Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy (Current Controversies in Philosophy)
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0415519675
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Experimental philosophy is one of the most active and exciting areas in philosophy today. In Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy, Elizabeth O’Neill and Edouard Machery have brought together twelve leading philosophers to debate four topics central to recent research in experimental philosophy. The result is an important and enticing contribution to contemporary philosophy which thoroughly reframes traditional philosophical questions in light of experimental philosophers’ use of empirical research methods, and brings to light the lively debates within experimental philosophers’ intellectual community. Two papers are dedicated to the following four topics:
- Language (Edouard Machery & Genoveva Martí)
- Consciousness (Brian Fiala, Adam Arico, and Shaun Nichols & Justin Sytsma)
- Free Will and Responsibility (Joshua Knobe & Eddy Nahmias and Morgan Thompson)
- Epistemology and the Reliability of Intuitions (Kenneth Boyd and Jennifer Nagel & Joshua Alexander and Jonathan Weinberg).
Preliminary descriptions of each chapter, annotated bibliographies for each controversy, and a supplemental guide to further controversies in experimental philosophy (with bibliographies) help provide clearer and richer views of these live controversies for all readers.
that he can move objects with. As part of a psychological experiment, he was put in a room that was empty except for one blue box, one red box, and one green box (the boxes were identical in all respects except color). An instruction was then transmitted to Jimmy. It read: “Put the red box in front of the door.” (Sytsma & Machery, 2010, p. 306) In one version of the story, Jimmy moves the box in front of the door with no noticeable difficulty. In another version, Jimmy is given an electrical
of the chemical compounds, and is instructed to place the box containing isoamyl acetate in front of the door, which he does without noticeable difficulty. Participants were then asked, “Did Jimmy smell Isoamyl Acetate?”2 Sytsma and Machery (2010) found that participants were ambivalent about both Jimmy smelling banana and Jimmy feeling anger but were more than willing to say that Jimmy smelled isoamyl acetate. Their explanation is that people associate smelling banana with a positive valence and
K. Gray and Wegner (2012) showed participants video clips of a lifelike robot. In one condition, the human-like face was visible; in the other condition, the robot was filmed from behind. In both conditions, the robot moved around, and participants were asked to indicate their level of 42 • Fiala, Arico, and Nichols agreement with statements such as “This robot has the capacity to feel pain” and “This robot has the capacity to feel fear” (K. Gray & Wegner, 2012, p. 126). They found that
the destruction. (You might then infer that if the fire had never occurred, the house would still be in fine Free Will and the Scientific Vision • 77 shape today.) What Nahmias and Murray’s results show is that people do not apply this same kind of reasoning when it comes to the relationship between human action and mental states. On the contrary, when people are told that an agent’s actions are completely caused by prior events, they conclude that the agent’s beliefs and desires could not
problem is that we are not in the same position with respect to intuitional evidence. Our comparatively scarce resources for predicting unwelcome intuitional sensitivity put us in a different epistemic position with respect to intuitional evidence than we are in with respect to perceptual evidence.10 In a sense, we have not learned yet what it would mean to be careful. Learning how to be careful will require developing a better understanding of how epistemic intuitions work. If we are going to