Experimental Philosophy

Experimental philosophy: An interdisciplinary field that uses the collection of empirical data to shed light on philosophical issues.

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

@M_Prinzing And if that's true, maybe we should be thinking instead of the goal of helping students to achieve knowledge or understanding (i.e., academic goals as opposed to personal growth goals)

But I don't mean to be dogmatic about this! Do you see it differently?

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

@M_Prinzing My reasoning was that if the (truly enormous) differences we find between different majors don't have any impact on personal growth, then maybe the take-home message is: differences between academic programs of study basically don't have much impact on growth

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

@d08890 I see what you mean with that example, but would you really describe it as a case in which people had an ideology that made them want something to be the answer?

It certainly seems different from the ideological conflicta between left and right, or between theists and atheists

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

On the various fights between empirical methods and more "traditional" methods:

The traditional methods almost always seem to reaffirm the ideology of the community. One almost never hears: "We all wanted the answer to be X, but our traditional methods say that the answer is Y"

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

@PhilosophyUd In that particular case, would you say that philosophers had an ideology that made them want to believe a particular conclusion?

This feels radically different from what we see, for example, with political ideologies

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

@DruckerDaniel Yes! This is super helpful. And it's noticeable that empirical research is not like that. It's super common that, say, a student runs a study in hopes of finding sexism on a particular dependent variable but then does not get the hoped-for result

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

@DruckerDaniel These are great points, and definitely speak against the most straightforward version of what I originally said. I wonder if there is something helpful to say here about what differentiates these cases from the ones I originally had in mind?

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

@DruckerDaniel The points you are making here are definitely very helpful

Perhaps it's interesting to note that Parfit emphasizes that his conclusions about personal identity are appealing on some level, rather than just being something she was forced into by the logic of the argument

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

@DruckerDaniel Do you think your examples might be different in some fundamental way? I do think there is some important difference between these examples and the sorts of cases I was initially thinking of

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

@DruckerDaniel Those are super interesting examples. I had been thinking that, e.g., when people on the left use a method like phenomenology or conceptual analysis or whatever, they never seem to get a result that speaks against the left, and similarly for people on the right

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

@M_Prinzing This is fascinating! I wonder if perhaps it could be seen as support for the view that colleges should focus on their core educational mission of just conveying knowledge and skill in academic disciplines?

[Joanna Demaree-Cotton @Jo_DC]

When a hurricane hurts someone, that's just bad luck. But when a person hurts someone, they're doing wrong. They are a moral agent. But how do we decide this? What exactly is moral agency? Thrilled that my paper with @jensemler is out in Cognition https://t.co/gWE8NIEZUU

[Eugen Fischer @eugen_fischer]

New x-phi paper in “Mind and Language” provides the first psycholinguistic explanation of fallacies of equivocation: A comprehension bias can be strong enough to support them – in philosophical arguments and beyond. https://t.co/l4AHN83lfN

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

We gave people five thought experiments, then the same five two weeks later

The result: Half the variance is within-person variance, half is stable individual differences

In other words, A LOT of the variance is stable individual differences

https://t.co/Yt5IJJcbi4

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

On most philosophical thought experiments, people give different answers. Say 60% of people choose answer A, 40% choose B

Here’s one picture of what’s happening: There's something about each individual person that gives them a 60% chance of choosing A, 40% chance of choosing B

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

And here’s the very opposite picture:

Maybe it’s not something within each person but a difference between people. There's something about some people that makes them consistently choose A, something about others that makes them consistently choose B

So, which is right?

[Daily Nous / Justin Weinberg @DailyNousEditor]

Ask a group of people a philosophical question and it’s often the case that they'll give conflicting answers to it. We quite naturally interpret this as different people having different intuitions. But that's not the only available explanation... https://t.co/2h7BV48RTc

[Brian D. Earp, Ph.D. @briandavidearp]

New preprint 🚨Love and Change - if the person you love and married undergoes major changes in their moral character, memories, or physical appearance, are you obligated to keep loving them and staying together? Led by Elze Mikalonyte https://t.co/BQzpaPoGf6

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

The full paper is available at:

https://t.co/8qotxK5SsQ

But please feel free to write in with thoughts even if you haven't read the full paper

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

There hasn't been enough attention to this amazing result, and I'd love to hear ideas about how to explain it

Participants are given a story about a morally bad behavior that it is due to genetics. Then they are asked the simplest possible question: Is it due to genetics?

[Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher]

In other words, the answer to the question is already given explicitly within the study materials. People are told that a bad thing is genetic and then asked whether it is genetic

Yet, amazingly, many participants say "No"! They explicitly reject the whole premise