Experimental Philosophy

Hi Bluesky! 👋 We’re the Philosophical Moral Psychology Lab, based at the Uehiro Oxford Institute. We use experimental philosophy and moral psychology methods to study morality, with the aim of contributing to normative and philosophical debates in ethics. Follow us to keep up with our work!

It’s a small book but it is nice to hold it in my hands

The sort of case that Earp considers in his paper is more like: AI writes section 2 of your paper. The section might look like it was written by a human, but no human actually wrote it. Then the question is whether something important has been lost

This is so interesting! It seems like the way you are imagining it as that AI tells you the answer to a question but doesn’t tell you how it arrived at that answer. That’s a really helpful case to consider…

I’m really curious to hear people’s thoughts on this issue!

(Feel free to reply even if you haven’t yet read Brian’s piece)

Whereas in philosophy, there’s a strong pull in a different direction

It doesn’t seem to be just a matter of the idea that AI work won’t be as good as human work (though it might also be that). It seems to involve some goal other than just the goal of ending up with the best possible work

This piece by psychologist/philosopher Brian Earp is about the differing attitudes toward AI in psychology vs. philosophy

In psych, one common attitude is; The goal is to get the right answer to fundamental questions in psychology. If AI helps us do that, well then, all the better…

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This essay identifies a normative function of the concept of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that the concept of intentional action functions to focus our evaluative concern on some doings rather than others. It acts as a proxy for evaluative priority. Two arguments are offered for this thesis. First, we need a concept that functions to focus evaluative concern, and the concept of intentional action exhibits features we'd expect from a concept with this prioritizing function. Second, the thesis is explanatorily powerful: it explains in a unified manner a number of puzzling features of intentional action, including the Knobe effect, the threshold of sufficient control governing intentional action, disagreement over whether knowledge is required for intentional action, cultural variation in ascription of intentionality, and the radical pluralism of ways that intentional action manifests. This second argument also shows what can be gained by attending to the functions of our concepts of agency.

New article:

Mikayla Kelley, "The Normative Function of Intentional Action", Philosophers' Imprint 26: 5. doi: doi.org/10.3998/phim...

Abstract in alt text. #philsky

Is philosophy too precious for AI? On writing, thinking, and the ego of authorship

New post 🚨 Is philosophy too precious for AI? briandavidearp.substack.com/p/is-philoso... ... on the science-humanities divide in LLM appreciation

I wonder if this same point also applies in all the other cases

For example, there are people in religion depts doing highly influential work in cognitive science of religion, but the field seems to be leaving religion depts and just becoming a part of cog sci

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For this question about DH, it might be helpful to see DH as one example of a broader phenomenon - attempts to import quantitative, scientific methods into humanities disciplines

Other examples include: experimental philosophy, cognitive science of religion, computational work in music…

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So maybe a good way to encourage reporting of null results would be to make it more possible to report results in a form that didn't require writing a publishable paper?

(These thoughts inspired by a helpful conversation with @liao.shen-yi.org)

I would absolutely want to make my results available to anyone who might find them useful, but I'd be a bit reluctant to take all of the time that would be necessary to write up a complete publishable paper (e.g., explaining in detail why I initially thought the hypothesis was true)

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Just speaking for myself, I would be much more likely to report null results if there were a good way of doing that without writing up a full publishable paper

Suppose I come up with what I think is an exciting new hypothesis, but then it turns out that my hypothesis is completely wrong…

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Thanks Devin! Roughly speaking, the issue is: If my idea turns out to be wrong, I wouldn't want to write an introduction explaining why I originally thought it was right or why I thought this study would be worth running… but I would still be happy to write up the details of the methods and results

I would be happy to spend some time making the results publicly available, but it would have to be something that fell *very* far short of what it would take to write a publishable paper

If there was a way for to do something like that, I would be happy to do it for all of my studies!

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Suppose I come up with a new hypothesis, but then it turns out that my hypothesis is completely wrong

In most cases, I would find it extremely difficult to write up the results in a form that would constitute a full-blown publishable paper

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These are great points! This doesn't get at the core point of Shen-yi's original post, but I just wanted to say that I love the idea of having some kind of repository for things like this

To make this work, the repository would different in important ways from a journal

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By contrast, what gets studied in most work on creativity is just coming up with ideas that are peculiar or different from anything people have done before

Newman argues that studying real creativity (ability to come up with good ideas) requires a fundamentally different kind of inquiry

Think about what you are doing when you try to write a song, or run a scientific experiment, or invent a game to play with your kids

Your goal is come up with ideas that are actually *good*

Psychologist George Newman has a new book out about creativity, but it’s about almost exactly the opposite of what people usually mean by “creativity”

Usual topic: ideas that are zany or original

Newman’s topic: ideas that actually work

www.amazon.com/How-Great-Id...

Perjury is often explained (including to juries) as the legal name for the folk concept of lying, but it is narrower.

Lying has a dual character, research by @izaskoczen.bsky.social suggests, and perjury corresponds only with the concrete aspect:

buff.ly/xeYPHBm

HT @xphilosopher.bsky.social

Are Lying and Perjury Dual Character Concepts? - Law and Philosophy To commit perjury, you have to say something you believe to be false, not merely suggest it. The paper presents a novel explanation for the divergence between the folk and the legal concept of lying, ...

Paper available open access at:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Key insight:

The legal concept is not some completely distinct thing that you would have to learn separately

Instead, the ordinary concept comes with two different criteria. To learn the legal concept, you have to know *which* of those criteria to use in legal contexts

New experimental jurisprudence paper from Iza Skoczen on the legal concept PERJURY vs. the ordinary concept LYING

This paper introduces a surprising new view about the relationship between legal concepts and ordinary concepts

@izaskoczen.bsky.social

x.com/izaskoczen/s...

Does going to college make people more liberal? Probably yes, but it’s complicated… For decades, US adults with degrees have held more left-leaning views on social issues, but not on economic ones. And, until the 2010s, grads did not *identify* as more liberal than non-grads.

Flanagan & de Almeida on Cognitive Science and the Hart-Dworkin Debate Brian Flanagan (National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUI Maynooth) - Faculty of Law) & Guilherme F. C. F. de Almeida (Yale University) have posted What Cognitive Science says about the Hart-Dworkin Debate on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Hard cases generate disputes in which judges insist that fidelity to law sometimes requires departing from its letter. Ronald Dworkin argued that this phenomenon poses a distinctive challenge to legal positivism.

Flanagan & de Almeida on Cognitive Science and the Hart-Dworkin Debate

Brian Flanagan (National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUI Maynooth) - Faculty of Law) & Guilherme F. C. F. de Almeida (Yale University) have posted What Cognitive Science says about the Hart-Dworkin Debate on SSRN. Here is…

I am talking about experimental philosophy of medicine on Thursday. ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom.us/j/67803558818

New paper from the IMC lab! I am very excited about this one. For years, I have been arguing that one of the main claims of the so-called "simulation heuristic" is likely not true for episodic counterfactual thinking, namely that the harder it is to mentally simulate it, the less plausible (1/n)

That’s fair. I was assuming that, e.g., the way people behave on Bluesky is affected by how they see other people behaving on Bluesky - and then that we need research to understand how and why this happens

But you might potentially question that whole premise