194 research outputs found
Intentional Action in Folk Psychology: An Experimental Investigation
Four experiments examined peopleās folk-psychological concept of intentional action. The chief question was whether or not evaluative considerations ā considerations of good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame ā played any role in that concept. The results indicated that the moral qualities of a behavior strongly influence peopleās judgements as to whether or not that behavior should be considered āintentional.ā After eliminating a number of alternative explanations, the author concludes that this effect is best explained by the hypothesis that evaluative considerations do play some role in peopleās concept of intentional action
Normality: Part Descriptive, part prescriptive
Peopleās beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both peopleās representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that peopleās notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, peopleās representations of what is normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: peopleās use of the word āānormalā (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms
On the instrumental value of hypothetical and counterfactual thought.
People often engage in āoffline simulationā, considering what would happen if they performed certain actions in the future,
or had performed different actions in the past. Prior research shows that these simulations are biased towards actions a person considers to be goodāi.e., likely to pay off. We ask whether, and why, this bias might be adaptive. Through computational experiments we compare five agents who differ only in the way they engage in offline simulation, across a variety of different environment types. Broadly speaking, our experiments reveal that simulating actions one already regards as good does in fact confer an advantage in downstream decision making, although this general pattern interacts with features of the environment in important ways. We contrast this bias with alternatives such as simulating actions whose outcomes are instead uncertain
Philosophers are doing something different now: Quantitative data
The philosophical study of mind in the twentieth century was dominated by a research program that used a priori methods to address foundational questions. Since that time, however, the philosophical study of mind has undergone a dramatic shift. To provide a more accurate picture of contemporary philosophical work, I compared a sample of highly cited philosophy papers from the past five years with a sample of highly cited philosophy papers from the twentieth century. In the twentieth century sample, the majority of papers used purely a priori methods, while only a minority cited results from empirical studies. In the sample from the past five years, the methodology is radically different. The majority of papers cite results from empirical studies, a sizable proportion report original experimental results, and only a small minority are purely a priori. Overall, the results of the review suggest that the philosophical study of mind has become considerably more integrated into the broader interdisciplinary field of cognitive science
Philosophical Intuitions Are Surprisingly Robust Across Demographic Differences
Within the existing metaphilosophical literature on experimental philosophy, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the claim that there are large differences in philosophical intuitions between people of different demographic groups. Some philosophers argue that this claim has important metaphilosophical implications; others argue that it does not. However, the actual empirical work within experimental philosophy seems to point to a very different sort of metaphilosophical question. Specifically, what the actual empirical work suggests is that intuitions are surprisingly robust across demographic groups. Prior to empirical study, it seemed plausible that unexpected patterns of intuition found in one demographic group would not emerge in other demographic groups. Yet, again and again, empirical work obtains the opposite result: that unexpected patterns found in one
demographic group actually emerge also in other demographic groups. I cite 30 studies that find this sort of robustness. I then argue that to the extent that metaphilosophical work is to engage with the actual findings from experimental philosophy, it needs to explore the implications of the surprising robustness of philosophical intuitions across demographic differences
Moral Structure Falls Out of General Event Structure
The notion of agency has been explored within research in moral psychology and, quite separately, within research in linguistics. Moral psychologists have suggested that agency attributions play a role in moral judgments, while linguists have argued that agency attributions play a role in syntactic intuitions.
To explore the connection between these two lines of research, we report the results of an experiment in which we manipulate syntactic cues for agency and show a corresponding impact on moral judgments. This result suggests that the two effects observed previously ā in morality and in syntax ā might each be a reflection of a more general capacity to understand event structure
Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero
probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus,
it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly
like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own
in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this
conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite
universe, we find that the doomsday argument applies only to effects which
change the average lifetime of all civilizations, and not those which affect
our civilization alone.Comment: 25 pages; v2: revised version to appear in British Journal for the
Philosophy of Scienc
Dual Character Art Concepts
Our goal in this paper is to articulate a novel account of the ordinary concept ART. At the core of our account is the idea that a puzzle surrounding our thought and talk about art is best understood as just one instance of a far broader phenomenon. In particular, we claim that one can make progress on this puzzle by drawing on research from cognitive science on dual character concepts. Thus, we suggest that the very same sort of phenomenon that is associated with ART can also be found in a broad class of other dual character concepts, including SCIENTIST, CHRISTIAN, GANGSTER, and many others. Instead of focusing narrowly on the case of ART, we try to offer a more general account of these concepts and the puzzles to which they give rise. Then, drawing on the general theory, we introduce a series of hypotheses about art concepts, and put those hypotheses to the test in three experimental studies
The true self: A psychological concept distinct from the self
A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics
that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge
of research has begun examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics
that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These
factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we
introduce the concept of the true self and identify features that distinguish peopleās
understanding of the true self from their understanding of the self more generally. In
particular, we consider recent findings that the true self is perceived as positive and
moral, and that this tendency is actor-observer invariant and cross-culturally stable.
We then explore possible explanations for these findings and discuss their implications
for a variety of issues in psychology
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