• 1. Moral Rules and Moral Reasoning
    In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 297. 2010.
  •  57
    Rules
    In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. 2010.
    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 abou…Read more
  • The Science of Ethics
    In Hugh LaFollette & Ingmar Persson (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, Blackwell. pp. 169-196. 2013.
    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 tha…Read more
  •  101
    Socializing Metaphysics supplies diverse answers to the basic questions of social metaphysics, from a broad array of voices. It will interest all philosophers and social scientists concerned with mind, action, or the foundations of social theory.
  •  31
    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 org…Read more
  • Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style
    with Edouard Macher, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich
    In Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oup Usa. 2008.
  •  2
    Reference
    with Mike Dacey
    In Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.
    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…Read more
  •  2
    Applied Philosophy of Social Science
    In Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.
    A traditional social scientific divide concerns the centrality of the interpretation of local understandings as opposed to attending to relatively general factors in understanding human individual and group differences. We consider one of the most common social scientific variables, race, and ask how to conceive of its causal power. We suggest that any plausible attempt to model the causal effects of such constructed social roles will involve close interplay between interpretationist and more ge…Read more
  •  59
    Transgressors, victims, and cry babies: Is basic moral judgment spared in autism?
    with Alan M. Leslie and Jennifer DiCorcia
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
    of (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) forthcoming in Social Neuroscience. [nearly final draft in .pdf] An empirical investigation of moral judgment in autism.
  •  141
    Moral dilemmas and moral rules
    Cognition 100 (3): 530-542. 2006.
    Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of this asymmetry have neglected the contribution that rules make to reasoning about moral dilemmas. In two experiments, we find that participants sho…Read more
  •  76
    Dual Processes and Moral Rules
    Emotion Review 3 (3): 284-285. 2011.
    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 dis…Read more
  •  619
    Against Arguments from Reference
    Philosophy 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
  •  242
    If 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
  •  846
    Semantics, cross-cultural style
    Cognition 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
  •  171
    Causal Realism and the Laws of Nature
    with Richard Corry, Robert N. Brandon, H. Frederik Nijhout, Richard Dawid, Jonathan M. Weinberg, and Hong Yu Wong
    In Borchert (ed.), Philosophy of Science, Macmillan. pp. 261-276. 2006.
    This paper proposes a revision of our understanding of causation that is designed to address what Hartry Field has suggested is the central problem in the metaphysics of causation today: reconciling Bertrand Russell’s arguments that the concept of causation can play no role in the advanced sciences with Nancy Cartwright’s arguments that causal concepts are essential to a scientific understanding of the world. The paper shows that Russell’s main argument is, ironically, very similar to an argumen…Read more
  •  430
    Accentuate the Negative
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2): 297-314. 2010.
    Our interest in this paper is to drive a wedge of contention between two different programs that fall under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”. In particular, we argue that experimental philosophy’s “negative program” presents almost as significant a challenge to its “positive program” as it does to more traditional analytic philosophy.
  •  3
    Moral dilemmas and moral rules
    with Shaun Nichols
    Cognition 100 (3): 530-542. 2006.
  •  69
    What's at Stake in the Race Debate?
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (S1): 54-72. 2022.
    How can there be so much apparent disagreement about what race is, when there is so much agreement on the facts surrounding race? In this paper, I develop this puzzle and consider several interpretations of work in the philosophy of race to try to answer it, several ways of understanding what the metaphysics of race is doing. I consider and reject the possibility that apparent disagreement is metaphysically substantive, and I also consider and reject the view that apparent disagreement primarily…Read more
  •  50
    Racial Attitudes, Accumulation Mechanisms, and Disparities
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (4): 953-975. 2021.
    Some psychologists aim to secure a role for psychological explanations in understanding contemporary social disparities, a concern that plays out in debates over the relevance of the Implicit Association Test. Meta-analysts disagree about the predictive validity of the IAT and about the importance of implicit attitudes in explaining racial disparities. Here, I use the IAT to articulate and explore one route to establishing the relevance of psychological attitudes with small effects: an appeal to…Read more
  •  97
    What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (4): 835-835. 2020.
    Philosophy of race has experienced a vibrant period of development over the last three decades, and the fruits of this development, as well as its continuation, are fully on display in this book of...
  •  2
    Accentuate the Negative
    with Joshua Alexander and Jonathan M. Weinberg
    In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2, Oxford University Press Usa. 2013.
    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 th…Read more
  •  165
    Ambiguous Reference
    Mind 125 (497): 145-175. 2016.
    One of the central debates in the philosophy of language is that between defenders of the causal-historical and descriptivist theories of reference. Most philosophers involved in the debate support one or the other of the theories. Building on recent experimental work in semantics, we argue that there is a sense in which both theories are correct. In particular, we defend the view that natural kind terms can sometimes take on a causal-historical reading and at other times take on a descriptivist…Read more
  •  621
    Applied Philosophy of Social Science: The Social Construction of Race
    In Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy, Wiley Blackwell. pp. 441-454. 2017.
    A traditional social scientific divide concerns the centrality of the interpretation of local understandings as opposed to attending to relatively general factors in understanding human individual and group differences. We consider one of the most common social scientific variables, race, and ask how to conceive of its causal power. We suggest that any plausible attempt to model the causal effects of such constructed social roles will involve close interplay between interpretationist and more …Read more
  •  16
    Arguments from Reference and the Worry About Dependence
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1): 160-183. 2007.
  •  137
    Competence: What's in? What's out? Who knows?
    with Joshua Alexander and Jonathan M. Weinberg
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 329-330. 2010.
    Knobe's argument rests on a way of distinguishing performance errors from the competencies that delimit our cognitive architecture. We argue that other sorts of evidence than those that he appeals to are needed to illuminate the boundaries of our folk capacities in ways that would support his conclusions.
  •  133
    Intention, temporal order, and moral judgments
    with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Tom Mccoy, and Jay G. Hull
    Mind and Language 23 (1). 2008.
    The traditional philosophical doctrine of double effect claims that agents’ intentions affect whether acts are morally wrong. Our behavioral study reveals that agents’ intentions do affect whether acts are judged morally wrong, whereas the temporal order of good and bad effects affects whether acts are classified as killings. This finding suggests that the moral judgments are not based on the classifications. Our results also undermine recent claims that prior moral judgments determine whether a…Read more
  •  115
    Constructing race: racialization, causal effects, or both?
    Philosophical Studies 175 (5): 1039-1056. 2018.
    Social constructionism about race is a common view, but there remain questions about what exactly constitutes constructed race. Some hold that our concepts and conceptual practices construct race, and some hold that the causal consequences of these concepts and conceptual practices also play a role. But there is a third option, which is that the causal effects of our concepts and conceptual practices constitute race, but not the concepts and conceptual practices themselves. This paper reconsider…Read more
  •  201
    Was Race thinking invented in the modern West?
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (1): 77-88. 2013.
    The idea that genuinely racial thinking is a modern invention is widespread in the humanities and social sciences. However, it is not always clear exactly what the content of such a conceptual break is supposed to be. One suggestion is that with the scientific revolution emerged a conception of human groups that possessed essences that were thought to explain group-typical features of individuals as well the accumulated products of cultures or civilizations. However, recent work by cognitive and…Read more