, the chapter summarizes by considering the payoffs of this literature.

Recent work proclaims a dominant role for automatic, intuitive, and emotional processes in producing ordinary moral judgment, despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about moral judgment “in the wild.” Indirect support comes via an assumption of dual-process theory: that conscious, reasoning processes are resource intensive. We argue that reasoning that employs consciously available moral rules undermines this assumption, but this has not been appreciated because of a failure to distinguish between explanation and justification. We conclude that it remains unclear what sorts of cognitive processes are dominant in ordinary moral judgments.

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 theory of reference undermines arguments from reference.

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 colleagues’ criticisms fail to address our concerns